South Patagonia, January 20 to 24

January 20 – In the morning, we took a ferry back to the mainland for our long flight to Punta Arenas,  the southern-most city on a continent. (Ushuaia is further south, but on the island of Tierra Del Fuego and it is the most southern city in the world.) We flew over the Andes and I took a bunch of photos from the plane – the glaciers really have the look of ice rivers from 7 miles up. It was unseasonably warm in Punta Arenas, which allowed us to go wading in the Straits of Magellan without getting hypothermia. Our first stop was the NAO Victoria museum, where replicas of important ships (for this part of the world) have been or are being constructed. We got a tour of one of Magellan’s ships – astoundingly small. They also had a replica of the little boat Ernest Shackleton used to find someone to rescue his crew when the pack ice ate their ship, and a replica of Darwin’s ship, the Beagle, is under construction.

Andes glaciers from the plane

Replica of one of Magellan's ships

Replica of Shackleton's boat that sailed from Antarctica
to South Shetland Islands with 6 crew on board.

 We took a short walk around town – found the only Chinese restaurant – and visited a grocery store yet again. Alex recommended a visit to the tallest building the city, with its ‘Sky Bar’. Taste Alert: DO NOT order a margarita! They didn’t have pisco sours, but we should have gone for a local drink instead with calafate berry. We had some difficulty keeping the attention of the waiters because with the temperatures in the high 70s or 80s, the beach below, even at 7pm, was full of bikini-ed girls – a first in their existence, and they used the binoculars at the bar to their best advantage.

Alex led Randy and the two of us to a recommended fish restaurant – I was kind of fished out, so I ordered chicken and discovered that just because something was on the menu was no guarantee that it was actually available to serve. The same thing happened with the wine we selected, and they brought out 3 other similar bottles to choose from. Randy was interested in a local varietal, a Carménère, which was quite good. The most startling part of ordering wine in a restaurant here is that they rarely serve by the glass AND the bottles are REALLY cheap and good. This one cost us $15 and compared well with something that would have been three times as much  (or more) at home.

January 21 – Today was another bus ride day, heading north to Torres del Paine. We stopped at a little burg for a rest stop and I found a fleece hat and short-sleeved shirt (so I would have something fresh to wear when we got back to Buenos Aires). We saw our first herds of guanacos – these are smaller, less wooly, less tame-able relatives of the llama, and we all oohed and aahed at the first herd or two….by the 10^th, we were totally over them. We also saw the local rhea, called nandu, both adults and chicks. The boy birds entice eggs from several girl birds (who then go off and cavort with other boys) and the boy gets to hatch the 10 to 60 eggs he has collected as well as look out after the little ones. Kind of an interesting concept in child-rearing.

Nandu flock - the big one probably a dad and the smaller ones are his kids.

Guanacos -- wilder and less woolly than llamas

 The bus stopped when we got our first view of the towers of rock that the park is named for (Torres del Paine is Towers of Blue in Spanish and the local language, so called for the blue-ish tone of the granite). There are two primary kinds of rock in these mountains, which are a bit separate from the Andes, and glaciation is responsible for the stark forms. Once in the park, we stopped at a trail that led past a waterfall between two lakes and then to an overlook to one of the lakes and the mountains. It is REALLY windy here, especially in the summer. The southern tip of South America is the ONLY continental land at this latitude, so the wind whips around the globe with nothing to slow it. In the summer, the land is warmer than the ocean, causing the air to rise and drawing in the colder ocean air. Many of these mountains have only recently been summitted because of their general inaccessibility and the challenges of the wind. We drove through the park which has a lot of lakes and quite a few places to stay.

Our first view of Torres del Paine

The other famous site here the Cournos (Horns)

Jim being windblown

Waterfall between two lakes

Lynn enjoying Torres del Paine National Park

 Our hotel is on the south end of Lago Grey, which has a glacier at the north end, which we will boat to tomorrow. In the meantime, we have a good view of it in the distance along with big hunks of it that have calved off.

January 22 – Finally some nasty weather that requires warm AND rainproof clothing! I am so excited not to be wearing the same old warm-weather clothes! The glacier and the depth of the lake have both receded in recent years, so it now takes a bus ride, a half-mile hike, and a boat ride to get to the boat we will use to visit the glacier. Rain was threatening and actually started in earnest while we were on the open boat shuttling to the closed-in one. Out came the rainpants! Yay! Another item from the suitcase of unused stuff!  Our local guide showed us photos of how much the glacier has receded in the last 20 years – very dramatic – and the cause for considerable alarm. What used to be a single face of the glacier is now 3 as the ice has pulled back revealing rock that it had swept over in the past. We did a close approach and took lots of photos, which later all see a lot alike. The best part is the glorious shade of blue that much of the ice is.As we sailed back to the start, pisco sours were served, cooled by the glacial ice harvested on the trip. One member of our group, Ida, was celebrating her birthday and got a drink with ice that was older than she was!

Glacier Grey

The glacier used to cover the rocks in the middle and on the right.

Lynn enjoying the nasty weather

Ida, celebrating her birthday with ice older than she is.

 Back at the boat landing, we had the option to hike to a lookout point or go back to the hotel, so of course, we hiked. Randy was with us and we had to cross a 15-20 foot wide ‘bridge’ of gravel. I was hard-pressed to keep up with Jim and Randy, so I urged them to go on ahead while I slogged thru the gravel – kind of like walking thru sand, but not as fun. I was depressed at how far ahead of me they got! When I finally got to the land portion of the hike, I was glad for a few photo ops to catch my breath. I found the ‘boys’ at the point of the peninsula, which did have good views of the lake and glacier, then we headed  back to the bus and hotel.

Randy (in tan) and Jim (in green) at the lookout point.

I love the fabulous color of the ice.

 After lunch, there was an optional hike up to a cave with petroglyphs, so of course we went. It was a fairly long drive, all the way back to the park entrance and a pretty challenging hike up, and frankly, the petroglyphs we found were sort of disappointing, but hiking the hills felt pretty good. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped by a pond that several varieties of birds were using and hiked around the edge for a bit.

Petroglyphs in Torres del Paine National Park

 January 23 – Today was primarily a long bus ride to Argentina and El Calafate, the gateway to an impressive glacier. On the way, we stopped for one last look at Torres del Paine and for lunch at the same place we had had a rest stop at on the way into the park. After lunch there, we had time to burn, so Jim & I thought we’d take a walk toward the town, but the wind convinced us that being wimps was smarter, and we headed back to the restaurant after taking a picture of a horse statue. After we crossed the border to Argentina, we changed buses (a no-no to have a bus or local guide with international rights) and met Sebastian, one of the best local guides we had for the whole trip. He also doubles as a tour leader, so that may be why he seemed so exceptional.

Jim at the overlook as we leave Torres del Paine National Park

 Shortly after we crossed into Argentina, we stopped at a roadside shrine to Gauchito Gil, a local ‘saint’ who was revered by the populace for protecting travelers who gave him a beer. Alex said that on a company training tour a while back, one of the guides, during the stop there, had pantomimed DRINKING the beer intended for Gauchito Gil and that the trip had run into horrendous luck at every turn after that. Alex observed the traditional honoring of Gauchito Gil and watered the area with a can of beer. It might have worked, because we had a great trip and delightful weather for the rest  of our time in Argentina.

Gauchito Gil gets his obligatory beverage and makes the rest of our journey easy.

 Sebastian also told us a delightful tale about why the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Argentina) are so important to the Argentines. This was something that always has mystified me, since they were settled by the British in the 1830s and not by the Argentines, who went to war with the Brits over them not that long ago. There are virtually no Argentines living there, and the insistence on Argentinian ownership by a normally logical friend of mine in the US who came from Argentina made no sense. It turns out that a creation story by the original people featured beings from an island to the east. When Europeans first arrived and heard the stories, they put these (as yet undiscovered) islands on the map and lo and behold, hundreds of years later, islands were actually discovered. So the Argentinians had this emotional connection to these unseen and unpopulated islands before the Brits showed up and started using them for a naval base in the south Atlantic.

The war for the Falklands/Malvinas apparently was less about territory and more about diverting the attention of the Argentinians from their horrible domestic challenges, and now that there are a bunch of Argentine soldiers buried on the islands, Argentines actually go there. Plus, Argentina is concerned about future mineral and other rights to Antarctica and sees these islands as critical to maintaining a future level of control. Their maps show both the Falklands/Malvinas AND the Antarctic Peninsula as Argentinian property.

El Calafate is a tourist town whose claim to fame is its proximity to a national park with an impressive glacier. Sebastian and Alex also noted that Chile and Argentina have often had rather tense relations, and that whenever one of them establishes a national park along the border, it is not long before the other matches it as a way of controlling territory. Our hotel, Kau Yatun, was originally a ranch and has become a charming hotel and nearby restaurant, where we went for dinner. If I haven’t mentioned it already, this part of the world sees 10pm as a fine time to start dinner and uses lunch as a primary meal.

Randy was interested in trying out the restaurant behind the hotel (there was also one IN the hotel) and we agreed to join him. He made reservations for 8:30, but when we prepared to hike over, he was told that the reservations had been made IN the hotel. This was not what he wanted, tho others in our group were eating there and enjoying it. The upshot was that the earliest we could get in was 9:15, so we toughed it out. When we got there, the restaurant was clearly less than fully booked and we were mystified by the situation. Until after dinner, when the local dance show started.  Surprise! Clearly, one seating was going to be more workable for the restaurant so they could feature the show, but it is still a mystery why this was not more fully conveyed to us. In any case, the food was meaty and good, the dances were interesting, but it was a late night and our most expensive dinner out for our entire trip.

January 24 – Today was another glacier tour, but this glacier, Pedrito Moreno, made the Lago Grey Glacier look pretty puny. On the way out of town we stopped to look at the black-necked swans in the shallow areas of Lago Argentino, and then again to see caracaras (hawks) feasting on roadkill. Lago Argentino is huge and has many arms. We drove alongside one of them, Brazo Rico (Rich Branch) which looked like it was shallower than normal. We learned that Brazo Rico only has one exit to Lago Argentino and no other drainage points, and the Lago Argentino exit is sometimes blocked by the glacier. When this happens, this part of the lake backs up until there is enough water pressure on the glacier to break through. The worst situation was when the branch of the lake backed up to an extra 90 feet deep, killing many of the lakeside trees. When the water pressure finally broke the ice dam, the excess water caused flooding all along the rest of Lago Argentino as well, including in areas of El Calafate that had been identified for development. The current road and residential areas have been reworked to manage the normal 20 foot backup.

The water has clearly receded from a typical high water mark,but is MUCH lower than a worst case scenario.

At the glacier, we had the option of stopping at the top and looking around, or taking the bus to the bottom and walking back up. I’m sure you can guess which we did. There is a lovely metal grid walkway with lookouts all along the front edge of the glacier. Once again, we took tons of photos, that in retrospect, all look a lot alike. When we realized how big the glacier actually was only occurred when we saw two different boats on each side of the now-open ice dam, carrying passengers – and they looked like toys next to the ice. We also saw quite a few small chunks calve off, but none of the really big precarious pieces broke while we were there.

Lynn at Pedrito Moreno glacier -- it was fairly warm hiking up the walkways, but windy.

That itsy bitsy boat has 3-4 levels above the water and holds hundreds of people.

The glacier would be impossible to walk over in this area.

 Once we got back to the hotel, we walked into town for souvenir shopping and an informal group dinner. El Calafate is named after a berry bush that has never been domesticated, but makes great jam. Every single jar of jam we saw was in a tourist shop and (I thought) grossly overpriced. We even looked in a grocery store downtown (we arrived just as an army of Japanese tourists showed up) but found nothing. Either the locals don’t eat this stuff or there is a conspiracy to keep the reasonably priced options far from the tourists. We didn’t get any. We did, however, find the penguin-shaped pitchers we had seen near Bariloche in the north. Most of them had photos of the glacier and ‘El Calafate’ printed on them. Yuck. I just wanted a plain white one. We finally found a few unadorned pitchers, but none were white. There was an option for an interesting arty green/blue glaze or a plain solid light yellow-green one. I thought the price was high (2 times as much as anywhere else) but reasonable (half price) if you paid cash. I avoided buying one, but after scouring the town, it was clear that I either had to give up the idea or sign up to pay cash for an over-priced one. Fortunately, the Argentine interest in US currency reduced the price another 20%, but I wonder if I might have found a white one cheaper on the internet.