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!

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.

Final part of a three-part series about what I’ve been up to and what I plan to do next year.  Part 1 was about my time in Australia.  Part 2 was about my time in South America.

I’m back!  It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

So here’s my plan for next year.  After my trips to South America I decided it was about time to finally learn Spanish.  So I’m planning to move in January to Buenos Aires.  I’d like to spend 4-5 months learning in a full-time school, and there are lots of them available.  Most are private schools, but I’m most interested in the Espanol para Extranjeros (Spanish for Foreigners) program at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.  (I also need to learn how to type accented letters!)

The UBA program only accepts in-person registrations so I’m going to have to just show up and see if there’s any space left.  Another odd thing about the university program is that it has 4 month-long courses, but they’re run in January, February, June, and July.  So there’s a weird gap there.  After the first two months I’ll have to decide if I want to travel and return, switch to a private school, or something else I haven’t considered yet.

After that I’m going to backpack through South America for as long as my money and interest last.  I’m guessing I’ll return by the holidays and spend Thanksgiving and Christmas in Ann Arbor.  And finally, I’d like to then look for work in Australia…what an end to a great plan!

Of course everyone is welcome to visit me.  Family, friend, acquaintance, whatever.  Just figure out a way to get to where I am and I’ll show you around.  I have a few suggestions on how to afford a trip too, so keep your eyes out here for that.

Second in a three-part series about what I’ve been up to and what I plan to do next year.

In Part 1 I talked about my first trip to Australia all the way back in 2003 and the process of getting my visa.  I returned to Australia just a few weeks ago for a vacation, which was necessary to meet my visa’s “first entry” deadline.  That left a 6 year gap between trips, but even though I hadn’t been to Oz in a while I was still able to get abroad most years.  In 2007 I visited Peru and Bolivia for about 3 weeks.  In 2008 I went to Ecuador for a week.

Somehow I can’t even remember what made me originally decide to go to Peru.  If I had to guess, I was probably looking for a good deal to use the frequent flyer miles I had accumulated during my Thanksgiving and Christmas travel between Austin and Ann Arbor.  While planning prior to the Peru trip I wanted to see some of the more rural areas of the country and I decided I would head straight to Iquitos and explore the jungle and Amazon river areas.  Iquitos has a population of over a million people but it is so isolated that the only means of access are planes and Amazon river boats — No roads!

Machu Picchu

This brings me to my first rule of travel:  It’s no use planning an itinerary because I’ll just end up ignoring it.  I arrived in Lima and it became clear to me that my non-existent Spanish and the Peruvian people’s non-existent English was a bit more of a barrier than I thought.  Other than a family trip to France when I was 15 I’d never visited a country that spoke a foreign language (no comments about Texas, y’all).  So I decided to stay on the tourist trail and headed for Cusco to see Machu Picchu, and on to Lake Titicaca.  It turned out to be a great trip and I learned how a couple dozen words and some patience are all you need to get by when you don’t speak the local language.

The trip to Ecuador was really short…my only chance to get away in 2008 after my vacation days got cashed out from being laid off by AMD.  I just wandered around Quito a bit and then headed to a small town called Tena, located in the Amazon rainforest.  I took a fantastic day long rafting trip, with really intense rapids.

View of Quito

What I really like about South America is how informal everything is there.  Getting around is really easy, every town has a bus terminal with dozens of bus companies running buses to anywhere people want to go.  In most places you can just show up, and within an hour or two there will be a bus going just about anywhere you need.  Within the cities informal colectivos (shared vans) will run along any route they can find.  Once the van is full, it goes.  Of course you might have to wait for a while.  Street vendors selling tasty food show up anywhere there’s a crowd.  It’s nice, you hardly have to plan anything.

Next time: What’s next for me.  I’ve got a rough plan for the next year or so and it means going all over the place…