Uspallata and over the Andes

From Mendoza my destination was Santiago in Chile ready for my flight to New York, but by this stage in my travels I was way ahead of schedule and had plenty of time before the flight so I decided to stop at the little town of Uspallata. This is right on the edge of the Andes and only a short distance from Aconcagua, South Americas biggest peak and the bigest mountain outside of the Himalayas.

Uspallata by night

I had looked into a joining a tour to climb the peak but it was the end of the season and climbing permits had ended a couple of weeks earlier so I will have to save the climb for another visit. From Uspallata though I was able to make day trips into Aconcagua park and do some short hikes. On my first day in the hostel I met a Greman girl called Heidi who was planning to do the same as myself, so we headed out together the next day by bus to the park and did a short walk before heading down to the nearby town of Puente del Inca to see a natural stone bridge over the river (also visited by Charles Darwin so I learned).

Inca bridge

Then a quick visit to the cemetary for all the climbers who have died on Aconcagua and we thumbed a lift back to the hostel.

Aconcagua cemetery

The next day we hired bikes from the town and cycled into the desert to see a feature called 7 coloured mountain. I didnt excpect it to be too amazing but I was surprised to find that it really was very colourful. It was an hour and a half cycling uphill to get there but barely twenty minutes of racing down the dirt road back into town.

Desert Biking

Most of this stuff really needs pictures so I will update this post once I am able.

Heidi left the next day so I went for a walk into the desert nearby the hostel on my own, I was aiming to climb a peak and get views across the valley to the Andes, the peak I chose was a lot higher than I was expecting when I started and it took a full four hours of hard climbing to get to the top but the views were amazing.

View from the top - Uspallata valley and the Andes.

From the top I had hoped to find an easier route down as the one I had taken up was not suitable for descending and I was pretty much through all the water I had taken with me. I was out of luck as there were no easy routes down and so it took me another two hours to descend. After reaching the hostel I was told by the owner that I had walked into a military area, he was a bit anoyed as he said he was responsible for his guests, I told him that it was traditional to put up signs and fences as I had passed none, he wasnt too pleased. I am still trying to find out how high the mountain I claimbed was.

My last day of adventure in Uspallata was a return to Aconcagua park for a longer walk, this time up to Confluencia Basecamp, this is the first campsite for climbers on their way up Aconcagua and sits at about 3500meters, not too high but since Uspallata is only at about 1900meters it was a big height gain for the day and got me breathing a bit harder.

Looking towards Aconcagua

The views from here are amazing and just a short walk from the campsite is the end of a glacier that snakes its way along one side of the mountain. Unfortunatly there wasnt time to explore further and I had to head back down, even so I had missed the bus and faced with a long wait for the next one I thumbed a lift again and got back to the hostel a lot faster.

High altitude traffic jam

My next destination is Santiago and to get here I had to cross over the Andes, there is a road winding its way into the mountains and through a tunnel which eventually spits you out into the neighbouring country - the high altitude boarder post is interesting but what is far cooler are the 29 switchbacks that take the road down the mountain on the other side, at times I could peer out of the bus window and see the road looping around below me again and again as it headed down the slope. There are no barriers to the roads so if we had gone off the edge we wouldnt have stopped for a long time.

Long descent

Buenos Aires

I am falling behind a bit in my blogs so I will keep them short and try and catch up. I am already back in Santiago Chile but I have yet to write about most of Argentina. I still can´t add any pictures yet, either because the hostel PC´s wont let me or because I dont trust them not to be riddled with viruses and I dont want to loose my pictures so I will update some of my blogs once I am back in the UK and add pictures then.

Anyway, back to BA. I spent about a week in the city and liked it more than I expected, I am not into big cities but BA is a lot of fun with plenty to do. The hostel I was in was great with other interesting travellers to chat to, which helped a lot.

One of the stranger tourist activities I got up to was visiting a cemetary, it sounds odd but it is a must see for anyone in BA. First up it is packed with many of Argentinas rich and famous (and dead), a few presidents, some great military leaders, and probably most well known to the world Eva Peron (known by most people as Evita). The cemetary isnt full of gravestones as the caskets aren´t burried, instead they are placed in morseleums, each family having its own little building, the richer the family the more ostentatious the tomb. The cemetary is massive, like a town with little streets running between the tombs.

The nightlife of Argentina takes a bit of getting used to, they often dont eat dinner until 10pm and head out for the first drinks of the evening at midnight, so the clubs dont even open until 2pm and kickout time is generally when most people are getting up for work the next day, I managed a couple of nights but couldnt get into the locals routine without tuning into a vampire.

On one of the nights out I went to a drumming session called La Bomba del Tiempo, a kind of folky drumming band who were on stage for a couple of hours of fast and lively music.

The city has plenty of museums and architecture to see so I had a bit of culture and saw some of the modern and fine art galleries. The rest of my time was spent being a tourist, visiting areas of the city like the working class area of La Boca which is famous for its colourful tin buildings and tourists getting mugged. I wasnt all that impressed as it seems like the neighbourhood has been done up for tourists and was way too much like a theme park for my likeing. A far more enjoyable activity was getting a coffee in one of the sidewalk cafes and watching the people go by.

Resistencia

Well I was due to stay in Paraguay for about six weeks at a voluntary job but the organisation at the place was lacking to say the least so I only spent two weeks there before deciding to head out for a bit more travelling. With an extra months travelling to play with I headed south out of Paraguay in the direction of Buenos Aires.First stop was Resistencia just over the boarder into Argentina, The town is very easy to sum up - dont bother going! Its a relatively pointless town to visit as a tourist with no attractions, it is in no way geared up for the transitory traveller. There are no hostels that I could find so I stayed in a cheap but nice enough hotel but this isnt a great way to meet other people and there was no internet for me to plan my next destination. In most towns this wouldnt be a problem, just find an internet cafe, it wasnt until my third and last day in town that I finally found one, and it wasnt working. I never did manage to track down the tourist information either! It rained seemingly consantly here, indoor activities are few, activities in general are few. I did spot what appeared to ba an art museum - closed. On the plus side there are a limitless amount of pharmacies here, practically one on each corner, there are only slightly fewer shops offering all manner of printing and photocopying services.

Street sculpture in rainy Resistencia

The memorable highlight of my couple of days here was a crash outside my hotel between a motorbike and a car. The bikerider lay in the street motionless in the rain for quite some time with police and bystanders milling about and not a single person giving him any medical attention. I finally headed down to the street to see if I could at least make sure he was still breathing when the ambulance arrived. There followed what seemed to be some fairly sloppy medical handling of him onto a stretcher and he was whisked away in the ambulance. I want back to watching TV in my room, I was glad to leave that evening on an overnight bus to Rosario.

Iguazu Falls

Having recently visited Santiago and Asuncion I have noticed one or two differences between the two capital cities, maybe you can spot these in the pictures below;

Santiago

Asuncion

Santiago

Asuncion - Nice eh?

From Ascuncion I took a six hour bus ride to the opposite side of the country to see Iguazu Falls – one of the biggest waterfalls in the world. These are located just outside of Paraguay on the Brazilian/Argentinian boarder, I first went to Brazil to see the falls from their side; impressive but limited views so I looked forwards to going to Argentina for what I was told was a much closer and involved tour of the falls.

Iguazu Falls

Me posing at Iguazu Falls

First though, whilst still in Brazil I went to Itapu Dam, a massive structure full of facts and figures. It was apparently the biggest dam in the world until China’s Three Gorges dam was constructed (or will be constructed - not sure if its finished yet). Itapu dam was built jointly by Brazil and Paraguay – what is most amazing is that both were equal investors in its construction. It now provides 90% of Paraguays electricity and 20% of Brazils. Paraguays share of the dam actually produces double what the country needs so it sells the excess back to Brazil, corruption and shady dealing prevents Paraguay from making a fortune from all this free energy.

Massive concrete wall

Ituapu dam from the top down

Nearby the Brazilian side of the falls is a fairly low key but very nice bird park, there are the usual large cages in which you can view the birds but as usual these are quite dull, what is far more interesting are the huge walk through aviaries, these contain an impressive range of birds and butterflies; parrots, humming birds, toucans, flamingos, the list goes on. These are used to human contact and so were not disturbed in the least as I walked through, I’m fairly sure the toucans were posing for the picture.

Finishing my very brief stay in Brazil I made the quick boarder crossing to Puerto Iguazu on the Argentinian side of the falls. What I had been told was true, the views and experience on this side was far above what Brazil had to offer. Walkways lead right into the base of some of the falls where the spray soaks you, these then lead to the tops of the falls where the scale of the whole park can be appreciated.

Thats it for now - more later.

Torres Del Paine

OK so some of this blog is written retrospectively and some I wrote at the time. I am only now getting around to putting it up as a blog because I wanted to get some pictures on this one - you'll see why below. So, even though Torres was pretty much my first stop after leaving Rothera it is only just going on the blog now...

Rothera is receeding behind me following my whirlwhind departure on Monday 3rd Jan, from there I managed only one night in Punta Arenas in a hotel courtesy of BAS before heading further north the next day to Puerto Natales. Its a nice enough town, fairly small and windswept and the gateway to the national parks here in Patagonia. It is for that reason, as the tourist books say, a hive for gore-tex clad travelers lugging huge rucksacks in readieness for treking in the mountains. I was one of these people and after a couple of nights in town I was prepared to head for Torres del Paine national park.A two hour bus ride took me to the park boundary from where I caught a catamaran ferry across one of the many lakes to take me to to the start of the trail. On the ferry ride I got chatting to Dave and American and Kate an Austrailian, since each of us was travelling alone and doing the same route we decided to travel together.

The mountains of Torres del Paine from the catamaran.

The scenery on this first day was stunning, from the boat we got great views of the mountains as we approached and once on the trail the peaks towered above, glaciers on their summits cascading down into waterfalls and the trail winding its way though the warm hills and forests below.

Looking back across the lake to our start point.

Waterfalls, glaciers, and forest.

Each day we hiked from one campsite to the next on our circuit of the mountans which covered about 140km, some days were harder than others with long distances (22km being our longest distance) or steep climbs up into the mountain valleys.

Looking back down the valley.

The first four days of the trip were spent walking the 'W' trail which took us across the south face of the Torres range and into two of the deepest valleys.

Our campsite in the Torres valley.

The most spectacular of these was the Torres Valley itself, from the campsite at the top of this valley we got up at 4am and climbed up to the base of the towering granite peaks. From our vantage point on the huge morraine above the lake we waited for the sunrise. For a while it appeared that clouds on the horizon would ruin the sunrise but just in time they parted and for a brief few moments we were treated to a great view of the face lit up by the orange glow.

Early morning at the foot of the Torres spires.

The circuit now took us around the 'back' side of the range - this is less frequented by most travellers and so the days walking in this area was often very quiet.
It may have been tranquil in terms of fewer people but this terrain brought us some very strong winds. At one stage Dave was blown over by a strong gust and I felt as though I were walking at a 45 degree angle. This was fairly shortlives though and as we descended from the exposed mountain slopes to the sheltered valley floor the wind eased and the temperature soared.

Warm and calm down in the valley.

We were now nearing the end of the trail with only a couple of days left but one big event to look forwards to. This was the mountain pass which climbed high towards the peaks and allowed us to break through into a glacier filled valley. There was some low cloud as we crossed the pass but even so the views were amazing and we now started our long decent of about 700 meters to our last campsite.

Views over the Gray Glacier from the mountain pass.

The last day had been kept purposfully short and was quite plesant with a great deal of decent and fantastic views back over the glacier.

Last views of the Gray Glacier.

It was now though that we became more aware from chatting to other trekers that all was not well politically in the area and we reached the end point amid rumours of road blockades and the potential that we may be trapped in the park - these all turned out to be true!
Plans were made, changed, made again, and in the end Dave decided to chance the offer of a lift in a car and an attempt to get through the roadblocks, whilst me and Kate walked a further 17km to and administration center in the park which was near a road. From here we were still trapped but in a better position to get information and to get out once a bus could get through, which one did the very next day courtesy of the Red Cross and the blockade organisers themselves.

Red Cross and Chilean Airforce arrange things in Puerto Natales.

Ascuncion

Its hot and humid. Arrival at the airport came with its customary attack of the taxi drivers wanting my custom as I left immigration. Looking for a cash machine and finding none I could get to work I went for the money exchange instead - closed, a boy tagged onto me at this point and took me to a money exchange that was open. I changed some dollars into Guruani - He waited, I had found my new local guide.
A taxi to town was going to be expensive so I asked him to take me to the bus stop, he got me on a bus to the city and in return got a tip of about $4 and went on his way (the taxi was going to cost about $20 so we were both happy, plus the bus only cost 20pence.
The bus driver was a fan of the accelerator and brake in equal messure. Embarking or disembarking this bus was all about timing and split second reactions.
I was going to throw the scrap of a ticket the driver had given me away - lucky I didnt - it was checked twice on the short trip into town, they really dont like fare dodgers.

I wasnt entirely convinced I was on the right bus until I passed a landmark that was shown on my map. The Plasa de Uraguay, a green park the size of a city block - one of the largest in Ascuncion, and it seemed, home to the down and outs and vagrants on the city. It resembled a refugee camp with shelters made of sticks and plastic leaning against the trees. Entire families appear to be living there, cooking, sleeping, eating, existing, all in the park.

Thinking I might be getting close to my hostel I got off the bus, I was facing a sign saying 'Black Cat Hostel', I had arrived

Evacuation

Although I have been in South America for a couple of weeks now and have just finished trekking in Torres del Paine national park, due to rather strange and interesting circumstances I am going to have to start at the end rather than the beginning.

Right now I am in Santiago a few days earlier than expected so I am staying in the city waiting for my flight to Paraguay. This has come about because at the end of my trip in Torres I discovered that there was a strike on in the area so no busses were running – in fact there was no road transport whatsoever as roadblocks were in place around all the towns as part of the protest over fuel price increases by the government. Anyway, this meant that I was stuck in Torres for a couple of extra days until a bus was allowed through by the protesters to evacuate the tourists from the park (food was running a bit short so the authorities were eager to get rid of us). This got me back to Puerto Natales where I was once again trapped due to the roadblocks. The Red Cross had set up in the local school and were organizing buses to the boarder with Argentina (some folk chose to walk the 24km) and had linked up with the Chilean airforce who were putting on flights to Punta Arenas airport. There were hundreds of tourists in the town by this point some sleeping in the school and being fed by the Red Cross; who seemed to be very twitchy about getting foreigners out of the area. I managed to find a hostel but did have free lunch in the refugee camp served by the local scout group – all good fun. It was the most affluent and multicultural refugee camp you are likely to see, with most of the ´refugee backpackers´ sat around using iphones, blackberrys, laptops, etc. Some had been stuck there for over a week.

So I had a couple of nights in Puerto Natales, checking in with the red cross each day to get myself a flight (free by the way!) to Punta. On the morning of the third day I made my way to the Red Cross only to find the place almost deserted, the last few tourists were being ushered onto on of the last buses to the airport, so, like the fall of Saigon I grabbed my backpack and ran for the last bus from the besieged town lest I be left behind. At the airport the Chilean airforce took over and a military plane flew me to Punta Arenas airport which was also surrounded by roadblocks so nobody could get to the town about 30km away without walking. The airforce had put on a soup kitchen and somewhere to bed down for the trapped tourists. I did consider walking to town but I was able to get my ticket brought forwards by a few days and so get out of that mess and to Santiago – which by the way is not suffering from any protests. Unfortunately I got here at 4am and so had to spend a great many of the early hours walking the deserted streets looking for a hostel. I got quite a nice place in the end and so I am sorted for the next few days.

I’ll have to get around to writing about the Torres trip later.

Escape from Rothera

Rothera in winter snow

Well I have now escaped the confines of Rothera and left Antarctica far behind me on my journey into the wider world. I am currently in Punta Arenas (4th Jan) and am heading to Puerto Natales this afternoon. From there I should be going to Torres del Paine national park for about a week before heading back to Puerto Natales and then to Punta for the 21st Jan for my flight to Paraguay. I am planning to be in Paraguay for about 6 weeks so hopefully I will have a chance to add to the blog more once I am there.