April 01, 2005
El Calafate and Chalten
On arriving in Calafate I said goodbye to my 'friends' from the park trip and set off to find a hostel. Unfortunately this was a case where I forgot that someone (Petra) had recomended me a good hostel in the town and just wandered around until I found one, which was new and clean but impersonal and not so great (although I did me three English girls travelling together who had just made a trip on the Carretera Austral which is the road which runs through the southern part of Chile. They had travelled by bus, donkey, tractor and army truck but had somehow made it in one piece!). I spent two nights there and visited the Perito Moreno glacier (interesting because it is actually moving relatively quickly, although melting about the same rate so neither advancing nor receding, and so regularly has large chunks falling off it into the lake at its foot. However it is extremely touristy and compared to the glacier I had seen in Torres del Paine just didn't have the same feel of latent power but tranquility).
I then moved on to Chalten a much less touristy and more relaxed kind of town with some beautiful mountains close by (the famous one being called Fitzroy). I met an Irish girl there and we spent the afternoon of the first day and the whole second day walking on the mountain in perfect weather. I stayed at a hostel called Desierto del Lago which was a great place with a group of crazy guys working there. While I was there they had got hold of surround sound system and were busy banging holes in the ceiling to hang the speaks from! However on the third day it just rained and the forecast indicated it would be the same for most of the rest of the week. I decided to leave that day and headed back to Calafate, this time to the recomended hostel which was a great improvement and then caught a bus out to Punto Arenas.
Punto Arenas is in the very south of the Chilean mainland and I had decided to go there to see penguins but also to try and buy a car, as I had heard that it was a good place to find one for various reasons (I want to buy a Toyota Hi-Lux, a 4x4 apparently built like a tank and with spares available in every country in the world). However it turned out after a few days (for some reason I stayed in the cheapest place in Punto Arenas but it was an experience!) that this really wasn't a good place to buy a car at all. I did go to see the penguins however which was good. It was not at all as I expected. It turns out they actually have burrows for their young, who when not in the burrow just stand nearby waiting to grow up! There were only a few hundred penguins left, the slow developers - the young have to wait for their feathers to change before they can go in the sea. Then they become autonomous from their parents and all head up to warmer climes, such a Brazil. Apparently penguins can live in hot climates quite happily and even prefer it; they only come down to these cold places to raise their young, because they normally cool down in hot places by swimming in the sea, but until their feathers change the young penguins are unable to go in the sea, hence they must live somewhere cold!
I then got a bus to Ushuaia, having ummed and ahhed about whether to bother at all; ultimately I decided that I was so close it was silly not to, although I was expecting poor weather, bitterly cold, rainy, windy. In reality the weather here is amazingly good, with lots of bright sunshiney days and there is loads to do here. I've now spent a week here and there's still more left. I'm planning some more days here before heading to Buenos Aires.
Until then... suerte.
Torres del Paine
I joined up with three fellow passengers and arranged to do the 'w' circuit in Torres del Paine, a very famous set of peaks in Chile. In the hostel we met another guy interested in doing the trip and so we set off together on a Saturday morning, five of us (Sam, Tim, Martina and Emma (all English except Martina who is German) with heavy packs (six days' worth of food, two tents, sleeping bags, stoves, pots, etc., etc. - between 10 and 15 kilos per person). After the 2.5hr bus journey into the park we had a short boat trip before arriving at the bottom-left point on the 'w' (the walk is shaped like a 'w' walking up and down each 'arm'). We got walking just after midday and were greeted by rain which lasted for the remainder of the day, though not really heavy. Eventually we arrived at the refugio where we camped and spent the evening inside warming ourselves and drying out clothing. By this time I was beginning to realise that our little group didn't really get on. Still not quite sure why exactly but basically I didn't fit in. In retrospect it is probably better not to dwell on this any further but to simply note that you should pick your walking partners with care!!
The first day we camped near the foot of the Grey Glacier which was visible from the campsite covering the entire upper part of the valley. The next day we had much better weather and we decided to spend it investigating the glacier a bit more rather than pressing straight on with the hard-core walking. The glacier was a truly amazing thing. Completely still and silent but nevertheless capable of carving out the entire valley over the course of thousands of years. It was fed by the Patagonian Ice Field, an enormous area on the west of Argentina which feeds a lot of glaciers as it gradually oozes out under the pressure of new snow fall on it. I was content to just spend hours sitting on a mound on the valley side above the glacier and looking at sheer size of it, the strange forms it had (in some places its surface appeared to be a series of small mountain ridges, but obviously made from ice, in other places you could see frozen lakes and waterfalls at the side, and the whole surface is obviously criss-crossed by crevaces and cracks. In places it has a dirty colour where stone and mud has been picked up and brought to the surface. Overall the glacier is white, but the ice often has a blue tinge to it which I believe is due to the formation of the ice at extreme pressure (glaciers are actually made of compressed snow from the ice field). At the face of the glacier you sometimes see pieces fall off and the ice is modelled in a kind of abstract rounded way, producing beautiful forms.
The next day we packed up our gear and retraced our steps to where we had arrived by boat and then further round to a campsite at the bottom of the middle of the 'w'. All this while we kept meeting the same groups of people, all following the same route and at more-or-less the same speed, a lot of them from the Navimag. This campsite was close to a large snow-melt fed river where we went at night and watched the stars - not quite as amazing as when I saw them once in France but impressive none the less. Although the sky was clear it was quite cold so I could't admire them for too long!
Next day we climbed the middle valley watching and listening to the frequent avalanches on the mountain on the other side of the valley. There was one particular place where the valley narrowed and caused the river to be quite beautiful, very powerful and with amazing rock formations. After a lot more walking, the last part on a huge scree-slope we made it to a viewpoint from where we could see the Torres in the next valley, although I found the valley we were in more interesting. One mountain with a sheer face hundreds of metres high, on the other side of the valley a coating of snow on the top of a cliff also a hundred metres thick. Another mountain called shark's tooth and with good reason, the edges razor sharp and the sides totally smooth. The glacier that formed this mountain is no longer, leaving just a small moraine lake at the top. On the scree field there were places where rivers flowed, clearing the falling stones to reveal the underlying rock, smooth plates rising up at almost 45 degrees and coated with ice. In one place I found a stream with a branch hanging over a waterfall in it. The water was so cold that it splashed on the branch and froze giving it an ice coating all over. Sam had hurt his ankle the previous day and so was walking much slower than normal, so Tim and I headed down to our camp (we had to return past that site to get to the next site) packed up the tent, and then after the others had arrived we set off at a fantastic pace for the next campsite, in order to have to tent up before dark. I was impressed I managed it and it is certainly the way to get fit walking over steep rocky terraine at speed with a 10kg backpack! We took an hour to do the distance, the others took two! That night we were woken by the wind which blew in from across the lake we were camped by. Over time it got stronger (100mph gusts) and due to the soil being sandy there was a danger of the pegs of our tent being ripped out the ground. So began a 2am search for rocks and after this several hours of lying inside the tent watching the sides bending in under the force of the wind, although unlike everyone else I did actually managed to sleep! Next morning out tent was still standing (although with somewhat bent poles), which our neighbours we sleeping in the collapsed remains of their tent - flysheet and poles gone and the outline of their faces visible beneath the inner tent material. The wind was still blowing strong and we went down to the lake to watch the wind whipping the water of the tops of the waves it had formed and then dashing it across the lake in clouds - it was all quite incredible and the back of me got soaked as I was forced to crouch down almost like sitting but sitting on the wind rather than a chair and then a huge cloud of water got blown in! I then had a 15 minute hunt for my sleeping bag cover which had blown away in the night but I eventually found and we were off again.
The previous day one of the guys had hurt his ankle but the two girls and I wanted to carry on up the final part of the 'w' so we split up and made it up to the top of the third part of the 'w' by night, fighting against incredible winds on narrow paths high up on the side of steep valleys. Some other people seemed to consider this 'scary' while I found it all rather exciting - certainly removed any of the monotony you can sometimes find while walking normally! During this day I met a guy from Santiago de Chile (capital of Chile) who told about the outdoor stuff available there, being close to the mountains. Skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing and kayaking at the least! So if I don't like big city life in Buenos Aires I may well try going there instead.
The next day we woke up to rain. We woke up early, before dawn, because the ultimate view of the actual Torres del Paine is at sunrise or sunset. Despite the rain we decided to go for it and a large group of people set off from the campsite, a line of bobbing head torches in the dark. Unfortunately the ascent from the camp to the Torres (actually to a viewpoint for the Torres) is entirely on a steep scree slope made up of very large rocks and getting steeper the higher you go. It stopped raining as we got going, being just windy and cold and we made it up without incident in about 45 minutes. When we got there we discovered cloud and lots of it. We had a fleeting glimpse of one of the peaks on the other side of a glacial lake through the greyness but soon that disappeared. There was no sunrise (we waited just to be sure) and by this time the cold wind was blowing cold rain at us and the whole experience was becoming thoroughly unpleasant! We went down (I by this stage having some pain in my knee due to the sheer amount of climbing and descending to which it had been subjected and so was enjoying the whole thing even less). Next one girl was (according to eye witnesses blown, but it seems more likely she slipped or at least it was a combination of wind and wet) from the rock on which she was standing, did a somersault and landed a couple of metres lower down. At this stage you wonder 'is it best to leave someone with a possible back injury lying on a wet cold rock on a wet cold mountain until someone arrives with a stretcher or not?' Someone else quickly decided that no was the answer we helped her get up and she appeared to be ok but very shaken. Just after this a we were climbing through a gap between two very big rocks the guy behind me slipped and feel a short distance, dislodging a smaller rock (15 or 20kg) and ended up with it on top of his leg. I moved the rock off him and amazingly he too was fine. So we finally made it back to the tent, shortly after which the rain stopped and then packed up and set off down the mountain, which didn't actually take so long, but was a bit painful with my knee. Finally we were at the exit of the park, basking in the sudden sunshine (all seasons in one day in Torres). We took the bus from an area where there had recently been a fire in the park caused by a tourist who had camped in a prohibited area and had some kind of accident with his stove. The fire actually destroyed 7% of the park - 60,000 hectares I think. The evidence of this were lots of scattered but completely incinerated scrubby bushes. Initially it looks very strange because the bushes are too far apart for the fire to travel, but then it turns out their roots burn and the fire travels underground. It seems the main result of the fire is that a lot of grassland and scrubby vegetation has been destroyed and as a result there is nothing to hold the topsoil down. This means that with the tremendously strong winds you can see great cylinders (maybe 500 or 1000m across) of spinning soil being lifted into the sky. They obviously need to get some kind of ground covering very quickly before all the soil blows away but I have no idea how they can do this with such a large area and such a hostile environment.
Finally we arrived back in Puerto Natales, fairly exhausted and having to get up early the next morning to catch a pre-booked bus to El Calafate.
Navimag
I spent one night in Puerto Montt which was quite an interesting town to wander around in, before arriving at the Navimag check-in at about 10am the following morning. The Navimag is a passenger and cargo ship which travels between two Chilean ports, both in the south of Chile but separated by about 1200km. The boat eventually left at 6pm so there was a fair amount of waiting around (it turned out most other people checked-in, then left and walked round the town during the day. For some reason this didn't occur to me!). The Navimag we travelled on wasn't the 'real' Navimag because unfortunately they managed to run that aground a couple of months back and are currently repairing it. This meant our boat was smaller and had a 'd' class which meant that as the previous set of passengers left I was able to hear stories of their disturbed sleep. One group had accomodation (I don't say cabin because it sounded more like it was probably the corridor!) next to the chain locker so got woken when the anchor was raised (a process which can take a suprisingly long time). Another group was installed next to a herd of cows in transit and finally there were just general comments about the strange people found wandering around below decks and bottles of wine disappearing. Unfortunately on my trip there were no tourists in the 'd' class so I was unable to gloat from my 'c' class luxury bunk (in a room with 15 other bunks, although this didn't actually bother me at all). The next day (first full day) the weather was wonderful and most of it was spent lying on the deck, trying to play games of deck-sized chess and draughts and chatting with everyone. The only bad part to the Navimag trip can be when it sails through a part of open sea; normally it travels sheltered by the numerous Chilean islands on the west of Chile. I am not great with sea and so I was somewhat nervous about this. Apparently we would arrive there in the late evening and be through by the morning, so I had planned my strategy of anti-sea-sickness pills combined with sleeping tablets to ensure I knew nothing about it! For some reason however we actually entered this part of water at 2pm in the afternoon. This meant I and a few other people took the sea-sickness tablets at midday with the result that we just felt drowsy for the rest of the day. This wasn't so bad, because as I said we were able to lie out in the sun. In the end the sea crossing was extremely calm, although apparently during the night there were some decent sized waves, but luckily I was asleep. (I heard news of the same sea crossing from some people who returned north on the trip after us - apparently this time it was rough, the outer doors were locked and everyone had to stay inside. I was lucky!)
Next day was a bit rainy and a bit gray, but this meant that instead of sunbathing I actually looked over the side of ship at the landscape and the animals! I saw seals and dolphins swimming (and they seem very playful, in small groups playing around and all skimming out of the water together), lots of unidentifiable birds and someone else saw a sealion. The landscapes of uninhabited islands and fjords were very beautiful and there was also some amazing light (i.e. lots of photos!). We also went past the gloomy wreck of a cargo ship sunk purposely a long time ago by its captain (the story was he was carrying sugar and decided to sell the sugar elsewhere, sink the ship and claim the insurance money. When asked where his cargo had gone he explained that the sugar had dissolved in the water. When asked where the plastic bags containing the sugar had gone he found himself in prison!).
On the second full day we stopped off at a town called Puerto Eden, accessible only by boat and which the Navimag stops at twice a week, once going north and once south. It brings supplies for the people and also gives them a ride if they want to go somewhere. Originally the village was a native settlement but has more or less changed to be immigrants, with only seven natives left, only one of these a woman and she married to a Chilean immigrant (so there is little prospect of a next generation of pure natives). One major industry in this little town, which basically seemed to consist of houses running for several miles along the coast, joined by a boardwalk, was smoking mussels. Apparently you have to be somewhat careful due to red tide which makes them poisonous but we bought a couple of strings of freshly smoked mussels and they were very good. After returning to the boat in the small fishing boats which had come out to collect us we set off again. That night, the final night on the boat we partied until the early hours, meaning that the next day we woke up just as we were arriving in port. On the Navimag I met a lot of people: my first Luxembourga, a salmon fisherman from alaska, a couple of German carpenters travelling through three years as part of their apprenticeship and required to wear traditional carpenter's clothes, a hyperactive French/Argentinian who was off to run a marathon in Ushuaia and numerous others with lives a little more 'normal'!