Sunday Thunder, Monday Thunder

This is another bumper catch-up post so brace yourselves for some words. We bumped into an English / Ozzie / Dutch / Indonesian couple (Miriam accounted for the last 3 nationalities by herself) on the bus from El Bolson to Bariloche. I think we were all too disappointed with our visit to the smaller towns the region (see the El Bolson rant in the previous post) had to offer to strike up idle conversation. Hilan and Miriam had spent a couple of days in Esquel and apart from their trip on the famous Old Patagonian Express, a narrow gauge steam train of old, as far as I could figure out, everything else seemed to be closed in the town of Esquel during their visit. It was when we all ended up in the exact same seating configuration 4 or 5 hours later on another bus from Bariloche to Mendoza that we started chatting and sharing shitty (ahem) bus snacks. The conversation definitely shortened the rainy overnight bus journey. As I was having my altercation with Francie Bellew in Mendoza bus station when we arrived, Hilan discovered that a large bottle of Miriam’s moisturiser exploded inside his backpack causing chaos, confusion, much moisturising of personal effects and a large scale pan-national watery domestic. This is after he woke up on the bus to discover an unpleasant present stuck to his sleeping bag liner, some less than mintyfresh pre-chewed gum which some previous kind passenger had deposited by the window and which had attached itself to his liner overnight.

Valpo

We waited for close to an hour in the rain at the bus station in Mendoza in a taxi queue with people clutching second hand bedside lockers, spare parts for mannequins, cardboard boxes hermetically sealed with shoelaces, and all manner of other bits and pieces of baggage and shopping. When the taxi eventually did arrive, I got on the wrong side of the driver straight away by banging my door despite this very obviously placed sticker. I think it means close the door gently, or lovingly.


We checked into the Hostel Independencia and that’s where we stayed for the next few nights. We’re slowly cottoning on to the fact that private double rooms in hostels are a relatively cheap and less distressing compromise to living in full dorms with upto 6 other backpackers. They’re also the rooms which get booked quickest so you need to book ahead rather than turning up with a dishevelled head and being disappointed. When you’ve got 8 people in a room, statistically you’re guaranteed to have at least a couple of snorers, one or two who are less than hygienically disposed, and a couple of dipsos who don’t get in til 3 or 4 each morning who when they do, snore AND stink.

We had one Spanish guy who talked in his sleep but very entertainingly so. He had 2 sided conversations, in very stern and forthright voices. like a film noir dialogue. Apparently he spent the first 16 years of his life sharing a room with his brother who also talked in his sleep and his father told them that they used to have sleeptalk chats over and back. Too bad they were in Spanish cos I’m sure I would have enjoyed a sneak peek into his psyche (so to speak). It’s weird though, no matter where we stay there’s always someone who gets night terrors and calls out my name to release them from their horrors.


Mendoza is an average nice town it’s main feature being streetside gaping open drains (or canals as they’re called locally) 2 or 3 feet deep which were used for irrigation of the tree lined boulevards. They’re pretty dangerous, especially if you’re drunk on local wine or if you have your head stuck in a camera. Aspects of Mendoza would remind you of BA but there’s much more of a town feel off Mendoza – despite it’s size. It has a huge municipal park which houses a University, a sports stadium and a load of other public amenities. The houses surrounding this park are as good if not better as any of the plushest architectural anomalies we witnessed in Buenos Aries. It’s located in the heart of the most well known wine region in Argentina and it’s really its winemaking industry and its many bodegas and larger wineries which result in the influx of tourists.

M at Septima Bodega

We took our first South American city bus to the extreme outskirts of the city to a free winery tour at Septima Bodega, one of the more modern bodegas in the area. The building itself sits in the middle of a sprawling vineyard – a grape concentration camp - and was built incorporating Inca building methods. The end result is a stunning mixture of old and new and even if I hadn’t done the wine tour I’d have been happy to check out the building from the inside. We took the tour, given by a girl called Carolina Green who’s great grandmother on her father’s side was Irish and who endearingly referred to the cellar as “the celery”, in the company of 2 apparently well to do Americans. She was dressed in a gold coat with matching handbag and shoes, he was dressed like a politician on a working holiday. We were dressed in whatever was left from the pile of clothes sent to the laundry that morning. Who gets dressed up formally for a wine tour anyways? Stretchy pants a go go.


The tour itself was interesting enough – we learned that the grape had most likely been introduced to South America by missionaries in the 15th century who needed wine for the sacraments. We also found out about the different varieties of handmade barrels imported from France and the states, some made from French Oak and others from North American Oak - French Oak is superior and is kept for only the reserve wines as it gives it a superior taste and richness over time. Rosé has such a light taste because it doesn’t get barrelled at all. Other wines achieve a medium oakiness or woodiness from the fact that they’re stored only in barrels on their 5th usage. It’s all very scientific and controlled (except for the 30 fruit flies I swallowed as I inhaled going into the mixing room – I kept coughing for half an hour as if I’d been eating peanuts) and entering the realms of the wine bore but we learned something, saw the inside of a functioning winery and got to glug some free wine at the tasting afterwards. We bought a couple of bottles of Malbec to keep us warm on our bus journey to Santiago. We had to keep asking the driver to adjust the air conditioning so we could sip our wine out of our Nalgenes at the just the right temperature.

The most remote off license on the planet

We met Hilan and Miriam later for dinner and we hit a Vegetarian Buffet which was a refreshing change from the usual bowel locking fare. Vegetarian food is like the Labour Court when your unionised bowels go in strike. Deadlocked bowels are bound by the intervention of the Falafel treaty, the Empanada amendment and the Pakora dictat. The following day we went on a bus tour up the mountains which wasn’t nearly as interesting as our wine tour. We bumped into a very old dog in a tiny village high up in the Andes who had the misfortune of being very blind. He comically stood facing a wall and barked at the rain. All the time we were there.



We left Mendoza on the Saturday morning and took a swish bus across the Andes into Chile, towards Santiago to our eventual destination of Valparaiso. We needed the swish bus (leather seats that reclined 75 degrees – the 90 degree recliners were sold out) to calm our travel frayed nerves after the border crossing took 3 and a half hours on its own. The Chilean Department of Agriculture is on constant lockdown (think of ports and airports in Ireland during the foot and mouth crisis) and refuses to allow any animal or plant derived food products from entering its borders. Chile is pretty hardcore on drugs aswell so every vehicle including the hundreds of commuter buses which pass through this extremely busy but remote border crossing, are rigorously searched by dogs, customs officials, department of agriculture officials and police drugs squad. So you have the usual painful queuing for immigration and the multiple forms to be filled out with exactly the same information. Then you queue to get your carry on luggage xrayed, very slowly and methodically with suspicious bags being systematically searched as you are called to witness the search while the rest of the bus looks on. Then all the main luggage from the bus is slowly and methodically unloaded and passed through the xray machine. It’s all unbelievably tedious and when you consider you’ve waited at least a couple of hours already for your turn (it’s done on a bus by bus basis) AND that the luggage handler guy goes around with a paper cup looking for propinas (tips) just as you’re about to board the bus and just as you think you’re finally done with the craziness, you can understand how it might take 3-4 hours and make you crazy in the coconut.

The Argentina Chile border high up in the Andes

I’m currently reading The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux where he outlines his travels by rail from Boston to Patagonia. It’s a highly recommended read more for the fact that a lot of his experiences aswell as their locations mirror ours – here’s an example of his take on border crossings : “The Panamerican express crosses a national frontier and railway travel is never more interesting than when it involves a border crossing. The frontier is always a no man’s land in which fascinating pieces of fraudulent theatre are enacted – the passport stamping ceremony, the suspicious looks, the bullying at customs, the foolishly patriotic pique and the unexplained delays.”


The public toilets in Chile are all turnstile affairs where you need to pay your Domestos contribution before you can relieve yourself. They say it’s in the name of “hygienic and secure toilets for everyone”. Not having any Chilean currency at the border and needing to visit a bathroom that’s not in a chrome wardrobe (like on the bus) becomes problematic when you discover they don’t take credit cards. It’s funny though, the local government, whose idea it presumably is to charge people for such a basic public convenience, are wholly inconvenienced themselves by the public health problems caused by the fact that many Chileans decide to opt out of the toilet toll and just do it in the street.

Don't do it in the street

We’ve seen so many guys, from the very young to the very old, urinating freely in alleyways, behind trees, just off shopping streets, in stairwells, over sea walls, in doorways and on street corners. Valparaiso in particular, which already has a plague of vicious or unhinged street dogs with wonky ears who use the streets as their toilet, was a pretty odorous streetwalking experience. And still they charge people to do their numbers in public bathrooms. Most of the time if you stop and try and unconfuse yourself about a lot of how South America works you’ll get pickpocketed or sold some chintz by a 50 year old “medical student” with a 5 o’clock shadow. So it’s not worth the effort. Bite your tongue, mentally staple the reasoning part of your brain closed and carry on.

Valparaiso

Our first night in Valparaiso was pure horror show. It was a bank holiday weekend and there was no room at the inn at the first 2 hostels we tried. So we scanned further down the list of accommodations in the guide book, almost to the bottom of the list and came across Hotel Puerto Valparaiso. It seemed cheap enough and mentioned “claw footed cast iron baths”. We later cross referenced the entry with another guidebook and found it was located in an area frequented by truckers, transvestites and rent boys. Always a lethal combination. Anyways, completely ignorant of this fact we checked into our windowless room, happy to have a bed for the night. We initially complained about the 20W bulb in our room and we were grudgingly upgraded to a room with 40W bulbs. We were still left with a windowless room so dimly lit that you needed a tripod to take a photo This place was a complete nightmare, the most low rent place we’ve had the pleasure of so far. I’d say the building itself was well over fifty years old with the original fit out done with second hand fixtures and fittings with things being only mended or ignored - never replaced, since then. Its bathroom had the oldest toilet I’ve ever seen and it had a fetching gingham jam lid cover over the opening. The bathroom relied heavily on “plumb and pray” plumbing - you only got a true appreciation for the plumbing innovation from the perspective of the toilet seat; a shoe lace had been drafted in to seal one of the joins.

.....sometimes

The bathroom door itself wouldn’t close as the wood had warped so much over time that it no longer cleared the broken tiled floor – even if you could get it shut there was a panel missing leaving a hole big enough to accommodate a llamas head….should you be mad enough to try and accommodate your llama in the en suite of your accommodation.

Valparaiso

So picture it, you’re trapped in this dimly lit, musty hell hole of a hotel at least until morning, you decide to take a look around, wandering the halls for distraction and the whole interior of the hotel is covered in homemade Word Art ads …..for the very hotel you’re trapped in. Helvetica Wavy Spooky. We had to borrow chairs from the restaurant to sit on in the room because there were none in the room and I caught the bed winking at me several times and refused to make contact with it until I fell out of my standing with tiredness. The interior lighting was very economically configured so that when you entered a hallway, a spotlight would turn on as you passed and have dimmed itself before you had even made it around the corner.

Notice in the hotel - your guess is as good as mine

We fled the claustrophobic confines of the hotel to go in search of food and maybe even some alcoholic anaesthetic but the streets of old Valparaiso at night were to prove even less hospitable than our mental breakdown of a hotel. Valparaiso is an old port town and still runs a functioning port from its waters. Our hotel was in the older part of this old port town but despite of, or maybe even because of its long history of visiting sailors from distant shores, the neighbourhood had a very unwelcoming ghostly feel. Our first stop was an ATM machine enslosed in one of those glass boxes where you need to swipe your card to gain entry. There was a bloodstained fist sized hole in the glass and notices over the machine to always check behind you when using the machine. Rattled, we stuffed the notes in our pockets and ran towards the light of what looked like a main street, passing a man walking on his cushion covered knees because….he seemed to be missing all his toes. The smell of deep fried meat and rotten fruit aswell as the aforementioned health and safety shortfalls filled the evening air. The purveyors of all things deep fried all seemed to have bushy moustaches. I’m not sure what the link is. We walked and walked, partly looking for some wholesome food and partly just to keep moving so not to provide an easy target for whatever malevolence we had convinced ourselves was abroad in this strange town. We eventually settled for bread and cheese purchased from a supermarket rather than risk trying any of the deep fried fare from the smoke filled holes in the wall packed to choking point with noisy locals. We returned to the hotel resolving to eat and get to sleep as quickly as possible to await the brighter perspective which morning generally provides. We bought new earplugs and dad has always called TV chewing gum for the eyes – well these things are chewing gum for the ears. They have the texture and consistency of well chewed Hubba Bubba but they work a treat for keeping the disco in the ballroom up the hotel from your room out of your dreams.

Valparaiso

Breakfast was an experience even by Argentine/ Chilean standards. We were greeted by more faded Word Art place settings – they had obviously gone so mad printing word art posters and place settings that the printer had ran out of toner. We were presented with Inedible Vittles – eating them was like trying to eat concentrated Liga or ten cream crackers at once. The cutting corners to save costs mentality of this hostelry continued – strictly 1 sachet of instant coffee and one portion of halflife-less butter per guest. The shallow bowl of pathetic sticky substance placed at the centre of the table looked like it had been paged 10 minutes previous to make an appearance at breakfast and pretend it was jam. We ended up eating our own cheese for breakfast..

We ended up hightailing it to an Internet kiosk first thing on Sunday morning and looking for a better class of accommodation. We had already decided to hole up in a nicer hotel for a few days prior to our Easter Island trip. Travelling can be pretty stressful, especially if you’re doing long journeys constantly without much of a break in between. I know you’re all sitting at home working hard going WHAT is he talking about?


But honestly, with holidays as long as these – as hilarious as it sounds, sometimes you need a break :) So we hit Vina del Mar and stayed at the brand new Sheraton hotel. This place is very nice indeed. It’s built right on the rocks just over the ocean – a brave investment as the area is renowned for its earthquakes and ensuing tsunamis. There’s even roadsigns depicting little matchstick men fleeing large waves in terror showing you escape routes in the event of the big one.


There was a full on gym, pool, sauna, outdoor jacuzzi overlooking the crashing waves and a very tasty and healthy buffet breakfast every morning – exactly what we needed to get ourselves relaxed and back in travelling mood and a world and a half away from the Valparaiso Puerto Hotel up the road. We kept bumping into other guests who would have a look of stunned silence on their faces when we told them we were in South America for 6 months. They were dying to ask how rogues like us could afford such high class accommodation for 6 months. We’d never mention our tent.

Valparaiso's speciality

Our first outing was to Pablo Neruda’s beachfront home in Isla Negra about an hour up the road. Pablo Neruda was, in 1971 the second Chilean poet to receive the Nobel prize for literature – the first being Gabriela Mistral. He’s a beloved figure in Chile as a lot of his history is tied up closely with the history of the country and a lot of his poetry refers constantly and very romantically to the beauty of the Chilean landscape. For example, Neruda was not a friend or supporter of several of the right wing Governments in Chile during his lifetime – indeed he had to escape from Chile over the Andes on a donkey carrying his unpublished manuscripts at one stage after a warrant for his arrest was issued. Then, when he died in 1973, the Chilean people ignored a curfew imposed by the military dictatorship (specifically to deny the outspoken poet a large funeral) and hundreds of thousands took to the streets to show their respects for their country’s poet laureate. This show of power by the people was the first demonstration to the dictatorship, indeed to themselves that they were a power to be reckoned with and it was from here that the seeds were sown for the eventual overthrow of the dictatorship. I have to admit to knowing very little about the man prior to visiting Chile but its amazing the interest which grows from visiting a man's home – especially when its as interesting as this one.

Neruda's Steel Wallpaper

He was a man who had a lot of obsessions outside of poetry. One was the sea – he apparently held a lifelong fantasy of becoming a ship's captain but was apparently happier on land than on water. So, he collected ship heads from old whale and coal ships all over the world. So there’s several of these things hanging all over the house, his favourite being one from the 18th century which had its original porcelain eyes. When he lit the fire in the room the condensation behind the ship head’s eyes would result in what looked like tears rolling down her cheeks. The house itself was built piece by piece over decades under Neruda’s instruction by his personal carpenter and a lot of local stonemasons and craftsmen who he employed to put flesh on the bones of his collected artefact’s dreams. It’s a haven of random eccentric esoterica and the rambling nature of the house’s structure is testament to Neruda’s genius and eccentricity. He always wrote in green ink, which he believed symbolised hope and life. Leather footstools, tables, walls and crockery were displayed all splashed haphazardly with the green ink of a poet at work. The place was hobbled together using rescued stained glass from about to be demolished buildings and rescued or uncovered ornate doors and windows. True to the nautical theme, the dining table was displayed laid out like he was the captain, and the hallways were all narrow and wooden with rope banisters.

Coloured Glass At Isla Negra

His other collections included an amazing shell collection which has to be seen to be believed, a lot of stained glass and old coloured bottles (he believed that wine tasted better drank from coloured glass), ornamental art from around the world - kitschy tack done with a kind of learned style. There were stetsons, hobnails, Tuxedoes, costume hats, guitars and other random srtinged instruments from all over the world bought because he liked their shape, and a series of wallplates depicting ornately painted air balloons. Telescopes, bronze hands, portraits, glass buoys also featured as well as paintings with moving parts – windmills, clock towers, goat’s heads and drinking peasants. He also had an impressive collection of ceremonial masks from Japan, China, Easter Island, Mexico, and Mongolia. His real job was (depending on which Government was in power) a foreign diplomat and throughout his life he had diplomatic postings to Singapore, Spain, Malaysia which facilitated his bizarre magpie like behaviour. An example of his madness – he bought a huge whale husk from Denmark with his Nobel prize money (88,000 dollars in 1971), he also purchased the life size horse outside a saddlery from his youth which he would pass every day on his way to school. This was displayed proudly in one of the already cluttered halls. Other random artefacts displayed around the house were reverse painted astral charts, stuffed hummingbirds , and an impressive purchased butterfly collection.

A fetching fish sculpture in Neruda's backyard

It was funny to see the stalls of touristy kitsch outside the house doing a roaring trade with tourists inspired by Pablo’s impressive collection wading in to whip up dream catchers, shell mobiles, brightly painted Neruda clay caricatures, mugs and wall plates, miniature replica ship heads, seashells (branded), cloth shopping bags, posters, postcards, baseball caps, ships in bottles, ashtrays, button badges, key rings, wall tiles, bins, buckets and spades, whatever wasn’t nailed down basically.


Neruda’s old writing desk now overlooks his final resting place. So that was his beach front home on the weekend….. He also had another crazy house in crazy Valparaiso, “La Sebastiana”, which we visited the following day. I would liken this one to Willy Wonka’s house – candy striped wallpaper, portholes in dividing walls, strange shaped rooms with odd views, some impressive steel wallpaper. There’s also another wooden horse – this time one rescued from a merry go round in Paris. The most endearing thing we saw here though was a black and white photo of him reading to a crowd of over 100,000 at a football stadium after his return from receiving the Nobel prize and he’s all alone on this vast expansive stage seated behind a very elegant writing desk and a fancy upholstered chair.

The view of Valpo from Neruda's study

Here’s an excerpt from the poem he wrote for his Valparaiso home ……..

To La Sebastiana :

I gave myself over to the cheapest doors,
Doors which had died
And had been pitched out of their homes
Doors without walls, broken
Piled up on scrap heaps,
Doors with no memory by now,
No trace of a key,
And I said “Come
To me, abandoned doors
I’ll give you a house and a wall
And a fist to knock on you
You will swing again, as the soul opens
You will guard the sleep of Matilde
With your wings that worked so much

..Now we can stop thinking. This is the house.

The common theme in both homes was the amazing views, particularly from the bedroom. Apparently every New Year’s Eve he would invite friends to a party at his Valparaiso home to watch the fireworks display over the bay, which continues even today and is considered one of the finest annual fireworks displays anywhere in the world.

Old Valparaiso

So other than all that madness, we’re still moving. We’re currently in Santiago, Chile’s capital. It’s Good Friday and the place is like a ghost town. Very religious are the Chileans. We’re hoping to get to mass in one of the large cathedrals in the city for 6 o’clock mass.

At Isla Negra

We fly to Easter Island very early in the morning. We had a quick look at the weather forecast for the next few days – we’re camping – and “Sunday Thunder, Monday Thunder” were writ large all over the forecast. Anyways, we’ll figure all that out. Happy Easter to all.

May the sun always set in your wineglass

Datta Boy Francie - Get Stuck In!

We left El Calafate eventually on Sunday afternoon carrying a straggler. We were actually pretty lucky to get out of this touristic chintzville as early as we did. The standard route north from Calafate for the cash strapped backpacker is to backtrack south to Rio Gallegos and get a connecting bus (which leaves at 4am) to Commodore Rivadavia and then get another connecting bus to Mendoza, Santiago in Chile or like we needed to do, to Bariloche. We had been to both Rio Gallegos and Commodore Rivadavia and my fear of ever having to return to either town was marginally greater than my general aversion to backpacking….I mean backtracking. The reason the bus companies take such an illogically circumvent route is that the large tour buses get North quicker by hitting the better paved roads of the Atlantic coast than by trundling up the fabled but unpaved Ruta 40 along the rocky spine of the Andes. So the added expense of a quick flight became instantly preferable to some depressing long distance 30 hour backtracking exercise or a gruelling, dusty and apparently pretty boring trip up the Ruta 40.

People with reading sickness in Calafate airport

We knew there was a flight north directly to Bariloche every Sunday. Leaving it until we returned from Chalten on the previous Friday to book it was probably unwise but we lucked out and got a reasonably priced ticket for the Sunday flight - oddly, purchased at the bus station just after we landed back from El Chalten. Despite the quality of service and abundance of routes for internal flights in Argentina, this would be our first flight since landing in BA in December and actually my first ever internal flight in any country.

M gets a surprise roadside attack of reading sickness

Our straggler was the middle aged traveller-nervosa on a 1 year sabbatical from an apparently high pressure, high responsibility post in Zurich and liked nothing more than fishing and golf but talking about fishing and golf. Like the lusty sailors of old, he had a rod and a half set of clubs in every town. He possessed a British soap opera accent - despite his stated Scottish heritage and Northern Irish education - the kind you put on when you want to appear wishy washy or half facultied. During a communal kitchen conversation with M, he had heard that we'd be getting a cab from the hostel to the airport the following morning and he kindly proffered his companionship to save on taxi fare. He then very kindly proffered his companionship on the plane (more fishing stories mixed with some particle acceleration trivia) and on to the hostel we'd chosen in Bariloche. We almost ended up sharing a dorm with this guy - all as a result of a random conversation over a stove in a hostel - but for the grace of an almost fully booked Periko's with one bed free in one dorm and 2 free in another. It's interesting the sense of helplessness you feel when the hostel staff, seeing you've arrived together, do their utmost to try and accommodate you together even though you desperately want to shake off your newly acquired companion. The randomness of hostel relationships or acquaintances, which up to now have been really positive, interesting and informative, cuts both ways I suppose. He even suggested that dining vegetarian would be OK by him - ie. he'd very accommodatingly eat whatever food we were preparing that night. Bless his veggie friendly soul. Basically he was a Walter Mitty character with parasitic tendencies. Boring and cheap is an unforgivable combination on its own. Add a vocal obsession for fishing to the mix and I couldn’t get away from him fast enough. He left the following day to go fishing on the Rio Grande not before causing an international incident at breakfast over someone not ordering him a taxi. Poor Walter must have thought he was staying at the Ritz.

We spent the first full day in Bariloche acclimatising to the relative warmth again after our extended travels in Long John Patagonia and Thermal Tierra del Fuego. To give y’all some perspective on the season here in the Southern hemisphere, we're currently (as I’m pretty sure y’all are) coming to the end of March which, weather wise, equates to the end of September at home - almost the second month of Autumn.

The car pictures are back

Bariloche is a year round resort town, with student partying, trekking and watersports in the Summer and skiing and snowboarding in the Winter. It’s pitched kind of chaotically on the rolling hills overlooking the magnificent lake Nahuel Huapi. The town council seem to be trying to force some tentative link to the Swiss Alps down the throat of all visitors… the architecture is all pseudo Alpine log cabins, exposed beams and acutely pitched roofs. Apparently the secondary industry after the touristic pot of gold is the ancient Argentinean lost art of chocolate making. Milka’s PR push is in overdrive here with entire shops decked out in Milka’s colours, devoted to trying to convince you to purchase buckets of Swiss chocolate seeing as you’re kind of in the Alps. This is a bizarre turn to the previously noted Argentinean obsession with all things European.


Our main reason for visiting Bariloche was that it would break up the grand trip north. There was also some apparently great trekking opportunities in the area. We decided on a 2 day trek upto Refugio Frey – a more interesting 2 day trek would probably have been up to the Tronador – we figured this out afterwards. We scored some very allusive bencina blanca fuel for our stove, packed our tent, sleeping bags and warm clothes and we were again on our way into the wilds of Argentina to walk around in circles. We took a public transport city bus from Bariloche to the small skiing resort of Catedral – a trip of 20km – where we would grab a cable car up the mountain and then a chairlift up to Refugio Lynch to start the trek. The bus was 30 minutes late, fully packed when it did arrive and promptly broke down just when we got out of town. We had to wait a further half hour for a replacement bus to arrive. Yet again Milka chocolate came to the rescue to settle our nerves. The first days hike turned out to be more of a rock climbing expedition than anything resembling a leisurely hike. We hiked up under the cables for the ski runs and came to a sign which basically said you’re on your own after this. We spent the next 3 hours walking across the banks of a 1000m deep valley on a very narrow and infirm gravel pathway with nothing to stop you and your Fisher Price camp set on your back from rolling and tumbling down the boulders to your death or disfigurement at the valley floor like an over ambitious, over laden ant.

Ant M defies gravity....again

You really needed a head for heights and I figured out that mine aint great. Looking down actually made me dizzy a couple of times so I swan necked it for the first hour of trepidation along the valley wall. We’d walked up and down steep valleys before but walking across one proved to be an entirely different proposition. It was only then that the trip got interesting…. After traversing the valley, we were presented with an appealing vista of moraine, boulders and outcrops of pointed rock which formed the side of the mountain. This vista became instantly less appealing when we realised there was no path to be seen and that according to our map we needed to round this unforgiving pot bellied mountainside to progress. 10 minutes into our challenge we met some Ozzies who looked shook, they all had that mixture of madness and fear in their eyes of a racehorse that’s just refused the big one. They were turning back and seemed aggrieved that nowhere had they been warned about the difficulty and rockiness of this trek. We had to agree. None of the guidebooks or maps or information provided by the local trekking associations made any reference to the extended boulder clambering or scrambles across steep moving banks of loose sand and gravel. We decided to continue but several times I thought it might be wiser to turn back. We both got heavily grazed knees and arms from the rocks. Our wedding rings even got badly scraped from grabbing rocks to haul us upwards or through narrow gaps in the granite. And all this hardship with full packs on our backs. The tent got a bit of a hammering aswell attached as it was to the outside of my pack. And our boots look like they’ve aged about 10 years such was the abuse they took in this one day – but without them we’d have been screwed.

Irrelevant Pictorial Distraction

Several times the only way to make progress was to unstrap your bag, haul yourself up to a ledge, generally whacking your kneecap in the process and then winch your pack up after you. As physically demanding as all this was you also really needed to keep your wits about you and choose each step carefully lest you plummet to your death. This took a lot of concentration. You needed to stop every 1 or 2 minutes to try and get an overview of where you were headed using the red and yellow dots painted 50m apart on the rocks as your only guide. We eventually made it to a point where it looked like there could be no more uphill. Sweat soaked relief all round. We took a rest at a beautiful lake and convinced ourselves that yet again the hardship was worth it.

Where's Maisie?

Honestly these pictures don't do our trauma justice. Generally when things were at their scariest and the drops the steepest I was holding on for dear life rather than getting snap happy. The descent down to Refugio Frey however also turned out to be problematic. The challenging terrain changed not a bit, except for the fact that it was now downhill. Treacherously steeply downhill. At several points it felt like we were descending a quarry wall. Again it played havoc with my ageing knees. When we eventually hit the valley floor, scenic and all as it was surrounded by small lakes and interesting flora, we still had another hour of walking to do before we could pitch our tent and collapse ourselves. We got to the refugio, a lonely and small stone building dwarfed by the mountains and rocks on all sides and which looks like it’s been in situ for approximately forever, just before a downpour of rain.

Refugio Frey

Refugio S and M

Pitching the tent on rocks was interesting aswell. A couple of bent tentpins later and we had wedged our tent between a rock and a gorse bush on a vaguely level plot beside a lake and all was good again. Refugio Frey is a legendary hotspot for rock climbers – real ones, skilful, skinny and lithe unlike us grazed, ungraceful pretenders. They hike up, sleep overnight in the refugio and get up at the crack of dawn to scale sheer rock faces. There’s a complex etiquette involving teams of two and ropes and who leads and who follows but it’s fascinating to watch. Limbs launch sidewards like spider’s legs as these elastic men and women acrobatically secure foothold or handgrip enough to make upward progress. The rock above our tent must have been 700 or 800 feet straight up. These guys were scaling the top of this rock in about an hour and a half. Then they’d hang out with the bemused condors for a while and abseil down in about 20 seconds. Net gain in altitude zero. Net accomplishment – pretty high.


When the climbers congregated they formed the most oddball collection of people gathered round the huge stove out of the biting winds. Beards were a common element and also a wild and independent look in their eyes. Not the friendliest of souls but you could tell there was a huge amount of mutual respect between them. These were obviously people who had taken the experience of the great outdoors and the challenges of nature to an extreme. Anyone can walk up a mountain trail and hang out at altitude in awe of the scenery with, generally in the company of several other happy campers. It takes an admirable amount of energy, skill, determination and balls to get where these guys get, with the only reward seeming to be the stone cold solitude and obviously the superior views. Respect. We hung around the following morning watching these guys pushing spandex to the limits of its design and then strolled the 4 or 5 hours down the mountain again to catch the bus back to civilization.

Diggin' The Nature Scene

The buses back ran every 90 minutes. We somehow managed to time it so we reached the end of a 5 hour hike and even though we had to run the last 500 metres, no fun when you’ve no blisters left to pop, jumped straight onto a bus which was just pulling out. A shower at the hostel was our immediate reward and then on to our victory dinner. One of the faces that keeps popping up wherever we do on the Gringo trail is a girl called Nic. She’s a lovely girl of British / Zambian / Gambian extraction who we originally bumped into in the campsite all the way back in Ushuaia, then in the middle of nowhere on the Chalten / Fitz Roy hike and most recently at Periko’s hostel in Bariloche. She kindly agreed to join us for dinner and we headed to a Mexican restaurant which happened to be in the middle of a cocktail happy hour. Half price frozen strawberry margheritas all round, a couple of times. Anything in South America that’s not pizza or pasta, no matter what state of freshness or how ill prepared, is a complete joy. Even if sometimes you end up swatting bluebottles and house flies maniacally from your food knowing that if the flies are hanging out in the eating area that they're most definitely in residence in the rich pickings of a dirty kitchen. A rule of thumb is to avoid sitting near the swinging door of the kitchen. The glimpses of hygiene imperfection can completely ruin your already hold-the-nose meal. Greasy fingers and grease proof napkins which wouldn’t even absorb dust. General observations of the food we’ve experienced down here.

The Market - El Bolson

The Mexican meal was actually quite tasty. We had a very pleasant evening bitching about Israelis, snorers, and swapping tales of the more interesting characters we’ve met thus far on our travels. Nic had a funny story about some Italian guy who she met in Ushuaia who has been travelling forever in the same pair of almost fossilised cotton pants. Passing through Peru, he decided to buy a horse and cart to take him on his journey through that fair country. His primary reason for investing in this form of transport was because it was very cheap to do so. But also, it’d be a fucking blast man! He had to ditch the horse and cart idea 2 weeks later because – and this is the precise reason he gave – the horse kept going to the left. One cannot traverse the borders of Peru efficiently on a cart with a horse which keeps going to the left. Of course, there’s no possible way that it could have been his horse handling skills, the horse was obviously retarded. Funny stuff. We retired for more scoops to the ubiquitous Irish bar – generally the only bars here with any atmosphere – and were enjoying our first drink when a hardy handsome Canadian gentlemen politely requested the pleasure of our company.

......Roger From Kildaaaaaaare....

This is where it gets weird. It turns out he was part of a group of fly fishing medical professionals who travel the world on fishing expeditions – kind of like Fly Fishing Freemasons if you like. I was fascinated not by the fishing aspect of things but by the far flung and disparate groups’ means of co-ordinating their several trips a year (no surprise, the internet) so I was asking all kinds of noddy questions with genuine interest. He mentioned that 2 of the group were from Vancouver – he himself is the dentist in a town called Russell, in the province of Manitoba in Canadia. Something clicked in my head about a conversation M had with her dentist just before she’d left Vancouver which she’d reported to me. Her sage dentist advised staying away from Santiago and concentrating on Argentina. How was he so well informed? Well, he spent a lot of time down in South America fly fishing. Bingo! I asked Ron what were the names of his Vancouver Freemason Fly Fishing Lodge members and the name of one Ernest (Ernie / Ernesto) Schmidt was mentioned…. M’s Vancouver dentist who was also on this trip but not present in the bar! What an interesting and crazy co-incidence.

Nic, Ron and M

We spent another very interesting hour or so in rapt conversation with Ron (who apparently has the softest beard on the planet) who patiently answered my entry level fishing conundrums like - has he ever caught the same fish twice (yes)? What’s the fascination with fishing (another apparently zero net gain sport as they throw the fish back)? He also put to bed any nagging doubts I had about the source of some food poisoning I’d had in BA (it was the chips at the tango club). Ron, the epitome of the Canadian gentleman, very kindly got the tab for our drinks when we puffed out around 1am citing exhaustion and frozen margherita madness as our excuse. Ron if you’re reading this, thanks again for the drinks and for your memorable description of your hometown in Winter as “cold as a witches’ tit”.

We shipped out of “touristic” Bariloche the following day, heading for the much heralded hippy / vegetarian paradise of El Bolson about 120kms south. Well. It turned out that the only thing this place had going for it was our Arcadian campsite surrounded by the tallest poplars you’ve ever seen. Poplars are sewn prodigiously around Patagonia purely for their excellent wind sheltering properties. So constant and fierce are the winds that you sometimes see poplars sporting a fetching backcombed effect , rather than growing towards the sun or as gravity intended, the branches grow in the direction of the prevailing wind. Windswept and interesting…… a phrase Clodagh used to use regularly. Anyone anywhere know where Clodagh is or what she’s doing these days? I hope she’s happy and still both windswept and interesting. It’s so nice on a sunny day to have no clouds just the welcome shade of treetops. So anyway…..Artesian Market my hole. A migration of chip vans from the slurms in the morning as we walked into town from the campsite took the wholesome edges off any notions we may have entertained of having an organic Vegetarian feast. We did buy the heaviest and most unpackable shaped thing we could find. It’s pretty amazing what beauty can be produced with a chisel, a fist and a soft piece of wood.

M took this from the tent - El Bolson

So yeah, El Bolson in unstructured ramblings….. Crusty culture is alive and well. Kids dogs and adults all sharing the same empty bottle of shampoo. Felt rolls of cloth stuffed with their “artesenal” wares. Touristic. Touristical. Lock jaw clips pinning linen to metal frames. You like puppy? Make beautiful sandwich. Rollerskates and arrowback shoes. El Bolson is a parody of a hippy town with tourism the new "ism" from the East. Skinny greybeards with eyes disillusioned as ever peeking out from between their plaited ponytails. Bald patches from overthought. Filthy multicoloured striped baggy cotton pants do not obfuscate your alcoholism. Despite their generally admirable decision to take a parallel route off life's 8 lane highway, crusties to me always sully any impression of an idealistic soul with their propensity for always politely asking for more than you're prepared to give. Whether it's a swig from your last bottle of beer, or a couple of cigarettes when they very obviously only have one mouth. They seem to get on just fine with dogs though. El Bolson seems to me a confused town. Just off the gringo trail it still hosts its fair share of ogling over-thrifty backpackers foaming at the mouth for an original experience solely for bragging rights in the hostel common areas (or on their blog!). The honest hard working locals don’t seem over eager to interact with the hard thinking hippies on reality sabbaticals. Life is full of wont be backs. And El Bolson was definitely a wont be back.

All Souls Poker Tournament - El Bolson

We walked the town backwards looking for even one of the lauded Vegetarian oases on Sunday afternoon and ended up walking back to the campsite to cook our own. Very disappointing. The deserted El Bolson campsite was a very welcome reprieve from a crowded hostel dorm however. It was a semi functioning farm of sorts with apple trees, and several wheelbarrows full of walnuts and racks full of other interesting fruits lying around drying in the sun. There was also shed loads of these things tearing around :

Rare shot of a bird on rollerblades

You lose so much stuff in hostels – alarm clocks, individual flip flops, earplugs, bobbins, really important pieces of string. God knows where they get to but if it’s the case that whatever you’ve lost has fallen down the side of the bed or, heaven forbid, under the bed, you write it off as a sacrifice to the gods of gristle, dust and darkness. You don’t even think about it, you just do. There should be no grimace faced searching on hands and knees through the carpet of dust in the darkest corners of the dorm floor. Anything you may retrieve – if it isn’t someone else’s, will be covered in dust and hair and the shedded skin of costume changing insects. Besides, the dust gods will not be happy. Hostels equate to forensic anarchy. You’ll never see an episode of CSI “Wherever” set in a hostel. Ever. Although a missing block of cheese or half bottle of wine is rarely cause for involving the Feds anyways. Early morning ship outs are proving problematic aswell with a remarkable amount of our (M’s) possessions being written off as collateral damage. Our consideration for the sleeping patterns of our fellow dormers (which is incidentally very rarely reciprocated) means we don’t turn on the light as we pack our stuff, we speak in pre-dawn whispered whispers and we don’t take the opportunity to check amongst the cluster bombs of others possessions for elements of our own which may have become entangled. And that’s just the start of our issues with hostels. Short beds for tired legs is another one of mine. And snoring. I could write for hours on the misery I have been exposed to as a result of snoring. I’ve come up with a plan involving water pistols which should do the trick though. You snore, you get squirted in the dark by an unknown pistolist from an unknown corner of the room – that’d be me, wearing a leather glove to throw off the forensics people. You wake up (mission accomplished) with a wet ear and I don’t even have to climb down from my two story duplex bunk bed (I thought I’d said goodbye to bunk beds forever when I was 10 years old) to poke you in the ribs. Oh and more hostelling fun : yesterday I headed down to the communal showers to be told to return in 10 minutes as the showers were being fumigated. Nice.

Think about that one for a minute folks

And our hostel issues are just the beginning. Maybe we’re starting to get tired from all the travelling. It’s not so much the travelling as the disruption I suppose. Living constantly out of a packed bag, constantly shared living space, the half sleep on speeding buses and the ensuing screaming matches with the tip crazy baggage handlers. Yesterday for example, on arriving in Mendoza I went to retrieve our baggage from the under-bus storage, moderately dishevelled after an overnight 18 hour bus journey. I queued patiently like everyone else. It was raining heavily and when my turn came I saw 3 of our bags thrown on the wet oily floor of the bus depot. The one missing bag – my rucksack with tent attached – was lying in a pool of discoloured water under some galvanised panels in the luggage compartment of the bus. Naturally my first instinct is to go and try and rescue my stuff from such unnecessary hardship. Bad idea. Just as I had grabbed the straps, I got an unmerciful shoulder into the ribs, followed swiftly by an elbow dessert. It was a tackle that a county footballer at home would be proud of and the perpetrator, the hispanic Francie Bellew who was the baggage handler, stood looking at me with a smug that’ll-soften-your-cough look on his face as he pretended to busy himself with other passenger’s luggage. These guys aren’t employed by the bus companies or the bus stations. They’re generally residents of the slums adjacent to most large bus stations and they seem to eke out an existence from the paltry tips awarded by western backpackers. They’re basically answerable to no one. Not even me, screaming abuse at him as he responded in kind albeit in Spanish. Calling me that thing you called me means you don’t get a tip.

The last blog entry took a record 6 attempts to publish. I’m publishing this from the 5 star Park Hyatt Hotel in Mendoza, just around the corner from our hostel - the common area here is a little cleaner :) This is becoming more like work everyday. I had several instances in El Calafate and Bariloche of waiters refusing to give me a network key until I bought a coffee. Fair enough I hear you cry but when you plug the key in and you cant detect a signal you’ll hear ME cry scam. It maddens me that these places boldly advertise wifi (or wiffy as it’s pronounced down here) on their doors but yet cannot guarantee a signal. Their floor staff avoid eye contact and look very worried if asked to help troubleshoot even the simplest of issues – “Let me go look at the server” was their most common escape. Fair enough they're not techies but if a café offers a service they should have someone on hand to guarantee its delivery. For the blog the words arent a problem but you really need a solid connection to upload the images…hence my 6 attempts.

Welcome to wherever we are today

So that was a wandering incohesive update on our wandering incohesive travels. Despite all the first world complaints in these second and third world countries we’re still really enjoying ourselves. I’ll throw up another entry soon about Mendoza - the most famous wine producing area of Argentina where we've spent the past 5 days. We’re leaving here tomorrow to go to Valparaiso in Chile and we’ll be in Easter Island this time next week. We were just saying we’ll have to take a holiday when we get back from Easter Island because that will mark 4 weeks of some pretty hardcore travelling. But who’s complaining?

Not Us

El Bolson