Smelling Of Denis

Mannequin in Distress - Rio Gallegos

We had a thoroughly relaxing couple of days in Puerto Madryn doing not very much, including long walks on the beach and further downsizing of our life’s possessions. We found free internet and wireless in a really nice, very obviously newly opened hotel with brand new computers but with no guests. I’d get dressed up (so I wouldn’t be rumbled as an unmoneyed impostor) and wander down with my laptop and spend a few hours surfing in peace with a decent connection on a proper keyboard – without the crazy Spanish characters. I think the hotel was just happy to have the company, with me single handedly making the place look busy. We had booked our onward tickets to Rio Gallegos at the bus station in Bahia Blanca so all we had to do was turn up and jump on the bus.

Turning Up To Jump On The Bus

It was our first daylight bus journey in a while and the hours before sunset were thoroughly enjoyable as we whizzed through the heart of desolate Patagonia on our way south to Tierra del Fuego. The place is unearthly looking, ironically because there’s so little in the form of man made infrastructure to break it up. It’s completely flat in all directions, horizon to horizon of beautiful blue sky vacuum packing the landscape with just the two lane Ruta 3 highway weaving its way through the multi hued heather. It completely reminds me of an infinite Sally Gap. Sallygapagonia I like to call it. Our eventual destination was a town called Ushuaia (you-swhy-ee-a) which is officially “the end of the world” or Fin del Mundo, the most southerly town in the world this side of the Antarctic. This trip is really all about learning how to pronounce a place name only after you’ve visited it.

Our Bus about to leave Puerto Madryn

Unfortunately none of the national bus companies ventured to the end of the earth so we needed to get to Rio Gallegos and buy tickets with a local company to take us the additional 700km south to Ushuaia. The vastness of this country and this continent is amazing. The further we get from our previous destination, the closer we get to our next stop as dictated by bus schedules or bus company’s routes – each stop or diversion a mere stepping stone on our journey to our eventual destination thousands of kilometres from where we started. And we’re still in the same country! We got into Rio Gallegos and discovered that the next bus out was at 9am the following morning so we had the pleasure of this windswept and unpleasant industrial town’s company for the next 24 hours or so.

Rio Gallegos

There really was very little going on in this town, the weather was cold, overcast and very windy – a mere hint of what was to come weatherwise. A lot of the town wasn’t so much falling down as put up half arsed in the first place. The taxi drivers there don’t do luggage loading either. They stood back and let me struggle to get our bags into the shitty boots of their tiny TINY taxis, handicapped and all as I was. No tip for you, I said with a big smile on my face as I squeezed into the cab. I’m pretty sure he understood. Its pretty much a 90% indigenous population in these parts (by indigenous I mean native Indian – the Portenos pride themselves on their very pure European heritage) and its kind of tragic but they really don’t seem to do very much. We went shopping for ingredients for our bus trip picnic the following day and it was all about food stamps. Gallons of fizzy drinks purchased by government subsidy. Government sponsored obesity. No one was buying fruit or vegetables, it was all trolley fulls of snack foods, processed meat, fizzy drinks and really cheap household goods – mostly a lot of towels. We’ve been shopping in Norte, a chain store in Argentina which sells good quality cheap groceries. The Norte in Rio Gallegos had dayglo orange and pink Health Department stickers across all the doors saying something to the effect of “Closed due to rancidness”.

Somewhere in Rio Gallegos

M has been doing a really good job of keeping us (me) sane and fed on the epic bus journeys by building moxy loads of world class tasty sandwiches and dumping them into ziploc bags for later ravenous consumption, filling the already stuffy air of sleeping buses with oniony aromas and unwelcome wafts of cheesiness. The bus companies do provide “meals” but they invariably taste of the polystyrene they’re packaged in, the bits that aren’t made out of ham that is – maybe even the bits that are. An example of the confusion at the soul of this strange town – a pizza place (if we never see another pizza in our lives…..) with a wood fired pizza oven generally means good quality tasty pizza. The place we visited in Rio Gallegos however had an authentic enough looking wood fired oven but used those stodgy precooked bases. Now if that’s not cheating I don’t know what is.

Happy To Be Leaving Rio Gallegos

When we boarded the bus on the Sunday morning, I looked across to the bus next to us and saw Sonny Knowles. Or at least a man who looked just like him – he was even dressed in a Late Late Toy Show colorful jumper. That would have been funny enough but in the window seat directly behind Sonny Knowles was….Paddy Cole! I swear to god. Superstars of Irish Showbands Patagonia Tour 2007. I quickly checked the next seat back to see if I could spot Twink but I was to be disappointed. We haven’t laughed as much in a long time and the two poor doppelgangers, who were travelling separately, must have thought we were demented as we stole more sideward glances in their direction only to erupt in fits of laughter.

Patagonian Road Trip

Lest I give the impression that it’s all a struggle and an inconvenience, may I my I suspend my innate cynicism for a moment to say we’re really thoroughly enjoying our travels so far. We’re regularly blown away by the most unexpected things - a vista which appears out of nowhere, a chance interaction with or between the locals which restores our faith in the comic absurdity of it all, a small traditional store which takes you back a hundred years the second you cross the threshold, or one or the other of us pulling a previously undiscovered superpower out of the bag. Experiences visual and cerebral, which could only happen when you’re out of your depth in a strange place, all conspiring to make the disruption and disorientation wholly worthwhile. Travel is the best source of mind vitamins aswell, a real catalyst for brain thoughts. The revelations which occur when your switched off, unaddled brain is being bombarded with experience are very rewarding and mostly unexpected. The best kind. Those toilet seat or bath tub eureka moments happening in public can be pretty embarrassing though.

Somewhere in Patagonia 32

As arduous and discomfiting as the bus journeys are, I’m really enjoying the physical travel, especially when I have a soundtrack. Movement to the accompaniment of music turns your experience into something movie like. The road unravels like a movie reel with a sunset soundtrack. It’s funny but I only really get homesick listening to music. Sometimes I get completely carried away and M has vetoed my maniacal head nodding and body rocking.

Somewhere in Patagonia 33

For example, watching the sunset over Patagonia to Superchunk’s florida’s on fire was unforgettable. Don’t you know that the dirt’s on fire down here? If you’ve got the shells build a statue to yourself down here. Displacement Sunsets and the mindset that follows. Homesick for the known, the understood, the company as you hurtle alone into the unknown. Random episodes surfacing out of your mind’s light, triggered by snippets of songs, euphoria, fond memories with silver linings. Elation in an enclosed space. Elation with knees knocking.

Haberton Estancia 2

This trip seems to be blurring into a series of marathon bus journeys undertaken for the sole purpose of paying respect to the gods of wide open spaces. Where the asphalt ends and the gravel begins. Fossil fuel outposts bathed in the most beautiful light in complete isolation on the sunset swallowed plains. Jesus Christ pictorial bracelets. Snoring Ozzies. Yellow headrests = buttercup dreams. Copa Manteca. Using polystyrene ham sandwiches as plinths on which to fill out our immigration documents. Electronica in Nature. No need for clumsy, wasteful and unreliable humans. Digital purity and nature’s freshness. Wind powered robots. Solar powered synthesizers. Sustainable synthesizers. Renewable robots, fossil fuel teetotallers, siliconaholics. Utilitarian scars – where would we dump the cars? Harmless harmonics.

Haberton Estancia 23

Buttercup yellow and baby blue on brown skin. Into Chile, tomato seed stains on my bandaged hand. Chile Sin Carne. Patagonian waves of wind through the flora. A gold medal for good ideas. Alchemist robots. The thoroughly windswept head of heather on Mother Earth’s head. Blue rinse on the horizon . Roads as manmade lines on earth’s palm. This heart’s on fire. Headstrong winds. Concrete blowing in the wind. The White Album following me around. Windproof weddings. And now we must pack up every piece of the life we used to love just to keep ourselves at least enough to carry on. The pickup trucks over here are beautiful. And the long distance trucks. Two tone, mixtures of the most unlikely colours with a random coloured spare door or trunk thrown in for good measure. Mini zoos with one sole resident, a very confused beaver in pastry co-ops in Tolquin.

Cafes and Guidebooks

The journey down was pretty uneventful (if the above paragraph of words scribbled on the journey is anything to go by). It took 13 hours despite the trip being advertised as a 9 hour journey. We drove from Rio Gallegos, crossed the border into Chile and on to the port of Puerto Espora for the ferry crossing across the Straits of Magellan to the island of Tierra del Fuego, appropriately called Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, on towards Rio Grande, crossing back into Argentinian territory for the remainder of the journey mostly on gravel roads towards Ushuaia. The ferry crossing was funny. Our full-on tourbus had to drive down the beach to where the tiny ferry was waiting for us, its ramp open like a drawbridge ready to swallow us into the jaws of the sea swell.

Our bus on the ferry crossing the Magellan Straits to Tierra del Fuego

The arse of the bus got seriously caught as it boarded the ferry, wheels spinning, metal on metal groaning, wind howling and the spray from the waves hitting the windscreen. I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen and that we were going to capsize into the sea but something moved – the tide probably raised the boat a little in the water, the arse of the bus was released and up the ramp we went to cheers of relief from the passengers. The crossing was only about 25 minutes but it was the choppiest ferry trip I’ve ever been on – the wind as mentioned was a gale force headwind – one of those winds where the flags look like they’re made out of cardboard as they stand to military attention in the direction of the prevailing gale. It’s a very interesting sensation sitting on a bus on a ferry in a high wind. Your body realises you’re in motion but your brain cant handle the fact that you’re swaying back and forth on different axes simultaneously – a Funderland sensation on a standard coach that’s both confusing and very worrisome. There was a pickup truck from Texas on the ferry crossing aswell. Now that’s a long ould spin.

The reason we took so long coming down was the time spent at the border crossings. Forms to be filled out, cheese sandwiches to be hurriedly scoffed lest they be confiscated, bags to be unloaded and reloaded, queues to put up with, passports to be stamped. 4 times. On the way out of Argentina, on the way into Chile, on the way out of Chile, on the way back into Argentina all in the space of less than 100 miles. Territorial one-upmanship and beauracracy gone mad. Immigration and customs officials as referees on adventure’s playing fields monitoring trajectories, fumbles, touchdowns and administering passport stamps on human post, confiscating tasty sandwiches in ziploc bags but not the ones in your stomach.

Windsweptness

There seemed to be a huge difference in the friendliness of the Argentine officials versus the Chilean ones, one of the Argentine guys spotted from her passport that it would be M’s birthday the following day and ordered me in a mock official tone to take her somewhere nice for dinner :) They had really cool jumpers with elbow and shoulder patches and pockets for pens and phones and gadgets. I totally wanted one and could also really do with one down here in the cold. We arrived in Ushuaia at 11pm on the Sunday night without accommodation in a freezing rainstorm and were dropped in a Statoil garage at the edge of town going – Wha Happen?? It took us about half an hour to flag a taxi and we were verily coldish when one arrived to drop us about 3 blocks up the road at a hotel where I managed to book a room. We could have walked. We slept heartily that night in separate beds in a triple room, the last one available.

Our Campsite On Top Of The World

Ushuaia is like Dingle with Indians. It’s surrounded by mountains so you get this very dramatic 360 degree panorama of snow capped peaks with the bay in the foreground and only a very small inlet through which the many ships pass to reach the busy port via the Beagle Channel. The road approach is very similar aswell as we found out the night before. The relief bus driver had some difficulty keeping the bus between the gravelly ditches and on a couple of occasions we could feel him temporarily lose control of the bus at speed with hundred feet drops either side of us.

Ushuaia

The next day was M’s birthday and we moved on from the relative warmth of the hotel to the campsite up the hill. It’s at the base of some ski slopes and the campsite comes complete with the most Amish looking ski lift I’ve ever witnessed. I’m not completely sure that Amish people are allowed ski, probably only horse-drawn winter sports are allowed. I’m not sure is it permanently out of commission or has it been seasonally retired but it acts as the centrepiece of this particular campsite anyways. M got several emails from girl friends going “so what luxurious unprecedentedly wonderful surprise has yer fella planned for your birthday this year?”, these expectations based on last year’s fancy dinners and champagne breakfasts in Vancouver. Well the answer was……a tent on the side of a hill at the end of the world. Not quite the pampered environment which a lady den céad scoth such as M deserves on her birthday but it was special in its own offbeat, numb-nose way none the less.

Ushuaia Gym

Besides, last year’s birthday was an extra special one and I couldn’t be raising the bar every year as I’d very quickly run out of notches – and money :) We pitched our tent and tied the kangaroo down (we love our tent – it’s totally more robust than that house on the Dulux ad) and we meandered down the hill towards town hungry for lunch, dressed like Arctic expeditionaries to counter the Baltic wind blowing through our bones.

The Road To Haberton Estancia

Sometimes you have unlucky days, sometimes things cant go much righter. On our way down through the picturesque but higgledy piggledy town which falls down the hill towards the centre and the seafront, imagine our surprise to see a sign on a wall advertising Comidas Vegetarian (vegetarian meals)! I had suffered several false alarms in Buenos Aires, spying “Vetenarien 24 Hours” signs and rushing glazed eyed across lanes of traffic looking for Vegetarian culinary fulfilment only to be assailed by the smell of cat shit and the sight of dogs with limbs in slings. Seriously – that happened twice. Interesting how your mind plays tricks on you like that – desperately trying to deliver your fondest wishes by hook or by crook. Anyways, this place wasn’t a mirage. It’s housed in a one up one down houseen with no seating. The owners of this immaculately clean and well run establishment, a very zen Thai couple with an even more zen son, take your order based on the spread of wholly vegetarian choices laid out in front of you. There was a shimmering smorgasbord of vegetarian delights like vegetable pakoras (we adore-a pakoras), curried potato and cauliflower gratin, veggie sushi, 3 different types of flavoured rice, samosas, empanadas, stir frys, raviolis, cannelonis, lasagnas. We’re not at all used to such a wide choice and I gave several brain farts, probably in anticipation of the real farts to come post-digestion, before making a decision or 5. There was no blaring Latino rock, or tacky Thai twang-twang - just complete silence as they packed your personally selected food in plastic containers with the care and attention to detail of someone who was going to be graded on presentation afterwards. We had the most satisfying and delicious meal ever on the pier in Ushuaia looking across the bay to the mountains, all the more wholesome and enjoyable for the fact that it was completely unexpected. I gave our impromptu picnic 15 out of 10. M only gave it 12 out of 10 on the basis that she had an over averous competitor for the tastiest morsels - even though there was enough food to feed a funk band with the munchies.

M´s Birthday Cake

We then retired to a café for a humungous hunk of Dulce de Leche birthday cake – no candles ( a precedent if ever I saw one). So thanks to El Bambu, Casa de Comida Vegetariana, (Piedra Buena 276 Ushuaia) whose motto apparently is “knowing how to eat is knowing how to live” We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the town. It’s kind of like if the main street of Jasper (or any outdoorsy tourist town) was suddenly diverted through Dara Park in Newbridge – the main street full of upscale cafes and outdoor equipment shops with the surrounding residential streets all rough and ready and smelling of coal smoke. Normally when you get the smell of an open sewer you look around and invariably find one. I’ve yet to actually spot the source of the smell in Ushuaia.

Looking over Ushuaia

But it’s actually a really nice town with a lot of character and even more characters. Like Dingle it seems to act as a magnet for professional travellers (nee vagrants) seeking enlightenment in as isolated and far flung a spot as they can find. There’s also a lot of very obviously moneyed tourists packing the outdoor equipment shops, dropping thousands of dollars to prepare for expeditions they’ll probably never make. They can however rest assured in the knowledge that their space age Gore-Tex bulletproof wind stopper jacket will be more than adequate to withstand the perils of their 5 star hotel’s wayward air conditioning system should it malfunction disastrously during their visit. I’m such a bitch. The locals wouldn’t be the friendliest. They’ll lock eyes with you and you always expect a greeting, at the very least a nod. Nothing comes. Ever. Pretty disconcerting that. They’re probably harbouring the same air conditioned sentiments expressed above towards us ….. Oh and there’s an infestation of dogs. Every house has several dogs of mixed heritage and these animals know how to bark. Like most things Argentinean their barking continues well into the night.

Ushuaia

Ushuaia

Fin Del Mundo wine - M´s Birthday

We found a gorgeous restaurant for dinner the night of M’s birthday. We wandered in dishevelled and malodorous but were very professionally treated like real people. We had a wonderful chat filled, plan making, meandering dinner with a couple of bottles of Fin del Mundo wine and all was right with the world even if M was trying to get her head around her prime numbered birthday. This was the night that the fat cough was rechristened The Béchamel Cough. Far more dignified sounding. My much neglected earwigging habit (I don’t understand Spanich) was given a real treat when the couple next to us, a French middle aged man and his Spanish accented lady friend, started talking about their respective travels in bizarrely accented English. This guy and been around the world several times, his most recent jaunt prior to his trip to the end of the world being a spin out of New York on a motorbike to the Arctic circle. He also described trips up and down the Amazon and the Nile, ferry hopping on his bike where he could, charming or bribing the captain to make his way. The lady had some kind of nautical heritage aswell and was full of talk of her expeditions to the Antarctic and all around the South American Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Fascinating stuff.

Ushuaia

At one stage, the guy who looked like a trimmer Fergus Gibson (complete with fire engine red, oddly shaped glasses) said he’d been married 3 times and divorced 3 times. The divorced bit I could understand, the married in the first place bit was harder to comprehend. This well travelled couple disappeared together later in the evening into the adjoining well appointed hotel. We saw him the next evening however pitching his tent at our campsite having very obviously failed to make a lasting impression on the lady paying for the hotel accommodation. His transport was impressive though – an old school 1100cc BMW touring bike complete with sidecar which will no doubt come in handy if he ever gets lucky for more than a night. In the meantime it stored his camping gear, a spare tyre or 2 and whatever else you need to endlessly travel up and down the world’s highways and biways. He left the following morning, almost hitting the ditch as he waved ceremoniously to us in his wing mirror. You’d wonder how a man like that could safely make his way down to the shops never mind around the world and back.

Thermarest Breathalyzer Test – FAILED!

We had the utmost pleasure at a bar called Galway in seeing England defeated at Croke Park on Saturday. We hooked up with a very random collection of Irish, a couple of very mad Irish-for-the-day Scottish brothers drowning their sorrows after their teams earlier disaster against Italy and one solitary and very dejected English man. This motley bunch were all hunched around a tiny television with Spanish commentary happy to be enjoying the game at all in such a remote location. Of course it turned into a long night of celebration, chat, wanton drink mixing, pub grub (my dish was called You’re Going To Regret Eating Me In The Morning) and revelry as we moved up the road to a pub called the Dubliner and took up our positions at the bar with our motley group of brand new friends and drank and sang until we were all drunk and sung out. One of the Scots – Callum I believe was his name (who fascinatingly turned out to be a landmine clearance volunteer who had spent time in Angola and Pakistan. He called it advanced gardening because he only used gardening tools….), on hearing we were from Kildare introduced us to a song called Roger of Kildare, a ballad which turns dramatically and spectacularly bawdy around verse 3, and he taught it to us over the course of an hour and encouraged the rest of the bar to improvise the harmonies. Great crack. Moral of the story – don’t ever let your daughter go the fair with Roger of Kildare. And if you do bring a puncture repair. Kit. These days a hellish hangover follows a nights drinking as sure as a Whiskey chaser follows a pint. Being drunk in a tent is great fun altogether. Being hungover in a tent, pitched on a slope in a freezing, howling gale is most certainly not. Drool freezing to the side of your face, way too much light, the up to now unrealised proximity of insects, the bag in talks with the muscle and the obstacle course to the bathroom, the odd smell of a cheesemongers in your tent, the sheer nowhere-to-go-ness, having the fear you're going to roll down the slope and off the end of the earth in your sleep. The horrors basically, just dessert for the feelings of invincibility the night before. I spent several hours on Sunday in awe of the quality of design of the Thermarest (our inflatable magic mattresses) logo and contemplating the collapsible space inside the tent. Around lunchtime I bumped into a black dog with the strength of 10 men on the way to the clapboard shithouse. I eventually slayed him with 3 more hours of sleep on a slope. We ended up not making it out on the water for a sailboat trip which we’d booked for Sunday afternoon. I was feeling sea sick on land and the bag didn’t need any encouragement by dragging it out to sea. Sunday turned out to be a glorious day weatherwise. Monday, our only other possible alternative day for a boat trip was rainy, windy and very very cold so going out on one of the most treacherous and choppy stretches of water was out of the question. We’re very disappointed about that one.

An obvious example of hangovers ruining your life. One of the Irish guy’s - Padraig, an unstoppable rugby pundit and borderline alcoholic - told us of a story where a hangover had actually saved his life. Around 5 years ago he was with a friend in Thailand and went proper drinking the night before they were due to fly out. Such was the extent of their whiskey induced hangover the next day, they didn’t even wake up for their flight, sleeping well past their departure time and into the following evening.

Near Haberton Estancia

It turns out that their flight crashed into the sea shortly after take off, killing all 230 passengers on board. His family at home were informed and everything before he could call them to tell them he was safe but still thoroughly hungover. Unsurprisingly he has since developed a profound fear of flying which he battles through the liberal pre-flight use of alcohol. It doesn’t stop him flying though and he was the most learned person I’ve ever met on the topic of civil aviation and the safety and dangers inherent. For example the primary reason British Airways and Virgin have had the best safety record over the past decade is their policy of hiring only ex RAF pilots. These guys are the most highly skilled pilots bar none and are trained to fly their lightweight darts through hurricanes and thunderstorms as standard procedure – knowing how to ride undercurrents and avoid overcurrents which can snap an aircraft in half. Flying heavy, overpowered jumbo jets (regulation insists that commercial aircraft must be able to generate 4 times the power required to get and keep the plane airborne – losing an engine (a pretty common occurrence apparently) is therefore, in theory, not a problem) which basically fly themselves is a complete piece of cake. They are paid their 100k salaries for their ability and experience in emergency situations. Most of the time they’re completely bored. Strange job. Another interesting statistic imparted to me by this drunken civil aviation expert – 99% of surveyed survivors of plane crashes said they had paid “close attention” to the safety procedure demonstration at the start of the flight and knew how many seats away and in what direction the exits were. Of the badly injured survivors – 1% said they had played close attention. Statistics were unavailable for those killed. Inneresting huh? Other nuggets - the best place to be seated on a plane if you want to survive a crash? Just over the wing (structurally the strongest part of a plane) in an aisle seat so you don’t have to stand on other passengers heads to escape a wreck. All this information from a man who comes to South America and gets a Celtic band tattoo. He’s pretty well travelled and was full of complete horror stories, all first-hand, involving taxi drivers which would put the shit crossways in you.

Near Haberton Ranch

So other than all that we’ve been doing some hardcore camping. Camping with me is like a landgrab for surface area on the tent floor. I’m Argentina, hordes of wandering limbs seeking to extend my territory at the cost of my already land starved neighbour, M who is beleaguered Chile wedged between the Andes (me) and the deep blue sea (our stacked rucksacks emanating authentic fish smells).

Our Tent on location at the Nobel Prize Ceremony

We hired a car for a couple of days and went to the National Park of Tierra del Fuego and did some half day treks around Lago Roca. We camped by a very beautiful lake and heard the most deafening silence we’ve heard yet on our trip. Then we went back-country camping about 150km east of Ushuaia towards Haberton Estancia.

Haberton Ranch

An estancia is basically a farmstead – huge rolling reserves of land which were farmed by gauchos and which still exist throughout rural Argentina albeit heavily subsidised these days by tourism – you can pay megabucks to stay in the big house and go out gaucho’ing on horseback. Haberton Estancia is purely tourist driven now although it also acts as a marine reserve. It’s a complete enclave of civilisation at the edge of an utterly wild landscape, full of history on the frontier between Patagonia and the waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans. It has acted as a refuge over its 200 year existence for sailors and tribes of warring Indians aswell as missionaries on the run. It was nice and photogenic but really the drive out was far more impressive. 100km on dirt roads over bridges made of lollipop sticks (most of the tourist trips out that direction are by boat to the small harbour) with stunning views across to Chile and of the Beagle Channel and the surrounding mountains. We camped in a Dali landscape complete with bulls and condors. We’ve been camping down here for about 10 days now in rain with freezing wind, hail with freezing wind, snow with freezing wind and sun with very cold wind. Its probably the toughest conditions we’ve camped in. Regardless of what the weather is doing it gets incredibly cold at night. Here’s me going to sleep : One fleece lined hat, one t-shirt, one thermal top, another t-shirt, one long sleeved top, one warm shirt, one jacket with hood up, one pair of long johns, 2 pairs of socks, one pair of pyjamas, one sleeping bag, and one blankie. On really cold nights I don my wet gear for that extra layer of protection. One of the nights it got so cold I had a dream we were frozen chickens. You’re so cocooned when you throw on all those clothes and when you’re wearing eyepatches and earplugs you could be dead – or at least cryogenically frozen. The last night we spent at the campsite in Ushuaia was seriously cold. We basically had all our clothes on plus our rucksacks. But the sight of fresh snow on the mountains in the morning aswell as our first woodpecker (or good-pecker as one local pronounced it) just over our tent was almost worth it.

Woody Good Pecker

Thankfully though our gear is well up to the task. The trick is to keep everything dry and you’re fine. I give our tent the Nobel prize. Our Thermarests (which have kept us from freezing to death every night) get a Booker prize each. Our fleece lined hats get Pulitzer prizes. My boots get the Freedom of the city of Ushuaia. My blankie gets a Jacobs Personality of the Year Award - Honourable Mention. And probably most deservedly - our thermal underwear gets a hot wash. With the extreme cold, all our warm clothing (not very much – it’s bulky and we’ll only really need it down here) is pretty much constantly on. So we’ve resorted to the complex art of hygiene through layer rotation. When the smell of your feet reminds you vividly of Mature Edam Cheese then it’s time to re-evaluate your hygiene procedures. But despite the hardships it’s good to know we can survive relatively intact, if slightly dishevelled, in such a harsh environment. We’re technically leaving Argentina on Wednesday for Chile (Puerto Natales to visit Torres del Paine, maybe ambitiously to do the W trek) but we’ll be back on Argentine soil again to visit the glaciers and maybe Bariloche. We’re 2 months in and pretty happy with the progress we’ve made so far. Meeting people with exotic tales of other far flung attractions is making us re-evaluate our itinerary a little but we’re mostly on course for a June flight home. We’ll keep y’all posted. Thanks for reading another epic post. I wont leave it as long the next time :)

Near Haberton Estancia 3

Ushuaia Passport Stamp