Brett's Southern Crossing

Bariloche is amazing, and I would recommend that anyone who visits Argentina spend some time here.  It’s really got everything going for it:  Beautiful deep blue lakes, lots of tree-covered hills and mountains and parks surrounding the city, a good ski destination, cheap and accessible transit, and inexpensive food.

Since I was a bit sick of hiking, I spent a couple of days just walking through downtown and relaxing.  The town of Bariloche is nice but mostly unremarkable.  One fun day activity is to bike the El Circuito Chico.  This is a somewhat fuzzy term for a bike route (on a normal road) from Bariloche along and around Lago Nahuel Huapi, the huge lake near Bariloche.  You can do the loop starting and ending in the city, which is about 65km.  What I did, and I would definitely recommend this, is to take bus 20 out to km 18 and rent a bike there.  There’s a rental agency right by that marker, and they provide maps of the recommended route.  This cuts the loop down to about 30-35km, and the portion of the road that you skip is very busy with traffic and probably not very fun.  By starting at marker 18, you can limit the ride to about 6 hours and it’s the most enjoyable section without much traffic.

The ride took me past a number of really nice lookouts, as well as the the Colonia Suiza.  Colonia Suiza is an old German settlement area, which today is a bit touristy.  There are some German restaurants and lots of small merchants selling crafts and snacks.  It was a really nice break from yet another hike!

I’m almost done with my 6th month on the road, and could keep traveling for another 4 months roughly.

About 6 weeks ago I applied for a pretty cool job…to be a research associate working at a US base in Antarctica.  Basically the job would just be collecting data from various pieces of equipment, keeping them working, and coordinating with the scientists that are in charge of the experiments to do whatever they need.  Probably not terribly challenging, but a lot of people go wash dishes just to get the chance to live there so all things considered I think I would have like it!  It would have been for a full year, including “wintering over” which is staying for the period when it is totally isolated due to the cold preventing planes from working properly.  Anyway, I was selected as an alternate for the job so I’m going to be doing all the medical exams and whatnot but unless the first guy backs out, doesn’t physically qualify, or has some kind of illness or injury between now and October I won’t be going.  Oh well.

Still, now that I spent some time fixing up a fresh resume, doing 3 rounds of interviews, etc…I can’t get the idea of returning home out of my head!  If I had gotten the job last week I would have stayed here in Buenos Aires about 2 more weeks and then returned home to get qualified, trained, visit family and friends, and possibly head to New Zealand a few weeks to a month early to hang around (flights to McMurdo go out of Christchurch).

I had been thinking about it so much it seems to have become a habit, and there are a lot of great things to do back in Austin during the summer, plus the money I could be making if I had a job, etc.  I’m not unhappy here, but somehow I’ve lost of a bit of motivation to fully take advantage of where I am.  Still, if I did return and get a job I know in about 2 months I’d be thinking “Wait, working sucks…why am I not in Colombia or something?”

At any rate, now that I don’t need to go back for the job I think I’m going to start first thing next week on planning to backpack again a month from now.  I’m almost out of room in my passport so I’ll need to start by going to the US Consulate to get more pages.  Then, the route I’d like to do is Buenos Aires to Iguazu Falls, then go from Iguazu northwest through Paraguay and Bolivia, then head from Bolivia up the western coast of Peru.  I’ve seen most of Peru so really I just need to cover the coast and Iquitos.  Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia are 3 of the 4 countries in South America that require visas for Americans, so that means at least 3 more trips to embassies.  A week or two of bureaucratic nonsense will definitely put me in the mood to go   I’d also like to take a couple of weekend trips from here to Cordoba and back to Uruguay.

This would basically make for a good route to return to Austin from Lima near the end of September, or I could stay a little more.  If I was bored, I could return a little sooner.  I think it makes sense as a flexible way to end the trip.

El Calafate is a popular destination in Argentina, but seems to be entirely a tourist town, with expensive hotels and restaurants and not much to do.  The main draw of the area is the famous Perito Moreno Glacier in the Los Glaciares National Park.  For me, it seemed like this was just about the only thing to do in the area.  There were a few tours to other less accesible glaciers as well.

Visiting the glacier involves taking busses with about a thousand other tourists to the park, where they have built a series of boardwalks to give good views.  There’s also an optional boat you can take to approach the face of the glacier more closely.  For a bit more money you can trek on the glacier with crapons.

It’s definitely a spectacular view of a glacier, and I was told that depending on whether it is cloudy or sunny the glacier appears a totally different color.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when I went (which is unusual) and the glacier was bright white.  But I’ve seen a lot of photos of this glacier where it appears a really rich shade of blue, and apparently this is how it looks on an overcast day when the sun is more diffused.

I think it’s worth visiting, but given the distance from other places in Argentina I’d recommend combining it with a trip to El Chaltan, a town a few hours away on the bus that has a lot of really excellent hiking available.  I actually skipped El Chalten, which is almost sacrilegious according to a lot of people I spoke with.  But having just finished “the W” trek I was in the mood for a break from hiking and decided to move on directly to Bariloche.

Check out more pictures of this amazing glacier:

While in Ushuaia I met an Aussie girl named Lauren in my hostel, and we decided to head to Puerto Natales, Chile to hike one of South America’s most famous places, the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.  The park is named after three large spires of rock that form three of the mountains in the area.  There are two well known hiking routes here:  The first is a 5 day hike called “the W” which is named after the shape of the route on the map.  “The O” is a 9 day circuit that includes a loop around the back side of the park, connecting the ends of the W.

After a month in Patagonia, I was really looking forward to this since I hadn’t yet done any camping.  The toughest part about backpacking for a long period is that you never have the right gear.  I don’t have warm enough clothes for very cold places, I don’t have cool enough clothes for very hot places, and I definitely don’t have room for camping gear.  Torres del Paine is great place to visit for a true Patagonian experience.  You need gear for very cold night temperatures, warm day temperatures, wind up to 70+km/hr, and frequent rain.  But many people go to Torres del Paine and it’s possible to rent anything necessary in Puerto Natales.

Lauren and I started by going to a talk that happens every day at 3pm at a hostel called Erratic Rock.  This may be my favorite hostel I’ve ever stayed in – amazing staff, the best breakfast in South America, and just a really great atmosphere all around.  In addition to the hostel they also have a guiding business for rock climbers and rent gear.  But they’re best known for “the talk” which provides advice on all the logistics for going to Torres del Paine (routes, food, gear, etc).  We wanted to leave the next morning, which turned out to be a tight time schedule.  By the time we rented gear, packed our packs, shopped for food, and made arrangements for luggage storage it was time to get to sleep.

We started early in the morning with a bus to the park, which takes about 2 and a half hours.  From there it’s possible to hike the W route from east to west.  We wanted to hike west to east, so we immediately took a catamaran across a large lake to the opposite side of the park, and began our trek by hiking 5 hours to Campamento Grey.  This is a really beautiful hike along Lago Grey (Lake Grey), finishing at the start of Glaciar Grey which stretches back into the distance as far as the eye can see.  Parts of this route were extremely windy, strong enough to knock you over.  The campsite was busier than I expected – at least 25 tents and roughly 50 people spent the night there.  Chunks of glacier ice that had calved off the glacier float past the camp at the lakeshore, and we spent the evening cooking dinner and chatting with a pair of Americans, a pair of Aussies, a two pairs of Brits.  It took a few tries, but we even managed to pitch our tent with all the poles inserted correctly!

Day two started by hiking the same route as day 1, then continuing east to Campamento Italiano (about 9 hours total).  This campsite is located at the entrance to a valley between two mountain ranges, and as we began to set up camp we realized we would be seeing the same people in camp each day.  By the end of the trip we had made a bunch of really great friends!

Most of day 3 is spent without a pack.  The idea is to hike into the valley and climb up to a mirador with great views of the towers one one side and Cerro Paine Grande (a Cerro is a hill or mountain) on the other side.  Despite not having a pack the hike is very steep and a good challenge.  The round trip took me 6 hours, and we still had to hike another 2-3 hours to hike with our packs to the next campsite called Campamento Los Cuernos.  We also had a late start in the morning, which put our arrival at the camp around dusk.  We resolved to get up earlier the next day so we could arrive with time to spare for a change.

The fourth day is the longest hike, at around 18km.  We got off to a rough start by having to double back to camp for a forgotten item after 1 hour on the trail.  Then, Lauren was having a lot of knee pain so we took it easy on our pace.  We reached our final campsite, called Campamento Torres near dusk again despite heading out at a decent hour in the morning.  The hike was again beautiful, but the last 1-2km I began to feel pretty queasy in my stomach.  Our friends Emily and Jane had somehow managed to score fresh bread and eggs from one of the refugios we passed (cabins you can stay in for a fee, if you don’t want to camp) and we began to plan a feast although I was not feeling well at all.

Well this turned out to be an omen, because about 20 minutes later Lauren puked for the first time and shortly afterward I did too.  We had either food poisoning or water poisoning, and were up all night vomiting.  Thankfully the Conaf ranger was very helpful and let us spend the evening in his warm cabin, giving us tea and tang between each bout of vomiting.  Eventually I was so tired I had to sleep, so I went to the tent and crashed.  Lauren ended up sleeping on a couch in the ranger’s room.  In the end, I think I threw up 6 times and Lauren maybe a dozen.  I’ve had better days!

The next morning I was actually feeling pretty decent.  That morning the plan had been to get up an hour and a half before sunrise to climb up to a mirador and watch the sunrise over the towers.  We obviously didn’t do that, but neither did anyone else because the weather was poor and it had rained during the night.  We managed to drag ourselves out of camp for the 2.5 hour hike out of the park just in time…when we arrived it was only 15 minutes before the minibus was scheduled to arrive for us.  I’m not sure if we could have done it without energy from a few packets of tang donated by an English couple we had been cooking with in the evening.

Getting back to town and having a nice hot shower was amazing.  We tore down our gear, got cleaned up, had a nap, and then met a big group of people from the trail at a restaurant for dinner.  And by this time I had essentially not eaten in 2 days, plus hiked almost 30km!  It was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had!

All in all, despite the fact that we got so sick that last night Torres del Paine is what I would recommend most from all of Argentina and Chile.  Just make sure to rent trekking poles, they’ll save you from ending up on your rear more times than you can count between the steep rocky terrain and high winds.