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Published: March 30th 2006
Hello chaps, i have decided that i need to start a new blog entry before i forget what i have been doing for the last month. Life on the road has been really busy and i keep finding out about cool new things to do.
I last left you having finished the torres del paine circuit and having a big night out to celebrate. The next day i headed off to punta arenas which the best thing i can say about is it was better than puerto natales. It is right at the southern end of chile, and the towns down here on the chilean side are all a bleak collection of houses with tin roofs. Punta arenas however was once a quite rich city as it controlled the passage around cape horn. Therefore it has some nice old colonial houses around the main square. Apart from which it is a collection of bleak houses with tin roofs and a ridiculous number of brothels with big neon signs outside. Well i suppose it must get cold in the winter and the locals have little to do!!! That night i went out with a german guy from the hostel and we trawled around the city going from bar to bar most of which were pretty rubbish, but we found one with a live band so stayed there until about 5 in the morning getting hammered with the locals. I had a bus to ushuaia at 7.30 so it wasn't really worth going to bed which meant packing and having breakfast was a lot trickier than it should have been, and i staggered to my bus just in time to fall asleep for the journey. Unfortunately i was handed a cup of coffee which was still full when i fell asleep, so i was awoken by an alaskan girl concerned at the angle i was holding it at.
Upon arrival in ushuaia i headed to a really cool hostel with her and her husband, (whom i had met on the torres trek), then headed out to watch the super bowl with them. The only place we could find was an internet cafe which had a bar and ESPN. It definately goes down as the wierdest place i have watched a superbowl, particularly as we had to keep explaining what was happening to the bemused locals. Chana and Ryan (the alaskans) also told me about in incredibly cool place in bolivia they had been to. Basically you can volounteer in the rainforest to work with animals that have been captured back from the black market. The place is very basic and the mosquito's allegedly unbearable, but on the up side Ryan had worked with a jaguar and chana with a puma. Taking them for walks in the rain forest and generally improving their lives sounded like a really cool adventure and so i obviously decided that i would have to check it out when i made it that far north.
Ushuaia is quite a cool place it is surrounded by mountains and overlooks the beagle channel and isla navirino of chile which is really beautiful especially on a sunny day. I kept meeting people i had seen on the other treks in patagonia which was really nice as it gave a bit of sense of community almost as if i new some people in these parts!!! It took me a few days to go out and do anything as i had been hanging around town waiting to see if i could get a cheap ticket to antartica on one of the cruises.
Eventually i headed down to the national park for a couple of days. The laguna verde campsite where i stayed was really beautiful although overrun with rabbits an addition to the local wildlife sometime in the last century. The trekking there wasn't all that although the trek to cerro guanaco gave really good views from the top hence all the photos and the way back down at sun set was awesome. Due to something of a lack of meat and a ridiculous number of rabbits i hatched a plan to complete my rabbit catching theories from el chalten. Basically during the day you can get really close but there are a lot of tourists. Therefore at night i thought i could probably catch one to supplement my otherwise vegetarian diet. unfortunately at night the little blighters are a lot more cautious. After my first night of failed attempts it became clear to me that some sort of ballistic missile would be necessary. Unfortunately it appears i am an absolutely rubbish shot with a stone, my missile of choice, so i spent 2 hours throwing a stone from 15 feet at a 20 cm square rock. This was a realistic distance to get to the rabbits and the next night i was convinced that spit roast rabbit would be mine. However i was thwarted by the fact that they move a lot faster than i would have imagined and so despite my growing rabbit stalking skills and improved if still iffy rock slinging ability i didn't even get close. Next time i am definately taking a shotgun with me then i will feast!!!
Despite a lack of rabbit meat the first evening i watched the sunset and was dancing around my fire listening to seb fontaine on the ipod. I was just reflecting on how much i had enjoyed what i had been doing for the last few weeks with the adventures already had, and the adventures to come and came to the conclusion it was the most contented i had been for some years. So i danced away quite happy until the early hours of the morning and i hadn´t even been drinking or any such like thing. The next night having found a campsite that sold beer on my way to cerro guanaco i had an equally fun if somewhat less thought provoking or spiritual experience listening to AC/DC and dancing around my still rabbitless fire.
The best hike in the park is to cerro guanaco where you can see ushuaia and the beagle channel. it is absolutely stunning so i took a panarama which is on the ballards video site. Very fuegan andes! I decided i needed to try a more challenging trek so did the 4 day sierro valdevieso circuit. That is absolutely stunning no people and unbelievable landscapes. The beavers introduced at the beginning of the last century have destroyed quite a lot of the natural forest. It is unbelievable how much damage they can do, you can see where they are working long before the dam as there is always a stand of dead trees. I had not previously realised how big the trees they cut down were. They don't move the tree but cut off the branches for their dams which are impressively large. However as they then flood the surrounding land making trekking decidedly boggy i soon got over their architectural achievements and decided they were vermin in line with the official fuegan attitude. The circuit was brilliant though and i got some amazing photos passing the third pass into the big valley that seperates this range from the national park. Having bought the map i was somewhat dismayed on the second day when i unfolded it to realise that they hadn't bothered mapping the circuit and all the contour lines which should have been at 50m were in fact dotted at 250m. Basically they just haven't mapped the place and guess, which makes navigation somewhat more interesting especally when attempting to work out which pass to go through. There are stories of people that got that wrong and wandered for several days lost in the wilderness. Of course if you are not able to navigate to a known place on a peninsula given that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and the southern cross points to south at night perhaps you shouldn't be allowed out by yourself in the first place.
back in ushuaia i waited for a few more days hoping for a cheap cruise to antartica to bag my set of continents. Unfortunately it was not to be. Just before i arrived and a couple of weeks after i left cheap deals were available but not when i was there. Oh well i will just have to go back to climb vinson the highest peak and one of the seven summits as i close in on my climbing the highest peak in every continent goal.
However while waiting around there were some interesting sunrises over the harbour so i went down to take some photos and got rather carried away, well the sunrises do last for about an hour and a half this far south. I have spent ages trying to pare them down to a reasonable number on the gallery so as not to bore you all too badly. If you think there are too many shots of ships water and dappled light just think yourself lucky it could have been a lot worse!
eventually i had to leave in order to head back north and visit the lake district which will be the story of my next blog.
until then take it easy and enjoy the photos which are on the gallery as i couldn´t be bothered to upload them all twice!!
laters
alex
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Chris
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Dance of the Sun God
Your tale of the dance reminds me of the time you me and Andy did the dance of the sun god round the campfire in Scotland that time!