I've spent the last 10 days in Patagonia. Most of my time has been in Argentina. There was a brief stopover in Chile that lasted just long enough to get two stamps in my passport. If you're not interested in my adventures in hiking/camping/trekking, stop reading right now. Outdoor stuff is all I've been doing. No museums, no architecture, no culture. Don't worry, I won't be insulted if you close your internet browser. I have no idea how to track how many people are reading this silly blog anyway.
Working my way north from the southern tip of Argentina, the first stop for me was the Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine in southern Chile.
When I first heard about this place from other travelers, I thought, "What a great name for a mountain and a national park! The Towers of Pain! That's just pure badass." That's not what it means. Dammit. Why am I so stupid?! 'Paine' is an old indigenous name for blue. Towers of Blue. Doesn't quite have the same impact. Oh well. My guidebook, Lonely Planet, calls it the best national park in South America. I'd like to rename Lonely Planet. It should be something like "The Frequently Misleading, And Sometimes Dead Wrong, Guidebook." To the editors of Lonely Planet: I know you're trying hard and I know you want to put out a good product. On this one, though, a serious revision in in order. Here's the deal: Torres Del Paine is beautiful. No argument from me on that issue. 
But it's a bitch to get to and it's crowded with hikers. That makes it not the best national park in South America. Trust me, I've visted others that were better. I was only at Torres for a day (due to a combination of issues that are too complicated to explain). Yet several people from my Antarctica trip also went to Torres del Paine, and they left after just one night of camping. When we met up later, they told me that the campsites were crowded and loud, that the trails were grossly overpopulated, and that the camp facilities were subpar. The other pain in the ass about Torres del Paine is it requires a painfully long border crossing if you come from Argentina, as I did. Argentina is more than happy to quickly push tourists out of the country. Chile, on the other hand, is hyper anal about customs and immigration. They have this crazy rule that you can't walk across the border if you come by bus. So everyone in my bus had to get out with all their bags, walk to customs and immigration for a thorough inspection, get back on the bus with all the bags, cross the border zone which was no more than 100 yards, then get into a new bus that could operate inside Chile. Crazy. Why we couldn't just walk from one bus to another across the border zone is beyond me. It's a model of infuriating inefficiency, and yet, at the same time, heartwarming to know that terrible government bureaucracies exist outside of the California DMV.Okay, so I've kinda shat on Torres del Paine without even really describing it. The park itself, removed from all the other attendant crap I've mentioned (and some things I haven't), is amazingly picturesque. The main attraction is, of course, the series of towers jutting out of the top of a very large mountain. The mountain is next to, but not part of, the Andes mountain range. Only the very brave dare to climb to the top of the towers. Us mortals just walk around them and drink in the view. Some people come for just a day, like me, while others can find enough hiking to last them 10 days. There are a bunch of lakes that come in a variety of different colors depending on the mineral content. Some are dark blue, others are emerald. The vegitation rangs from scrub brush to semi-dense forest. The nicest parts are the rolling hills that make for great panoramas. Since I don't feel like repeating the words 'amazing' and 'extraordinary' every time I put up a picture, I'll just show the pictures en masse so you get an idea what the national park is like:
The animal life in Torres del Paine is pretty sparse except for the guanicoes. They're everywhere. I think they're part of the camel/llama family. They don't seem to do much. 
That's not a criticism, of course. They live in a beautiful place with no significant natural predators. Their daily lives consist of the 'fantastic four' activities: eating, sleeping, pooping, and screwing. You could do a lot worse. The one thing that the pictures of Torres del Paine can't really capture is the wind. Patagonia is known for it's wind. Although I didn't know it. So I guess I should qualify that statement: Patagonia is known for its wind, by people who know things about Patagonia. I learned the hard way. One hundred m.p.h. gusts are not uncommon. Several people who were with me were unkindly knocked on their asses by crazy fast gusts of wind. I was never knocked over but I did manage to have my sunglasses blown right off my face. Consider that for a second: I'm standing there, minding my own business, and facing into the wind with wrap-around sunglasses. One second they're on my face, the next they're gone. They blew off my face so fast I didn't even have time to track them. They just disappeared into the ether. (That runs the tally of lost/stolen/broken sunglasses to 7 during my travels.)From Torres Del Paine I travelled a few hours north back into Argentina to a town called El Calafate. El Calafate could aptly be described as nice but dull. There's one main drag with restaurants and chocolate shops and not much else. The tourist portion of the town looks like a less fancy version of Mammoth Mountain or Lake Tahoe during the summer months. (The non-tourist portion looks like your standard poor neighborhood. Dirt streets, tin roofs, abandoned buildings where it's unclear if they're in the midst of being built up or torn down, and cars from 1973. Amazingly, the poor part of El Calafate is only about two blocks north of the tourist part. They look like they belong to entirely different countries. While ambling around the non-tourist section - because I was bored one night - I saw not one other person during my two hour walk that looked like me. Back on the main drag later that night, everyone looked like me. Well, not quite as pretty as me, but you get the idea.) Back in the fancy part of town, I figured I'd try some of Argentina's famous beef. I consider myself a well-seasoned meat eater and therefore qualified to do the following: complain. Several times I ordered beef and got an overcooked, flat piece of not-so-tasty red meat. Even when I asked for the meat to be cooked rare (con sangre, as they say here), it was too well done. I like my steak medium rare, with an emphasis on the rare. If it's not purple-pink on the inside, it's cooked to much. I need to see blood. I think it's some link to primitive cavemen days - seeing the blood makes me feel like I actually hunted and killed the animal. But I got none of that here. I realise that's heresy to some people to criticize Argentina's beef. I can't help it: I've been underwhelmed. Some is good, but some is bad.
While I'm ranting about food, let me tell you about ham and cheese sandwiches. That's basically the staple item of Argentina's diet. One large piece of bread, a thin slice of ham, and a thin slice of cheese. The sandwich is 90% bread. Add that to the toast that I've been fed constantly for breakfast and it's no wonder that I haven't had to relieve myself more than a few times a week. It's like my guts are filled with concrete. Bread, bread, cheese, ham, bread, ham, cheese, bread. That's my diet these days. You want lettuce or tomatoes or any other veggies on that sandwich? Good luck finding it. One bright side to Argentina's carb crazy diet: dulce de leche. How did I forget how good that stuff is? (Dulce de leche sounds fancy, but it's really just caramel - I don't care what anyone else says.) To my sheer delight they put it on toast for breakfast. That's the way to start your day.
There's only one real attraction in El Calafate. It's the Perito Moreno Glacier. After being in Antarctica I had my doubts whether this glacier would really do anything for me. 
I was pleasantly surprised. It was worth the visit. It's a giant glacier coming off the Andes and advancing at a rate of about two yards a day. During the summer months, large pieces often break off and splash into the water. Several pieces fell off when I was there but I was too slow with my camera to catch it. The whole set-up is perfect for tourism. The edge of the glacier is only about 50 yards from land. 
There are a bunch of platforms to observe the glacier and hopefully watch a piece fall into the water. The national park also operates boat rides to get up close to the glacier at sea level. It's a bit of a con because you get no closer to the glacier on the boat than you do on land. Plus, the view is better from land than from the boat. But they hit you up for the boat ride first so you don't realize that it's a waste of $15. You live, you learn.
Here's something I didn't know about Patagonia: it's not a single, unified terrain. (Consider this the educational portion of this blog post.) 
The winds and clouds coming off the Pacific Ocean carry a huge amount of moisture towards the Andes. Since the Andes are so high and so long, they stop the wind from going any further inland. As a result, the moisture in the air gets dumped on the Andes and never makes it further inland. If you're in the Andes (as the Perito Moreno Glacier is), it looks like a giant pine forest as you can see from the picture above. As you proceed east, the land gets more and more arid with less and less vegetation. This transition happens rapidly. In less than 10 miles from the edge of the Andes, the terrain goes from lush forest to arid wasteland. This is what a huge portion of Patagonia looks like. 
It's the Southwest U.S. all rolled into one. Animals are few and far between. No plant taller than a few feet tall will ever grow. There are hills, true, but for the most part, it's flat as a pancake. In terms of transportation, this terrain is a mixed blessing. Argentina's Route 40, which is like what Route 66 used to be, cuts right through the arid portion of Patagonia going north-south for thousands of miles along the border with Chile. On the west, the Andes loom large. On the east, it's nothing but arid wasteland. It's pretty in a rugged, arid kind of way. The sunsets are great, and the stars at night are truly divine. As for driving it, my initial reaction was one of longing. Ohhh, to have my Camaro here to drive down this road! You could probably drive 130 mph for hours on end. Rarely are there sharp turns and I have never seen a cop. Except for a few portions of unpaved road, it's in good condition. (Well, sort of. More on this in a second.) Amazingly, I never once saw a sports car. In fact, now that I think of it, I have yet to see any sports cars in Argentina. Just pick-up trucks and compacts. And hitchhikers. Lots of hitchhikers. And sometimes they're standing by the roadside in the middle of nowhere. Like, 100 miles from anything. I can't even begin to figure how they got there. Thank the good lord I can afford a bus ticket.
Anyway, truth be told, Route 40 is immensely boring for long drives. 
It would be great for an hour or two drive, but as of the time I posted this blog entry, I've spent a total of 54 hours in a bus on this road. It's the same f%$@ing terrain. Boredom doesn't even begin to explain it. Now seems like a good time to dive into a crappy bus ride story. For part of my trip through Patagonia, the only available transportation was a two day bus ride going north on Route 40. It was scheduled to leave one town at 9am, arrive at a stopover town at 9pm where passengers would stay at a predetermined hotel for the night. The bus would begin again at 7:45am the next morning and would arrive at the destination town at 9pm. It's awful, but there's no other way to do it. Knowing how much this would suck, I mentally braced myself for the worse. But, as fate would have it, it was actually worse than I had expected. If this were a movie, it would be time for a montage. (The background music would be something like Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again" or Tom Cochrane's "Life is a Highway." ) The first picture would be... the bus station at 12pm, three hours after the bus was scheduled to depart. Notice the missing ingredient in the picture - the bus. It's one thing to be late, but three hours late is ridiculous.
At that point, you've crossed over from 'late' to 'why even bother showing up?'. The next picture would be of the bus driver telling us that Route 40 is out because of a rainstorm, which forced us to take an alternate route. The alternate route added 9 hours to the trip. Nine hours! (I don't have a picture of this, so just imagine what that would look like.) The third picture in the montage would be spliced images of the bus repeatedly stopping ever hour or so for no apparent reason. I appreciate a break ever four hours to stretch and use the toilet, but every hour is crazy. There we are at random bus stop numbers one and three, respectively.
There'd be a few more pictures in the montage - me brushing my teeth at an outhouse, me eating two 'dinners' of Oreo cookies and Sprite, and just to have a fake Hollywood ending, me falling asleep in a comfortable queen-sized bed - but I'll spare you those pictures. I actually fell asleep in a crappy hostel bed that felt like it was concrete in parts and cottage cheese in others. The bottom line was this: leave at 12pm, arrive at stopover city at 6am, leave stopover city at 7:30am, arrive at final destination at 9pm. Ouch.
While I'm ranting, here's a group of people I could do without: those who listen to their iPods loudly enough for me to hear the music through their headphones. Call me crazy, but I thought headphones were designed for listening to music without forcing other people to listen. When some dude has the volume turned up loud enough for me to hear his crappy tunes from three rows away, it seems to defeat the purpose. But that's just me.
Slightly further north from El Calafate is a town called El Chalten. By far my favorite place in Patagonia. The town is tiny. 800 people max. Ninety percent of the town revolves around campers who want to explore the national park and climb Mt. Fitzroy. The reason I loved the town so much is that it's next to the national park. Two hundred steps out of my hostel and I was on a trail. Blessed with great weather, I decided that this was the time to go camping. 
I rented a sleeping bag, mat, and tent for three days and loaded up on food. In the end I never used the tent. I strapped it to my bag and took about ten steps out of the hostel when I realized, and said to myself, 'This ain't gonna work.' Way too heavy. So I dumped it off at the rental store hoping that I wasn't doing something crazy by bringing only a sleeping bag. I rationalized my decision by telling myself that the weather was good, the sleeping bag was built for cold weather, and that sleeping under the stars would be nice. When I got to the campsite at the end of the first day, I was the only person, out of 40 campers, without a tent. After I crawled into the sleeping bag, a bunch of people passed by that night and early the next morning. I repeatedly got the 'What the f--k is that guy doing?' look. But it was a different look from different people. Two Americans gave me the look, shrugged their shoulders, then waked away. Two Dutch women gave me the look at night, stood there and stared, walked away, and gave me the same look the next morning. One Japanese guy walked by, gave me the look, then went to get his friend/girlfriend/wife to show her how crazy I supposedly was. Fortunately for me there was neither rain nor wind nor large angry animals, so I made out just fine without a tent. Tents... Hah! They're for suckers.
The national park maintains a network of 10 or so trails and four campsites, but people are free to roam as they please. Some of the hikes are pleasant and easy. Others are brutally hard. Especially with 40 pounds of crap strapped to my back. In the first picture, I'm celebrating - woohoo! - after a very steep climb to get a good view of Mt. Fitzroy. It's apparently a famous mountain in the climbing community because it's very difficult to get to the top due to the steep walls. The ascent to where I am in the picture only took about ninety minutes (after walking for four hours to get there) but it was steep, slippery, and littered with people in the way who had no business attempting to walk up the mountain. I got no further up the mountain than where this picture was taken. Why? Well, first and foremost, it's the end of the main trail. But, more importantly, as Dirty Harry once said, "A man's got to know his limitations." Going any further requires hardcore dedication to climbing as well as equipment that I neither own nor want to own. Yes, some crazy people actually attempt climb to the top of Fitzroy. It takes several days. Good for them. Anyway, there's a few more random photos in the park. (The last one is me at the top of a 150 foot waterfall. One more step and I'm a gonner.) 
Most of the hikes took all day long so my legs had a real go of it. In three days I hiked over 50 miles. Some of the trails were pretty crowded, however, a few times I managed to get on a trail where I went hours without running into anyone. That's how I like my hikes. At the end of day two, I discovered that both my shoes were torn in the same place. That was a fun discovery. What's that stabbing pain in my heels? Ah yes, the plastic part of my shoe digging into my skin. Blood and blisters. How wonderful.
After three days of hiking and camping - and not bathing - I smelled. 
Not just in that way where you sometimes hold your shirt to your nose, take a whiff of the armpit, and think, "that shirt is done for." (Although I certainly did that.) No, I smelled so bad I could smell myself. It was not a pretty situation. As I came back into town, I felt bad for everyone within a 5 foot radius of me. I should have had a sign that said, "I'm sorry for the outrageous smell. I'm planning on showering in just a few minutes." I was so dirty that I had a dirt tan. Here's a picture of my leg after three days of trekking and camping. That's not from the sun. That's from the dirt. Pretty sweet dirt tan, huh? That's probably more of my leg than you ever wanted to see, but it serves a point. The shower that night was much needed and well deserved. To be fair, I wasn't the only foul smelling camper around. The town was littered with some of the grungiest people I've ever seen or smelled. It was a like a brotherhood of the unbathed. The combined stench of all us hikers was palpable.
On my last day in El Chalten, 
I decided to bike out of town to see how remote the place really was. (I'm not sure why I decided to do that given that I knew it was remote from the bus ride into town. Just something to do, I guess.) After three hours on the road, I realized I hadn't seen another soul around. For all three hours. The, a few condors started circling overhead. They're strictly scavengers that eat dead animals. I took that as a sign. That, and the fact that my mind started wandering to thoughts like, "If a brutal psychopath dragged me into his van to torture and kill me, how long before people would realize I was missing?" Yeah, definitely time to turn around.
I had hoped that my time in Patagonia - in smaller towns with more 'local' people - would help to improve my Spanish, even if just a little. I figured there was less of a chance that they spoke English. That would force us into Spanish-only conversations. No soup for me. I managed a few conversations in Spanish, and for the most part, I think I fared ok. My vocab is weak and Argentinians speak ridiculously fast, but I held my own when I really had to. The problem, though, is that they can tell right off the bat I'm not Argentinian (or, for that matter, a native Spanish speaker) through some combination of my appearance, my accent, and that fact that I'm usually carrying a backpack (ergo, a tourist). I always start every conersation in Spanish but 75% end up in English. The fact is that most people I come into contact with are related to tourism. Those people speak better English than I do Spanish. Some are patient and nice and willing to let me stumble through a conversation to work on my conversational skills. Most, however, have this look like 'let's not waste each other's time with your poor mastery of Spanish when we can have this conversation a lot faster in English.' Sadly, the few words and phrases I've gained while in Argentina can be loosely categorized as curse words. I might not be able to order dinner, but I can tell you to go fuck your sister.
My last stop in Patagonia (after the hellish 34 hour bus ride) was a mid-sized town called Bariloche. It's in a portion of Patagonia called the Lake District. Want to guess why? Yeah, lots of lakes. Remnants of glaciers past. My first impression was that it looked exactly like Lake Tahoe in the summer. Very pretty forests, very nice hiking, and good places to mountain bike. I ran into some people from Seattle who felt much like I did - it's kind of ridiculous to come all this way to a place that we could easily find in our own country. A Swiss couple in my hostel said the exact same thing, too. But sometimes that's how it works out. So, what did I do. The same thing as I had been doing for the previous week: outdoor stuff. There I am, about to die after reaching the top of a 6,000 foot mountain. 
And here's another random hike around the lakes. 
And that's me, just chillaxing by a lake and eating an apple. The simple things in life. 
I was able to find some very nice places to just sit and think and read my books in peace. There was not a sound to be heard for miles except the wind and the waves. That made the bus ride to Bariloche more than worth it.
So that was Patagonia. Whew, that was a lot. I think it's time to rest...
love the photos, babe... really looking the part of the mountain man.
ReplyDeleteHilarious post! "Those animals don't do much."
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