Pics - It is done

Finally I have sorted and uploaded all my pictures up to the present day. 200 new ones in Rio. I've been trying to upload those for 2 months! Still some to go in Vids. Very glad to ave the lot uploaded. Now I'm gonna go through them as thoroughly as I can titling and descriptioning them before I forget what the hell they all are. This is one way of combatting my chronic amnesia like memory! In other newswe found a museum that was a restaurant and a Holy Land theme park. More to come on that with a real post later in the week. Tourism has been suspended for administrative issues (including possible fixing of suspected whiplash hopefully). Hasta luego!

New Pics

Finally having a decent internet connection has done wonders for my photo album - check out the updated folders (detailed on the right). There's about 300 new ones I'd say. New ones in Buenos Aires will be put up every day. No kidding. It takes about 10 minutes for me to upload 100 pics so it's no prob.

Buenos Aires - Buenos Aires

Just like New York Buenos Aires is so good they said it twice :). Well it's truly a pleasure to be out of Patagonia. Every time I see Patagonia in a travel agent's window or on the cover of a coffee table book I think to myself thank the good lord I've escaped. It's very sad really, I really enjoyed my time there until the whole fiasco wih the car and now that large ancient seabed of an expanse of nothing only reminds me of pain (physical at that!) and a sense of entrapment. Let me elaborate. The last time I wrote gentle reader I was still in Comodoro Rivadavia convalescing. You will remember there had been a volcano which caused havoc all across the country with transport etc etc so flying seemed an impossibility thus we chose to take the 24 hour bus journey instead, all well and good. Up we get to get on our bus at 8.30 in the morning only to find it a little delayed. No matter, I thought, Argentina'a a bit like Ireland like that, it'll be along within the next alf an hour. After 2 hours standing in 0 degrees I began to have second thoughts and eat the face, literally, off the drivers who were sitting in our bus eating croissants and laughing. What the fuck are they doing I asked myself!? Ire rose within me and clouded my weary brain. I was convinced that I was in the village of Prisoner fame except it was not Wales, it was Patagonia. A large village but nonetheless inescapable. You will also remember that due to an immense brush fire a month before we were unable to to go to Buenos Aires from Colonia in Uruguay. This time it was snow. All the time we spent waiting for snow so we could frolic about in the white and now the bastard was trapping us in Patagonia..Again!!! The road was cut off indefinitely. It was all a bit fushy though. We were told the road was cut off in every direction yet Comodoro was completely free of snow. The drifts rose to 60cm in some places we heard and nothing but a film of deep anger lay upon me. I fully expected a large white balloon to appear and swallow me up. Needless to say and to cut a long story short we managed to get a flight the next day having spent another considerable amount of time at the bus station and arrived in the much warmer Buenos Aires that night around midnight. It felt like a deliverance. I really felt that I had been freed. Poor Patagonia, it did nothing to deserve this harsh treatment but that's unfortunately how I felt about it at the time. I really hope I'll want to come back. The placeis really rather awesome in it's way.
So now I'm in Buenos Aires. It's really, well words escape me. It's really something! We managed to rent an apartment here which is lovely and homey and right beside Plaza de Mayo while still being a haven of peace and quiet (difficult to come by in the city). We'rea 5 minute walk from the subway too. It's great. It kind of feels like I live here. The previous place we were in was the Casita de San Telmo. This is quite a place. For one it's a beautiful house, if you read the website you'll get the details. There is also a cat that tries to invade your room but likes a good sword fight :) But the nicest thing about it is how friendly it is. We only saw the proprieter once suring our stay. It really felt like a friend had just given you the key to their house. The kind of house where everyone comes to hang out. Everyone is very friendly, always willing to have a chat and share some food or drink with oyu. It reminded me of living in student accomodation :). We met a lovely Swiss lady who had come to Buenos Aires to write a book and a very nice, interesting and cool irish guy called John. We spent some time with John in out few days in the casita and had a great time. I taught him about dulce de leche and a couple of Spanish words and he taught us about tango, gave us lots of handy advice and brought us to a great Milonga (Tango show, open to participation) where we met another interesting chap called Andrew who packed in his vegetable growing in Wales for a life of tango in Buenos Aires. If you're reading this, John, thanks for everything mate and we hope to see you in Toronto if we get the chance!Sound man as they say. Here's a link to his business website. He knows about cranes. If you're around Toronto and want a crane give him a bell!
The area we were staying in was San Telmo, very historic and ,I've realised, a source of Art Nouveau antiques!! Now, those who speak to me about art will know that I adore Art Nouveau and the prospect of owning such a thing makes my toes curl with delight. The relative cot of things is about a fifth of what it is in Ireland - I may be able to procure such an item without selling a kidney. I'm thinking of it strongly. There's loads of art nouveau architecture everywhere too. It's really great!
Today is the 25th of May as some of you who are keep up with the passage of time will know. Today is alos Argentinian independence day and so we expected the streets of the capital (and the main square) to be thronged to capacity with proud (rabid, or whichever way you look at it) Argentinians but no! The streets were empty, much quieter than a normal day. It was like the Marie Celeste in some places. Very strange. We did see a sort of variety show in the local cafe though. It reminded me of the entertainment you get on those ferries to France but there was a dance to the music of Cinema Paradiso which was really good.
I must mention ,before I go, the sculpture park we found whilst wandering along looking for something else. Giant metal lizards, cows and dinosaurs made out of bits of cars, typewriters, circuitboards, anything solid it seemed and preferably metal or plastic. There was even some giant ants climbing a telegraph pole. All the work of Carlos Regazzoni who is from Comodoro as well. If you've ever been to the town you would wonder how an artist could come out of it. It's like the Argentinian equivalent of Leitrim or something. It's also a city of knowledge we were told by a lady in the airport. Curious. Anyhow the sculpture park was completely unexpected and one of the reasons which I like Buenos Aires so much. It's very very different from Rio but I love them both in different ways. Viva Sudamérica! Hasta la vista!

Comodoro Rivadavia - Chubut

The time has come to end my silence! Suitably dramatic I hope :) For those of you who haven´t heard me and my travelling companions were involved in a car crash about a week and a half ago in the middle of nowhere in Patagonia. I´m disgusted that a boy who gets knocked off his scooter and sustains no injuries except a possible punishment beating from his da gets news coverage in the local paper and we don´t. Our car is now similar(in the front at least) to one of those cars you see in a little cube in a scrap yard. The other two have put pictures up of thier injuries and all sorts but I still find that a bit disturbing so I´ll try get a pic of the car to put here (not the one with the blood on the door frame.) You may have guessed, gentle reader, from my flippant tone that none of us is seriously injured. Indeed that is true although my back is at me something terrible and makes me feel like some sort of geriatric every so often :). The other two have fashionable bent noses (but only a little, don´t get offended if you read this! :p )
Head on collision can put a bit of a damper on travel plans though and due to the temporary messed uppedness of muscles involved in carrying large objects (i.e backpacks) and those involved in any serious walking or climbing we´ll have to be a bit more sedate for the next while. I think Macchu Picchu may be off the list but we´ll see, still dore now but might have cleared up by then. For the moment we will be leaving Comodoro Rivadavia on Sunday. I can´t say I´m not glad - bad memories of stressful waits in hospitals I´d rather leave behind. Off to Buenos Aires we go. Unfortunately we´ll have to go on a bus for 24 hours because where a huge tract of fields on fire was stopping air travel before a Chilean volcano has stepped in and covered everything to the east in ash. Sometimes the wind whips up the ash and makes flying not so safe. I get the feeling someone is trying to tell us not to go there! Whoever you are - if it was you who put that 4x4 on the wrong side of the road you´re a bastard!
Having said that though we got better accommodation in the little hopital in Perito Moreno than we got in some hotels! Breakfast in bed, free transfers to the bus station, television, adjustable beds! Even free, really stong painkillers!. It was all free. God bless Argentina. The cops also sorted out te car thing completely for us, it was great. *And* they gave us tea. It´s a pity really, we were making such good progress towards weird gnome town in the north. Maybe they were warding me off!
On our way while we still had an intact car we stayed in Baja Caracoles. It´s a town of 31 inhabiatants. Yes, you read right, I didn´t miss a zero. I was wonderng why everyone looked at us funny when we got in. Seems to me now that half the population of the town was in the bar of the hotel we stayed in. Literally. God it was remote. It was at least an hour from anywhere else in any direction.
On the upside we did get to see the "Cueva de los Manos" the ancient handprints on a rock wall in an an equally ancient canyon. That was pretty cool, couldn´t get over the idea that someone just came down with an airbrush and did it in their spare time, there being a lot of it in the Patagonian wastes I imagine. Actually after that we ran out of petrol on the way to Perito Moreno too (another sign!?) but after only about half an hout of waiting a nice couple came along and sold us some. On arriving in Perito Moreno to fill up properly we discovered we´d rimmed one of the wheels and petrol was leaking from the car. So we fixed it adn it only cost about 20 euro. We met the nice couple there again anf they told us to divert off the road and head east (to where we ended up having to go anyway!) because of the volcano. After checking the news we decided o head on the way we were going anyway. "Great", we thought,"the rental agency will never know we messed up their car and we managed to escape a scary accident!" Ah if speaking too soon was a sport we´d get a gold medal. It was the next day we ran into the other car. Still lucky are we to escape with pretty minor injuries and the hospital did some excellent soup! I think I´ll leave it there for today and relate to you again my adventures when I am in the capital. Hasta lluego mi amigos!
P.S Happy Birthday Ferd! Sorry we´re late on the pressie, we´re getting our heads together now. With superglue!!

El Calafate - Santa Cruz - Argentina

Perito Moreno glacier in all its glory


Well, once again I may have left too much time between posts and now will have to try to condense or dredge the memories of less than a week ago out of my befuddled mind. I think the last time I wrote was before we went on the Beagle channel. I suppose that's a good place to start then. I've also just noticed that this computer is spell checking for me as I go along. I approve. My multiple typos were a great source of chagrin to me.
So, the Beagle channel. Well it was a very fun trip and having had a very...vigorous (i.e somewhat painful) massage and been covered in a substance that smelled like deep heat we went out into the cold waters of the southern Atlantic. I admit to feeling a little like Withnail. The picture on the previous post is of a me standing on Isla Bridges, one of the stops on the trip. Having been told I looked too cheery for someone who was slowly freezing and being eroded by the rain I decided to look slightly more apt for the camera. I think I look like Geoff in this picture for those of you who know him. I'm sure he would disagree. I really felt like I was in Galway on that little boat. Freezing, raining and with fog on people's glasses. Ah, home!
It was a little boat which could fit about 10 people in it. Cheap and cheerful, cosy one would call it if it had been warmer and it was great craic. We drank beer and hot chocolate, we got to call the driver El Capitan and we lurched around on the waves trying not to spill it all. We nearly fell out while trying to take pictures of cormorants and jumping seals and one of us felt seasick :). I met a nice Danish man who'd gone kayaking in the freezing water the day before, an interesting man he was too on his way around the American continent kayaking in impossibly cold and harsh places and some nice ones. Fair dues to him. Hi, Ole if you're reading this! He's a nice man with a very red jacket :)Around the most southerly lighthouse in the world in the most southerly boat in the world with, I'm sure, the most southerly drinks in our hands. They really make a big thing of that end of the world stuff there! The Apocolypsists (sp?) would love it. Then I got off the boat and went home and we all lived happily ever after :)
We went to stay with the self proclaimed "freaky" Ana after that in her "Posada del Fin del Mundo". It's a lovely place and I recommend it to anyone - bright, warm and with a kookie proprieter. She told us about how relatives of Shackleton would stay on their way to Antarctica and of the kayaker who after paddling around the Argentinian peninsula there died on another trip from Australia to New Zealand. There was also a lovely cat and a dog and lovely books. I felt very at home :)
Ushuaia began its life as a penal colony for really bad people. So bad were they that they put them in a place where even if you did escape there's no way in hell you could get anywhere without dying or starving first. So we went on the train that the convicts used to take to go cutting down trees to build the town. It's a lot nicer now and we even had sandwiches and scones and things and took pictures of horses :) It was snowy up there too and that was where Ernesto was born. I'm glad we got to do something with the snow seeing as it's too snowy for ice climbing now. I couldn't believe that one - it's too SNOWY for climbing on ice and not snowy enough to go sledding. For chrissake! But that's for another time. So Ernesto was born but all too soon his mothers left him and he had to fend for himself. Such is the life of a snowman at the end of the world!
Continuing with the prison theme we went to visit the museum in the old prison too. It was very interesting and very large. The art there particularly enthused me, there are some pictures of it on my photo website.
And so we were to leave Ushuaia. I really liked it there but the in between season thing messed it up a bit. As far as feeling like I'm in a wintery place here is a little better! I think it's because the climate's better. Ushuaia is very like Ireland with a lot of rain and damp. We are, of course as the post name implies in El Calafate. The calafate is a bush with blueberry like fruit and one can get calafate jam, ice cream, tea, sweets, probably calafate flavoured edible underwear for all I know. It's a bit like dulce de leche is everywhere else in Argentina. For the uninitiated dulce de leche is like a soft butterscotch toffee that you can spread on things. I can't say it's not tasty but when it's included in nearly every dish you could get a little tired of it. But I digress hugely. The reason why we came here is because of a big (or multiple actually) fuck off glaciers which I find simply breathtaking and I think I prefer over Iguazu falls.
Parque Nacionale los Glaciares is populated by many glaciers but Perito Moreno is the most incredible with Upsala as a close second in my opinion. Perito Moreno is a 60 metre tall and 5 kilometre wide sheet of ice moving at 7m a day. You can see it coming over the Andes and into the blue grey waters of Lago Argentino, the largest lake in Argentina. It's a truly magnificent sight to behold. the enormous spikes of ice with the bluest colour I've ever seen in nature apart from the sky in the crevasses between them. Huge pieces of ice regularly fall off and crash with immense noises into the lake beneath and ships are dwarfed beside it. Incredible. Some of my pictures, I admit, don't really look real but they are. The blue seems too blue or the ice seems a bit too big to me. I've really enjoyed being here. We went on another boat trip to see more glaciers and I must say that the boat trip with the 10 of us in the Beagle channel was much more fun. It was that bit too plush and cut off from the outside world which was kind of the point of the journey. The fact that we had to get up at 6.30 in the morning to go on it didn't help either :). The redeeming features though were a small walk through a very nice and strangely ravaged looking forest to a lake filled with icebergs with two glaciers flowing down towards it and the sight of the Upsala glacier. This glacier is receding (it's gone back 5 kilometres in my lifetime) and has left the lake immediately in front filled with gigantic pieces of ice - they must be about 30 or 40 metres high. Some of them have sort of cracked in the middle to reveal very old ice which is the deepest, most beautiful colour blue. It really is something. Such a pity we can't go ice climbing in El Chalten :)
And another thing about El Calafate. It seems to have some sort of gnome invasion going on. Everywhere there are gnomes. I can't say I know why but I'm beginning to think the former hippie town, El Bolson, and its inhabitants may have something to do with it. I like gnomes, don't get me wrong, but their proliferation in this part of Argentina, not an overtly mystical place, is confusing. Usually all talk is of the most earthly things; sheep farming, wildlife watching, rock climbing, trekking, mate drinking. Gnomes, fairies and magic just don't figure. I think I'll enjoy being in El Bolson too, it seems just weird enough. As long as it's not filled with pretend mystic wannabe assholes I'll like it. Real weirdos are more in my line :)
And so we prepare to leave El Calafate and continue on to Perito Moreno (Perito Moreno is a very popular chap and has a lot of stuff named after him. This can make navigation a little confused to the unknowing traveller. We hope to see a cave, Cueva de los Manos, decorated with the 9000 year old handprints of cavemen, paw prints of rhea and other Patagonian animals. The canyon that it's in sounds pretty cool too, very deep with condor lairs in it and huge caves. I'm looking forward to it. Oh and there's a casino shaped like Machu Picchu here too. Hasta lluego mi amigos! My Spanish is improving!