Brett's Southern Crossing

An hour west of Santiago is the port city of Valparaiso, with a nice harbor and steeps hills skirting the coast.  I liked this city, because the houses were painted bright colors and built into whatever nooks and crannies the geography of the hills allowed.  Murals were painted everywhere, and one part of the city even has an “outdoor art museum” of murals painted by local art students.  The naval headquarters is also located here, which leads to the interesting sight of submarines sitting next to freighters in the harbor.

It’s also dirty, crowded, and sometimes smelly, but for whatever reason I liked the feel of the place…it had character!  Just north of Valparaiso is a town called Viña del Mar, much calmer and skirted by nice beaches.

My next stop after Pucón was Santiago.  I had heard a lot about Santiago from people who were heading south, and it seemed to me that people either love it or hate it.  I would probably fall in the “hate it” camp, although really that’s too strong a word.  Santiago felt very comfortable to me, and I realized that it seemed just like a big American city…say, Dallas.  Lots of new buildings with tons of glass, kind of sprawly, wide streets, everyone seemed to have a car, and fast food and malls everywhere.  It seemed like the opposite of Buenos Aires, which is older and more classical, with taller buildings, more narrow streets, everyone seems to use the bus or taxis, and with more one of a kind businesses.

Santiago Fish Market

Still, there’s nothing negative to say about Santiago.  It’s perfectly pleasant.  I had the misfortune of spending most of my time there with a toothache and searching for a dentist.  I spent all day Friday on the bus coming from Pucón, then Saturday couldn’t find any dentist open including the emergency dental clinics.  Finally on Sunday I went to an ER, and was promptly seen by a maxilo-facial surgeon, who took and x-ray and said “yep, it’s infected.”  He drilled a little hole in the back, flushed it out with some saline, plugged the hole with cotton, and told me to come back on Tuesday for a root canal.  If you’re curious, the cash cost of an hour with a surgeon in the ER plus an x-ray at a private hospital in Chile was about $130, and a root canal is $65 (for the first of 3 necessary appointments).  A few Chileans I mentioned this episode to gave me funny looks and asked why I didn’t go to the free hospital.  Both Chile and Argentina have free state operated hospitals that are by most accounts decent…I just went to the place I saw walking down the street.

In the end I didn’t do much in Santiago, so all of this combined has probably affected my view a bit.  In the end I went to the central market, which is a huge and very cool seafood market with little seafood restaurants packed into every corner of the building.  Around the edges are huge piles of slimy fish and squid for restaurants to buy from.  I stopped by the President’s mansion, which is big although kind of boring looking.  And I went to Cerro San Cristobal, which is a tall hill that has nice views of the city and lots of stairs and terraces to hang out in.

Entrance to Cerro San Cristobal

One nice thing about Santiago is that if you love it you can just stick around, but as soon as you get bored you can get a bus at any time to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar since they’re just an hour away.

I would say that I’ve enjoyed Argentina a little more than Chile overall, but my two favorite places so far have been Torres del Paine and Pucón, which are both in Chile.  After leaving Bariloche (Argentina) I spent a night in San Martin de los Andes (Argentina), which is a relaxed little ski resort town.  There are some parks nearby, but no good transit and since it wasn’t ski season I immediately caught a bus over the mountains into Chile to see Pucón.

Pucón is known as an adventure town.  You can white water raft, white water kayak, rappel, rock climb, canyon (rappelling down waterfalls), and do canopy tours (zip lines in the trees).  The main attraction is Volcan Villarrica, an active volcano that many people come to climb.  My timing was perfect…the guides were saying that for the past 2 years the lava hadn’t been around, but only a week earlier the volcano had become more active and lava could be seen from the rim of the crater.  Apparently only a few volcanos in the world have visible lava from the rim.  At night I could see the sulfur gas glowing red at the peak of the volcano, and the town has an evacuation alarm that is tested daily at noon along with “Volcano Evacuation Route” signs that I sadly forgot to take a photo of.

I had booked a dorm in a hostel called El Refugio.  This is a can’t-miss hostel I’d recommend to everyone.  The owner is a dutch guy named Peter who is very helpful and the hostel itself only has an 8-bed dorm, a 6-bed dorm, and a double room.  It’s one of the smallest I’ve stayed in, and with only 14 people it had a great community feeling.  We all knew each other, and it helped that everyone comes to Pucón to do the same thing:  Climb Volcan Villarrica.

I spent most of the time here with Matthias, from Germany, and Sofia, from Sweden.  Peter arranged for us to use a small guiding outfit called Sierra Nevada, which was a great choice.  There are a few well-known guide companies in town that take groups of 30-40, but we always had more like 6-8 and it was a better experience that way.  The best thing was that our guides were willing to recommend not trying to climb on a bad day without charging a fee.  It took 3 days of attempts for us to make the summit, and we saw the “big” companies trying to push ahead on awful days, probably charging their full $45000 CLP fee even as we watched dozens of people being forced back by the weather.  Our guides were relaxed cool guys and I would highly recommend Sierra Nevada!  The first day we drove in a van to the base of the volcano, but the guides recommended we not attempt to climb.  It was foggy, extremely windy, and bitterly cold…a truly miserable day.

Matthias, Sofia and I were happy enough to try again the following day, but two other people from our hostel who had to leave decided to try it anyway.  As it turns out they almost made it.  The crater had too much gas around it to go the last 100 meters, and another guide with a French tourist went all the way but got very sick from breathing the gas.  Our hostel-mate seemed exhilarated by having made it as far as he did, but he described his face as turning blue from the cold and being covered in snot from a constantly running nose due to the wind.  I wasn’t looking forward to trying again at this point.

But our guides felt the weather would be better the next day, and so Sofia, Matthias and I got up at 5am to try again.  This time when we arrived the guides seemed happy with the weather and the look of the gas hanging over the peak, and we rode to the base of the volcano again.  We set up our gear and started to climb.  It was a bit windy and cold, but manageable.  The first third of the climb follows some chair lifts installed in the base of the volcano, which operates during the winter as a ski area.  It was miserable, very steep and on a lot of loose dirt and gravel so that with every step I slid back halfway.  We took shelter in a small building at the top of the lift to rest and have a snack.  But our guides weren’t happy, they told us the wind had shifted direction and was holding all the volcanic gas at the peak.  We could continue if we wanted, but they didn’t expect us to reach the top.  We waited for an hour to see if the wind would shift again, and then returned to the bottom to try again the following day.

Taking a Rest

The third day was do-or-die for all of us, everyone wanted to continue moving and we weren’t going to stay to try for a fourth attempt.  When we got up at 5am again things didn’t look good.  There was wind whipping through the trees outside our hostel and it seemed to us that the situation would be as bad as the earlier days.  Fortunately our guides knew better and told us that conditions looked great and they were very confident that we’d reach the top that day.  We were still skeptical but we rode to the base of the volcano and were shocked to find that it was absolutely calm without so much as a breeze.  It was even possible to hike in a t-shirt, whereas the earlier days had required as many layers as I could put on.  Since the wind was absent, the ski resort was running their lift and we had the option to skip the first 400 meters of vertical climb (for a fee).  None of us were too proud not take advantage.  From the top of the ski lift we climbed several hours up the volcano until we reached the beginning of the ice and glaciers.  We put on our helmets and crampons, and the guides taught us how to use our ice axes for extra stability and to stop a slide in case of falling.  From there we took another few hours of climbing on the ice and finally reached the crater.

Sofia says "we made it!"

It was really a spectacular sight.  Every few minutes bright-red lava would shoot up from inside the crater, bubbling and splashing against the sides.  There was a slight breeze carrying the sulfur gas away from the crater, so we were able to stay as long as we liked.  It was barely even chilly, despite the fact that we had ascended 1400 vertical meters.  I thought back to the guy who had pushed on to the top the first day, turning blue, covered in snot, with people getting sick, and was very glad we had the time and patience to stay and follow the advice of our guides.  Most people have no trouble getting to the top the first try, so I would definitely recommend Pucón!

The return trip to the bottom may be the most fun of all.  Instead of hiking back down to the end of the snow/ice line, we slid down halfpipes worn into the steeper hills, using our ice axes as rudders and brakes.  It was like extreme sledless sledding, and I began to wonder why you can just go to ski resorts to sled!

Matthias, Sofia and I did one other amazing thing while we were in this town.  Our first day we tried to climb Villarrica we wound up returning to our hostel by mid-morning since we didn’t even start to climb.  We were looking for another activity, and Peter (the hostel owner) mentioned a waterfall he knew of that we could hike to.  It was definitely an off-the-map type of place that wouldn’t make it into any guidebook, and the instructions were roughly like this:  Take a taxi collectivo to a certain road, walk 2km up the road until you find the gate of an abandoned housing development.  Hop the gate and walk to lot 17, then look for a little trail into the woods.  Head down the trail until you see a horse fence.  Climb the horse fence and follow the ravine until you find a path heading down into it.

This kind of local knowledge is unbeatable and it turned out to be amazing.  When we got to the bottom of the ravine, we found a little semi-circular sheer rock cliff with a waterfall at least 150 feet high crashed down into a pool at the bottom.  The walls of the cliff were covered in intense green moss and vines.  I’ve never seen anything like it, and I loved that it seemed a bit like a secret, just for us.

The easiest activity near Bariloche for tourists is to climb one of the many cerros (hills) near the city.  Most of them are easily reachable on the main bus routes, and quite a few even have chair lifts for those that don’t want to climb them.  The peaks give some really nice views of the surrounding lakes and valleys.

I also took a trip out to some caves north of the city, the name I can’t remember.  There are a lot of caves in Argentina that have hand paintings, the most famous being Cuevas de Los Manos.  I didn’t visit that one because it’s so far away from…well anything.  It would have meant a 2 day detour just for that cave, and I hear it’s expensive.  So I decided to try out this one, and it honestly was underwhelming.

The caves are very small, essentially just little overhangs in the rock and a few small holes in the side.  The paintings are very difficult to see, because they’ve faded considerably over time.  All in all, something that can easily be skipped.

Hiking in Bariloche is easy because there are tons of refugios which are cabins in the forests that offer a place to sleep and eat.  They’re mostly run by Club Andino, the local mountaineering club and it’s a great service because it allows you to hike for the day, spend the night, and hike out the next morning.  A lot of places that couldn’t be managed as a round trip in a single day can be done by taking advantages of the refugios (important since I’m not carrying any camping gear).

Most of the hikes are easily reached by local bus from the city center, but on the advice of my hostel I decided to take a bus a few hours away to a park near Monte Tronador (Mount Thunder).  This mountain is on the border with Chile and is named for the glaciers on the mountain which calve pieces off over a cliff.  The sound of the ice falling down the cliff echoes through the valley as a low rumble that sounds just like thunder.

The climb to the refugio took about 7 hours and was up the whole way.  I had sat next to a Spanish guy on the bus from Bariloche and we decided to hike to the refugio together.  The path was a nice change from other hikes where it seems like every time you ascend 20 meters you then walk back down 10.  The first 4 hours are a gradual switchbacking trail through a beautiful old forest with massive trees, wildflowers, small waterfalls, and lots of moss and lichen.  Daytrippers can enjoy this area too because a local estancia (ranch) offers horseback riding and there’s a side path over to a glacier that still leaves time to hike back the same day.

Eventually we reached the caracoles (literally translated “the snails”) which is a 30-minute section that is extremely steep and made me glad my pack was nearly empty.  Past this is the tree line and a couple of hours of hiking, marked by paint splashes, over large boulders and shale to the refugio.

The refugio is still a few hours from the peak of the mountain.  It’s located in a gap between two glaciars and has some really nice views.  From here there’s a menu of guided tours available to ascend higher on the mountain.  We could have gone to the peak, to another refugio higher that has a descent route that cris-crosses the border (requiring advance permission from Chilean immigration), or just for a hike on the glaciers.  These all require crampons, ice axes, and guides to prevent you from falling into crevasses though.

From the outside the refugio looks like a decaying shack, but inside it’s pretty nice.  It has lots of wood paneling, almost a log-cabin look.  It turned out the only other people that came that night were two German guys, so we had 4 visitors and 3 staff!  The staff made made me a huge tenderloin steak with mushroom sauce and roasted vegetables, and I swear it’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  The four of us also split a bottle of wine, so it was kind of posh for being so remote!  The winelist had prices up to $450 ARS (about $115 USD).  Dinner was $50 ARS ($12.50 USD) and to sleep was $40 ARS ($10).  A bit expensive for Argentina, but given the challenges of operating the refugios it seemed fair.

It was interesting to talk to the staff about the logistics of running the refugio.  They bring in supplies (including food) mainly by having horses bring them up the main part of the trail, and then having the staff carry them in packs through the caracoles and across the rocks to the refugio.  I think the staff can probably do one packful in about 4 hours.  Occasionally the Argentine military drops supplies by helicopter (fuel, building materials, etc) because they use the glaciers near the refugio to train for Antarctica.  Hard work!

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!

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.

Ushuaia is the most touristy place I’ve been so far.  It attracts travelers by land and air from Chile and Argentina, and has a port for cruise ships to dock.  People come to see the wildlife in the area, to say they’ve visited the world’s southernmost city, and to board ships headed for Antarctica.

I enjoyed it here, but I don’t think I could rate it as a must-visit place for a trip to Patagonia.  The most popular activity seems to be a half day boat trip in the Beagle Channel.  The channel is named after the famous boat that Charles Darwin was on when exploring this area.  The islands in the channel have a variety of birds and sea lions to view, and they stop on one island to show shell mounds built by an indigenous people called the Yaghan.  These days, there’s just one aging Yaghan woman left.  The view of the wildlife was decent, though Puerto Madryn will be hard for any place to beat.

Also nearby is the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, which has some very nice scenery and a bunch of short trails to hike through.  I bought a shuttle ticket and spent a day in the park.  First I hiked along a nice lake with mountain views to the border with Chile, known as Hito XXIV (the name of the marker on the border).  Then I walked down the road to several short trails through a forest, a peat bog (with interpretative signs), and an area that has beaver colonies.  One solid day was enough for this park, although there were enough trails that I could have gone back for one more day.

Ushuaia is fairly expensive, with lots of parrillas (argentine barbeque restaurants) for tourists, although many of them offer tenedor libre (all you can eat, literally translated as “free fork”) for $60-70 pesos (about $15-18 USD) not including drinks.  The museums here are the most expensive I’ve seen anywhere.  The archaeology museum cost $50 pesos, leading a French guy staying in my hostel to rant “this is more expensive than the Louvre!!”  It’s apparently a nicely designed museum, but I thought the French guy had a pretty good point.

After the minor fiasco of Viedma, my next stop was Puerto Madryn.  This town is located a convenient distance from two major tourist attractions: Península Valdéz and Punta Tombo.  Both of these are day trips, and seemed fairly priced at $150 pesos (about $30 USD) for a 12 hour tour with a bilingual guide.  Although located in a fairly desolate looking part of Patagonia, these reserves are overflowing with wildlife.  In the week I spent here I saw lots of sea birds, dusky dolphins, southern sea lions, southern elephant seals, magellenic penguins, armadillos, llamas, and foxes.

A lucky visitor to Punta Tombo might see an Orca feeding on sea lions.  There were no attacks when I visited, but the videos show the Orcas beaching themselves onto the shored to get at the sea lions before somehow flopping back into the gulf…unfortunately the entire Orca population is only a few dozen individuals, so seeing them at meal time is uncommon.

The other major attraction here is the Southern Right Whale.  These whales come to the area to breed later in the year and there are so many that you can watch them right from shore if you don’t want to take a tour.

The most unique tour was a morning visit to snorkel with a colony of sea lions just a 10 minute boat ride from the beach near my hostel.  The sea lions will come out from the beach to swim with you, and it was a great experience.  They come close enough that I was able to reach out and touch them several times.  One sea lion came right in front of my mask and started blowing bubbles – I don’t know if it was just exhaling a bit, but some people say they’re imitating SCUBA divers that come to the area.  The tour operators claim this is the only place in the world where the sea lions will swim with snorkelers, and it’s definitely something I would recommend to anyone that visits.  The cost was a bit pricey, at $500 pesos ($125 USD)

While I was here I decided to also do some SCUBA diving.  It has been several years since my last dive and I wanted to refresh my skills a bit, so I signed up for a PADI Advanced Open Water certification class.  This is basically just 5 dives from different categories.  I did wreck diving, deep diving, underwater navigation, and underwater naturalism.  Puerto Madryn has dozens of dive shops lining the beach, which seems a bit strange since the diving is really not very good.  The water is cold (which means a 10mm wetsuit and lots of weights), the visibility is poor, and there isn’t much to see.  Cold water means no coral and few fish.  I was interested mainly in the refresher, but I don’t see why so many shops can stay in business.

Finally, I have to recommend the hostel I stayed in, Hi Patagonia (not associated with Hostelling International, by the way).  It’s a residencial house in a convenient area, with great staff, nice rooms, and cozy down comforters.  One of the best hostel’s I’ve stayed in.  It is midsize, probably housing about 30 people when full.  But this area doesn’t have the mega hostels some cities can support.