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

Weight Watchers for Rucksacks

Last Tango in Buenos Aires

The Monday we left BA was pretty hectic. The chaos started the night before as it slowly dawned on both of us that we were going to be the most overweight backpackers ever to sweat to death under their own weight in South America. We arrived in BA with 3 large bags and 4 small bags between us. We left with 1 large bag and a small one each. How we did it I still don’t know but what I do know is there are several very well kitted out dumpster divers in BA. A lot of footwear was chucked, much bulky jumpers, many funky but unfunctional jackets. We’d pare it down, I’d make a run to the corner of the street and leave whatever we’d discarded in ad hoc hodge podge “care packages” consisting of a rucksack, some books, underwear in its death throes (not pretty), and by the time I’d make it back to the apartment where we could spy the street corner from a bathroom window, no evidence of my deposit at the People’s Bank would be visible. These people work fast – especially when a pair of ultra desirable pink Birkenstock sandals is at stake. Its funny though, its not just down at heel dumpster divers who were drawn to our cast offs like fashion conscious moths to a Miss Mod’s sale. A couple of sparkling VW Polos pulled up and disappeared with some “gently used” (thanks craigslist) personal effects like summer dresses, silk scarves, Buenos Aires guidebooks as béarla, our underused travel scrabble, my much coveted “trousers with buckles” collection, and a small fraction of M’s tupperware collection. You get the picture. Shit we don’t need snapped up by people who don’t need it either. Although I’m convinced those trousers with buckles would come in very handy at least once in the Andes (maybe even save our lives or the life of a sherpa) even if I couldn’t convince M of that fact. Interestingly M hasn’t completely abandoned her tupperware obsession, she’s just substituted it for an obsession with ZipLoc bags – collapsible tupperware basically. So after much screaming at each other, tossing of camping gear across the room and several zips under more pressure than your Sunday best after Christmas dinner, an acceptable equilibrium was reached with one concession each. My unwieldy tripod and M’s bourgeois yoga mat (subsequently passed on to an elderly neighbour at our campsite who liked it because it was soft). When you consider S and M on the move with our lives on our backs you have to take into account my busted hand and M’s cranky back. We’re not exactly highly conditioned marching marines. We’re hilariously well past this backpacking lark as would become evident after our first couple of nights in a tent.

Puerto Madryn Community Centre

So we were due to check out of the apartment in Monday at midday – no sign of anyone at 1 o’clock. We needed to hang around to collect our deposit. Waiting around wouldn’t have been so bad if the building wasn’t being fumigated that day. Bad buzz. Seriously bad buzz. Someone eventually turned up at 2 to find us glazed eyed and on our backs on the floor making Geiger counter clicking noises at each other. After a slight scare regarding the peeling lino in the kitchen and whether or not it constituted acceptable use we were on our way. We’d booked tickets to Monte Hermoso and our bus left at midnight that night so we had 10 hours to kill in hectic BA in the company of a morbidly obese family of rucksacks and backpacks, the 2 wee ones on their own clocking in at 30kg. Rather than spend 10 hours exploring the circles of hell at the bus station (this place is where they shot Mad Max II, Sin City and Eat The Peach – or was that Offaly?) I had the cheeky notion of whiling away the time until our bus left in the lobby of a boutique hotel in complete comfort all for the cost of an agua con gas and a packet of peanuts. As it turned out it was M who ended up babysitting our luggage as we lowered the tone of the place to something approximating a 5 star youth hostel. Most of her time was spent fending off the disgruntled attention of the pretty boy waiters eager to suck our already anaemic wallet dry as I ran around the city trying to locate a box, some padding and a Fed Ex office to offload some hardware which I was having trouble justifying lugging around. I somehow ended up scoring some lovely sandals for M in the process, borrowing one from the shop to bring back to her to try on for size. The hotel staff only just tolerated our shenanigans but we came very close to getting chucked out when we did some rucksack reorganising. It all worked out well though, we downsized by another very expensive 10kg and made our way to the bus station through Buenos Aires at dusk. That city must have a serious incidence of bank robbery. The bank branches are all like mini Fort Knox with 2 layers of crash barriers plus all the shutters and usual security stuff. A couple of the banks on Florida – like Dublin’s Grafton Street – even had airport security X-ray machines at the door. Another side effect of the security issues is the sight of hundreds of armoured vans clogging the myriad side streets of the city at close of business, assisting in turning rush hour traffic into an even more static hornets nest with the angriest hornets in the nest, as usual, being the yellow and black taxis. The footpaths are decomposing, crap is falling out of the sky, people are queuing in all directions for the buses which don’t even bother stopping at the bus stops – you literally have to take a running jump and hope for the best as the drivers try to keep the too rare momentum going in the height of rush hour – tough luck if this happens to be at 35mph. From a distance you see the bus queues spontaneously breaking apart like baking tray gunge on a Mr Muscle commercial into the oncoming traffic as the bus approaches giving the commuters just enough time to figure out that yes, it is their bus and yes, they need to become airborne in the next 3 seconds if they want to catch it. It’s an interesting sight to see businessmen in beautifully tailored suits not even breaking a sweat as they launch themselves at their ride home like shit at a wall confident that when they do board the bus there’ll be standing room enough to get them home. And all of this in 30 degree heat after a feed of meat. I’m going to miss this town so bad.

Trellew, Chubut Province, Patagonia

When we got to the bus station it was even worse than we imagined it would be. There were guys openly scoping opportunities for bag snatching. And they always work in teams so you really need eyes in the back of your head to prevent a calamitous wallet malfunction. We were perhaps overly vigilant after our subway experience, my method of discouragement to prospective bag snatching suitors was to stare them down until they moved away. One guy took offence to my vigilance, cupped his crotch in a dramatically derogatory fashion and disappeared into the random population sample to seek a victim with less aggressive body language. M proved adept at matchmaking two random looking punters into teams, she’d watch one pretend to be on the phone, I’d watch the other pretend to be contemplating the Brownian motion of the crowd. No one contemplates Browninan motion in a dirty Boca Juniors shirt. They’d eventually depart within seconds of each other after arriving from opposite directions almost simultaneously – the walking definition of organised crime. We were extra relieved to board the bus with all our belongings intact and be on our way. We even, miraculously in a city this big, bumped into an cantankerous eccentric old couple who were at the table beside us at a Tango show the previous Friday night. They were boarding our bus! I recognised the old guy from his baby pony tail (imagine what putting your chest hair in a pony tail and holding it in place with gel would look like) one of the most visually upsetting hairstyles I’ve ever seen. The overnight bus journey to the seaside was hellish. Shorts and a tshirt, no blanket, no pillow and mucho air conditioning leaks made me a very windswept and sleep deprived traveller when we arrived in a truly windswept sandstorm in Monte Hermoso at 7:30am trying to see beyond the tumbleweeds with our sleep encrusted eyes to the true character of this seaside town. It reminded me instantly of Yabby Creek, not quite Summer Bay, not quite Hotton. Little did we know that through circumstances beyond our control, like fractured hands (beyond my control post impact anyway), rancid head colds, dodgy backs and the dreaded lurgy we’d end up spending a week here. It was an interesting antidote to the hustle and bustle in BA.

That's Ribena Ruairi

The guidebook recommended a campsite out of town about 5km up the beach because of it’s excellent facilities and quiet beach away from the main drag. Sounded peachy. What it actually turned out to be was Concentration Camping but in a good way. "You will be having ze crack in 18 minutes!" Fun family events are announced over the pre war loudspeakers and families dutifully flock towards the entertainment and thoroughly enjoy themselves before wandering back to their tents to await the next happy hour. When Argentineans go camping they really do take the kitchen sink with them. One old couple moved in to the site in front of us and it took them about 36 hours to get fully set up. Our setup was shockingly meagre in comparison. Camspites over here don’t come with the picnic table and chairs as standard like they do in Canada. Making sandwiches in your lap is not fun but we managed to remain fully fed as usual despite the obstacles. As a couple in this very family oriented campsite, we badly needed some kids to fit in and the fat stumpy baby rucksacks just wouldn’t cut it. I was wandering around with my hand bandaged up like King of the Knackers and a tshirt converted into a snot rag hanging over my shoulder, sunburned to a crisp, eyes bloodshot and facing in different directions from the headcold, and most detrimentally for making friends, completely without the language. You develop an unhealthy dose of paranoia when you don’t understand what people are saying around you. Are they laughing at you or ordering another beer? Did you just get insulted or asked the way to Amarillo? I was taught how to count to 14 by the girl at the bread counter she felt so sorry for me. Not even the kudos of a burgeoning mullet would make me fit in. A deep affection and appreciation for Hispanic soft rock would also have helped. As I have mentioned many times before, my Spanish wouldn’t be the best but I’m convinced I heard a love song blasted over the PA as I sweated away another afternoon in the tent, dedicated to a Parilla (a restaurant with a fire pit in the middle where all manner of animals are sacrificed daily). But it wasn’t all cross cultural doom and gloom. The campsite public address system also doubled as the daytime entertainment and generally had The Beatles on heavy rotation. There can be very few things as surreal as Happiness is a Warm Gun (in mono!! which means you’ll only hear half the instruments / backing vocals on a Beatles song) in an Argentinean Club Med campsite in 35 degree heat with a headcold. A very bizarre reggae cover album of Radiohead’s OK Computer kept appearing over the airwaves out of nowhere aswell. But anything would be better than hispanic soft rock accompanied by the middle aged female campsite residents singing the harmonies with *feeling*.

Monte Hermoso at night

The restaurant / pool room / function room showed constant reruns of the 1988 Olympics. Serious off season entertainment for someone who doesn’t know Ben Johnson was subsequently done for spandex enhancing drugs. The night time entertainment as far as we could make out consisted of resident’s kids and their party pieces. Young lads with Casio keyboards are superstars in Camping Americano. Jazz hands, jazz hands! Hit the play button to some pre programmed tango beats and the place was kickin’. All the drum fills were dropped in manually with the kind of showbiz aplomb you see in American Idol auditions. It’s funny though, the crowd seemed to react best to tango beats, so you had tacky classics like New York, New York, I Will Survive and various Stevie Wonder tunes all tangified and amplified to the max, hammered out to the kind of clamorous applause only family and close relations can provide. We saw this particular 14 year old casiotone prodigy wandering around the pool the next day with a coterie of fawning young wans in tow.

My hand still felt funny midweek so M forced me to see a doctor. We walked up the beach to the hospital, accidentally buzzed ourselves into the emergency room (accidents create emergencies after all) and I was taken to have my hand xrayed. Turns out the littlest knuckle is broken (aaaah). As I’d left it 10 days to get this fact diagnosed there was nothing they could do but, using the wonders of 21st century medical advancements, prop it up with a lollipop stick and some masking tape. We went back a couple of days later to a proper doctor who drew some abstract diagrams of broken bones and fingers facing the wrong direction, used the words impossible a few times and then strapped me up in a more manly contraption, throwing the lollipop stick in the bin with disdain. So it looks like I may have a dysfunctional little finger to go with my deformed “up for anything” little toe.

Dealing with the shock of my deformity

Monte Hermoso was the culinary equivalent of a town filled with Mrs Monaghan’s Harbour Hotels. Imagine Poldy’s pizza served in steel soup bowls. Resourceful as ever we did find a café which served as tasty tostadas, dulce de leche, cortadas and media lunas as we’ve had over here. Dulce de leche is a staple food group in Argentina. It’s sweeter than Golden Syrup, thicker than Peanut Butter, looks like melted Yorkshire Toffee and tastes so fine on toast. Dulce de Leche appears everywhere, ice cream, biscuits, alfajores, cakes, toast, media lunas – and all over my clothes after a tostada feast with a gammy hand. Its not an uncommon sight to see young people with their front teeth completely discoloured – sometimes missing completely, presumably a side effect of their affection for unlimited quantities of refined sugar and copious amounts of sweetened maté. Meat and Sweet pretty much defines the Argentinean diet.

A typical Argintinean Parilla

The meat eating was intense aswell with each family’s daily barbeque (or assado as it’s called here) kicking off around 11pm. These people have no respect for sensitive vegetarians. They even took to commandeering our barbeque pit when they realised we weren’t using it. The requirement for more bbq’ing real estate had more to do with the sheer volume of meat they were cooking than anything else. It was a common sight to see literally half a cow being dragged across the sandy floor of the campsite, thrown in under a tap and then propped up on the barbie to slowly char for a few hours, right under our noses. Distress. We even have meat grease on our tent, spat from our own barbeque from someone else’s meat. But thankfully for the duration of our experience we didn’t get bit once by mozzies, sand flys, chiggas, chuggas, black flies, deer flies or ticks.


And we did catch some amazing sunsets (Siamak – you should visit this place with your camera) while we were there. One of the main selling points of Monte Hermoso is the fact that you can apparently see the sun rise and set over the same stretch of beach. So all in all, just what we ordered – kinda. We were pretty rejuvenated when we left albeit 10kg heavier, carrying as we were, half a beach of sand around in our rucksacks and between our…… toes.

We were driven to the bus by Monte the Buenos Aires taxi driver, poolside botanist and saxophone player. So stressful is the life of a Buenos Aires taxi driver that it is his custom to spend December, January, February and some of March in Monte Hermoso, in the sun on the beach practising his saxophone.

We met 2 Irish kids at the Bus Terminal in Bahia Blanca – one from Down, the other from Limerick. There’s something about the Irish physiognomy, colouring and choice of clothing which makes us instantly spottable in a crowd. They were 4 weeks in to a year long spin around the world – 8 weeks in South America, 2 weeks in Fiji, 6 Weeks in New Zealand, 6 months in Oz and 2 months back home through Asia. We swapped stories and watched an old man cleave himself off the corner of a bus’s baggage door and bleed profusely from the head - all over coffee during a rainstorm in Bluebottle Colony Cafe. They were headed to Puerto Madryn as we were but on a different bus with a different company. We were catching the 23:30 overnight – again – to Puerto Madryn, a beautiful Patagonian seaside town located precariously between the expansive barrenness of the Patagonian steppe and the deep blue Atlantic ocean. It’s location would remind you of Clifden in Galway. There’s a very similar tourist industry here aswell with windsurfers and whale watchers all vying for space on the beach. Our bus journey was relatively hellish. The sunrise and the first hour of watching the Patagonian landscape unfurl like the Sally Gap albeit onto a much flatter canvas, were the highlights. Screaming babbies and burger eating and farting neighbours were definite lo lights.

Punto Tombo

Pretty much the main reason for stopping off here, in addition to breaking up the trip south, was to see Patagonian penguins. M was really the one who wanted to see penguins in their natural habitat and as it turned out the stop off was definitely worth our while. I’m not a big fan of the organised tour thing. I’d much prefer to hire a car and drive to our own timetable. Having a heavily bandaged hand is as much a hindrance as not having a credit card when trying to hire a car though, and add this to the really short notice in high season and the notorious ripoff tactics of the South American car hire companies and that made our decision for us.

The very rare Curly Haired Patagonian Zebra Penguin

We went on a tour booked by a man called Oscar. We’ve both been reading the Alchemist and it has taught us not to ignore omens. I’ll tell you why the name Oscar was an omen later. Anyways we payed our 90 pesos each (down from 125 – Oscar likes the Irish) and we were picked up outside our hotel at 7:30 am the next morning on our way 200km south to Punto Tombo a peninsula on the Atlantic ocean which hosts a colony of Magellenic Penguins.

A penguin in Patagonia - looks weird doesn't it?

There’s apparently upto 1 million penguins here from December to April because in addition to the migrating population of adults, the chicks have hatched and are learning how to be penguins in the relatively kind surroundings aswell. Punto Tombo is the largest penguin colony in all of South America and has been declared a reserve since 1979.

Punto Tombo

Getting there was interesting. The last 50km was on a well dicey gravel road and one woman in front of us upchucked slyly into a plastic bag such was her distress. I wouldn’t even have noticed had it not been for M’s supernatural smelling ability. Do you smell puke?.... I do now! Anyways, we eventually got to the “car park” and had to walk a further 2km to the beach. But it was so worth it. The tourguide had given us ample information in faltering English re the penguins (he pronounced it “ping-win”) breeding and mating habits, and why penguins are coloured the way they are - called counter shading (white bellies to confuse predators from the deep when swimming – a predator looks up and all it sees is white bellies and strong sunlight. Black backs to confuse predators from above, all they can see from the sky is the dark surface of the sea and black backs. Ingenious!).

Other evolutionary adaptation has resulted in their wings turning into flippers making them great swimmers and really crap at flying. He also explained how the male and female alternate incubating the eggs, the male goes swimming to find food for 10 days, returning to sit on the eggs while the female disappears to hunt for food. Fascinating stuff. The name penguin is said to originate from the Welsh words pen (head) and gwyn (white) even more interesting when you hear about the Welsh population in Patagonia. We were well rewarded for our efforts anyway.


There were thousands upon thousands of little, large, fat, thin, young, old, but universally smelly penguins lying in the shade of plants in the dunes up from the beach or running up and down from the beach after a swim. M was hilarious talking to them like they were kids, saying bless you when they sneezed and insulting the fat ones with chants of “who ate all the plankton?”.

Eliza Doolittle

It was pretty interesting at how close you could get to them. You were discouraged from actually touching them because they mate based on smell and infecting them with any human smell could cause massive confusion and even divorce apparently. All in all a really special experience. One of the highlights of our travels so far. As I stood on the cliff over the beach I was touched by how far the Linux mascot has come. If they keep breeding at these rates Linux will take over the world by Christmas.


Other people on our bus included 2 Brazilians who turned out to have spent 7 years living in Dublin – they both used the word “crap” profusely and with heavy Irish accents. There was also a slightly mad old guy who became my firm friend whether I liked it or not after I saved his life by passing him some water after he nearly choked to death on a complimentary sucky sweet. The next part of the trip consisted of a visit, including high tea, to a Welsh settlers town – in the heart of Patagonia. Apparently some high minded Welsh nationalists, so disgusted at the prospect of being assimilated completely into the British Empire, decided to go and seek a new frontier on which to settle and create a new Wales outside of Wales. They went first to America in the 1850s but there was a healthy presence of brits there too so that’s apparently what drove them to the wilds of Patagonia. And they are the wilds. Patagonia is what I imagine being on the moon is like. Arid, dry flat, no Starbucks. They arrived in Puerto Madryn in 1865, quickly realised there was no drinkable water, proceeded 200km south to where they encountered the first freshwater river and promptly settled there in a town called Trellew. They devised a clever and eventually effective means of irrigation using canals and became a self sufficient community living close to the teachings and in relative harmony with the native Indian population who taught them how to hunt, ride horses and grow bitchin’ mullets. There’s still a pocket of Welsh speakers to be found here although for the most part the language if not the traditions are dying out. Mad stuff altogether. M wondered whether they had brought rugby with them to Argentina but apparently that was the Brits in 1880.

Her Indoors

We had “Traditional Welsh Tea” in one of the tea houses in the town of Gamain. This was basically like having tea at your granny’s, bad lighting, dodgy patterned cups and saucers and strange smells. We had tea of course, jam tart, lemon meringue, black cake – a traditional Welsh recipe which is basically a less threatening Christmas cake – and very dainty cheese sandwiches. M thoroughly enjoyed the experience, being as it was her first ever High Tea. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough after a bout of fear enveloped me soon after the little house on the prairie waitress took our order in a welsh tinged spanish accent and I saw this tea cosy :

The Fear

Sorry for the length of these posts. I’m writing when and where I can in bus stations, cafes, hotel lobbies and anywhere there’s an unattended power outlet. Obviously I cant publish until I get wind of a wifi connection so I takes it when I gets it. Also obviously, I could do with an editor – a lot of the crap I’m writing about is interesting to us and makes us laugh or cry. How interesting it is for independent observers is debateable. In other news we’ve booked flights to Easter Island, hilariously through no fault of our own, over Easter. We cant wait. We’re leaving Puerto Madryn tomorrow on a 19 hour bus journey to Rio Gallegos where we need to arrange further transport to Ushuaia the town in Tierra del Fuego which is officially the end of the world (the most southerly town this side of the Antarctic). The travel is tough, especially with our accumulated sports injuries and large luggage family, but the rewards are high. We had to book into a hotel in Puerto Madryn to get a couple of nights on a proper bed in an environment where you don’t have to lock everything away before you leave. Interestingly this place had carpets up to waist level as M observed this morning over breakfast. Nice. So we’re fully reinvigorated and up for more adventures. Thanks to all for the email updates. They really mean a huge amount to us especially when the communication invariably isn’t reciprocated as quickly as maybe it should. 4 page blog entries are my way of saying thanks :) I’m hoping to getting around to some emailing tomorrow as we wait for the bus and maybe even a phonecall or two. Bear with us anyways is all I’m saying. We’re safe and well, having a great time and most importantly taking great care of each other. So ciao for now chicos . Next post will hopefully be from Chile.
Edit : quick update. We´ve both tried ringing home several times from several different locoturios (internet cafes with phone services) and for some reason no calls are getting through to landlines in Ireland at the moment. Calls to mobiles are something like 20 pesos a minute so we´ll stick to email and blogs until whatever the problem is sorts itself out or until we get to Chile. M says she loves and misses her family now that she can´t talk to them.

todo buen chicos?