Advertisement
Published: March 19th 2009
Edit Blog Post
It´s been a couple of weeks since the last update so we´re backtracking a bit here. Going back a couple of Thursdays:
THE PLAN:
Get this bus (Friday morning) a few hours south to Villa O Higgins and do a couple of days trek over the border into Argentina and the small town of El Chalten and do a few days trekking around there as it is supposed to be really nice. After that, we would go to El Calafate to see the Perito Moreno Glaciar and then back into Chile to visit Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine. These 3 places are 3 of the main reasons why we chose to come to southern Chile and Argentina in the first place
THE REALITY:
The day before the bus we spent wandering around Cochrane buying all the gear we needed to cross the border like food and camping stuff. That night, the owner of the hospedaje, Ana Luz, knocked on our door at about 11pm and invited us into the kitchen for a couple of Pisco Sours (the national drink of Chile) as we had been good guests and had stayed for so many nights. (This was only because we
couldn´t get out of Cochrane) She liked a drink as we had spotted her sneaking a glass of white wine from the fridge one morning at 11am and then quickly hiding it in the freezer when the cleaner came in. It was really nice and she showed us her collection of postcards and photos that previous guests had sent. She was hard to understand as she had had a few already and at one point a couple of her false teeth made a brief appearance before being sucked back in. Apparently only a couple of Japanese cyclists had stayed longer than us before. They stayed 9 nights and that was because the road south had flooded. She showed us a photo they had taken of the flooded road and I asked "Does the road flood very often" to which she replied that it was very rare for the road to flood.
We got up early the next morning and got on the bus south, the bus we had waited 4 days to catch, the bus that would finally get us out of Cochrane.
It got us out of Cochrane for 2 hours before we reached a part of the
road that had flooded overnight.
The bus stopped, everyone got out, had a look around, the driver weighed up the depth of the water, some police arrived in a 4WD and drove through a couple of times as if to show off, then a helicopter showed up, hovered around, carried on south to look at the road ahead, came back and signalled that we had to go back because there was no way through.
We couldn´t believe our luck. It was the only road south. We turned up back in Cochrane, 4 hours after setting off and decided to camp instead of stay at Ana Luz´s to give us a change of scene. We bought tickets for the next bus out of town which was on Sunday morning to Chile Chico and the Argentine border a few hours north. So we spent Friday and Saturday night in a town we didn´t like which only had 3 bars and 2 "discos". It turned out quite good because we met some really nice people who had been on the same bus to nowhere including a couple of spanish lads, Pablo and Emilio. We had a few beers with them and then
decided to go out and try the bars. The bars were grim and the less said about the disco, the better, but we had a good laugh anyway. Saturday was spent in much the same way, lounging around in the garden we were camping in with some other people and the owners, drinking wine and eating.
Sunday morning, we made our way to where the bus was leaving at 10am. We got there and were told it would now be leaving at 11 as there was a problem with the main bus, so now they were waiting for the backup. At about 12, we left in a mini convoy of 2 small buses and a 4WD. After an hour the 4WD had a puncture which was rapidly fixed, then after about 4 hours it was our turn for a tyre burst. This delayed us a bit more but it didn´t matter too much because the scenery driving through the Andes was some of the most amazing we had seen. Perfect blue lakes and huge mountains. After about 7 hours we got to Chile Chico, a small town on the Chilean border, then took a minibus over the border to
Los Antiguos.
The plan from Los Antiguos was to get a bus south down to El Chalten but this bus only went on even days so we would have to hang around for 2 days. If there was one lesson we had learned from Cochrane it was not to hang around for buses so we decided on a very different plan. After much information searching, we found out about a bus company which opened at 11:45pm with a bus that left at 2am for Caleta, 7 hours away on the Atlantic Coast of Argentina. We had already pitched our tent but decided to pack it all up at 1am and get on this bus with Pablo and Emilio. We arrived at 7 in the morning and immediately bought tickets for the 10 hour bus down to Rio Gallegos. This bus took us through the Pampa, a great stretch of flat grassland covering thousands of square miles of South America. It was literally hour after hour of exactly the same, flat scenery but it was incredible and hard to explain. The sky seems bigger and the horizon seems to be below you. We got to Rio Gallegos and traipsed for
an hour with our spanish friends to find a room.
Next morning we decided to get the bus to Puerto Natales and do our original plan the other way round, from South to North. The bus had problems with its gears and kept stopping by the side of the road. We thought our luck was completely out and that we would never get to where we wanted to go. Then the border control decided to do one of its random full-baggage checks that we had avoided previously. Eventually, after a detour of God knows how many hundreds of miles, we arrived at Puerto Natales, desperate to get some trekking done after our 10 days of waiting for buses and being on buses.
Puerto Natales is the base for visiting the Torres Del Paine National Park and this was what we had been looking forward to the most since originally planning the trip. We were hoping for a bit of luck for a change and if Torres Del Paine went OK, being trapped in Cochrane would be a distant memory.
Next post coming very soon...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.082s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0558s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb