Ok I'm about 6 weeks behind so will have to make this brief. How to summarise a 3 week journey across thousands of kilometres of such a country? Well I'll try...
The highlight of our couple of days in Ushuaia post-Antartica was the 4x4 tour in the mountains. We were pleased to discover that Land Rovers really do live up to the reputation of being offroad weapons. Obviously we hassled our (actually pretty cool) driver with lots of questions about the truck and he even got us up to 40 degrees roll (sideways tilt) at one stage. Nessie would have been on her side!
From Ushuaia we jumped on a bus for El Calafate. A long bus journey but didn't have to be, a large chunk of time was taken up crossing into Chile and then back out again an our later. Obviously nobody has thought to make this process simple so you have to get out several times to be process in and out of the respective countries!
El Calafate was cool enough, really the town is only there for the famous Perito Moreno glacier. As we approached it we started wondering whether we'd been spoilt by the massive glaciers and other ice amazingness we'd seen in Antartica but luckily the glacier was pretty impressive on it's own. We were lucky enough to have the glacier calve a huge chunk of ice right in front of us as we did the up close boat tour (not as dodgy as sea kayaks!). Not much else to do in El Calafate but we did have a great New Years Eve party at the hostel overlooking the lake. The local guys that ran the hostel put on a full Argentinian bbq and we ate pretty damn well. Much more of that to come!
From El Calafate to El Chalten, a much smaller town nestled in the mountains and jumping off point of lots of amazing hiking and rock climbing. Really cool spot but wouldn't want to be there in winter! There's really not much in the plains and rolling hills of Patagonia, hours and hours of driving past barren greey-brownness with the odd sighting of guanacos (similar to llamas) leaping over the fences and across the fields. Gunacos aside, very similar to the remoteness of outback Australia.
We did two great hikes in El Chalten but at the end of the first day my rather expensive hiking footwear was killing me! Somehow either my feet or the shoes had changed and a 20km hike managed to rub extremely painfully on a bone in my foot! The last 5km were agony so the next day I did the 26km round trip to see Mt Fitzroy in my Converse low tops. Pimpin! Never have I been so aware of being underequipped but I made it and was really glad I went. Amazing views (we got quite lucky with the weather) and extra cool to see a condor circling overhead and a few hardcore guys bootpacking up the snow, obviously going to so some serious climbing!
More Patagonian barrenness (is that a word?) on the 2 day road trip to Bariloche. It's known as Route 44 and compared to Route 66 in the US as a thing to do but I have to say you only need to do it once. Cool to see and have done but not nearly as diverse or interesting as the you might imagine given all the hype. Cool to see guanacos and wolves and flamingoes though! The odd guanaco didn't make the leap over the fences and you'd see the poor buggers dead and rotting on the fence. What a crap way to go.
Bariloche was great. Awesome setting in the mountains but a proper town (it felt like a city to us compared to where we'd been) with shops and everything! Rather busy due to all the Argentinian kids on uni holidays and we had a bit of trouble finding a room on the first night. Also had a bit of trouble with the local accent which pronounces the "ll" sound (normally a "j" sound) like a "sh". Not sure if that makes sense but it totally stuffed up what we'd been learning in iPod class!
Great place to spend a few days though and would love to go back during the winter to go snowboarding. We went on a hike, did a private Spanish lesson each and partied a couple of nights with some Argentinians from the hostel. They're mad in Argentina, they really don't go out until 2am. At 10pm they'll all be asleep in their beds in the hostel but the alarms go off and 1am and they're up getting ready to party! After working in sleep medicine for some time I can tell you that's not good sleep hygene! Fun though and we made a few friends and I managed to murder the Spanish language sufficiently to be apparently very entertaining.
The final leg of our Argentinian road trip was a 24 hour bus ride to Buenos Aires. This might sound bad but the buses in Argentina are pimped and it's an awesome was to get around. They have these huge bus terminals with dozens of companies running first class buses with fully-reclining-seats, etc. 24 hours is a snap.
Buenos Aires was great, and not just because it has the highest concentration of hot women I've ever seen. That helped though. We were all lucky to not end up with neck injuries and you really had to make the hard choice which hot girl to look at because you'd miss another one walking the other way. Amazing...
Anyway, there's plently more to BA and luckily we'd met a local guy Augusto in Bariloche who very kindly offered to pick us up and take us out for dinner and a tour of the city. Awesome, awesome food... if you love melt-in-your-mouth bloody steak (which I do!). Augusto actually took us out 2 nights in a row, once to a semi-fancyy place and another night to a "tenedor libre" (free fork) restaurant which is all you can eat meat! I think I ate a few parts of animals I wouldn't normally consider but I loved it all and walked away very full.
Apart from stuffing ourselves with steak and red wine we also spent a bit of time walking around this very cool, European-feeling city. The La Recoleta cemetary was amazing to see, the huge Avendia 9 de Julio quite a mission to cross and Evan and I both bought sweet leather jackets (with me doing nearly all the transacting in Spanish). Great place to just wander around though, really want to go back again.
So very sadly we had to part ways with Evan after a great road trip through Argentina. He headed to the ferry terminal bound for Uraguay while we got in our last (hopefully not psycho) taxi for the airport. Jack and I picked up our surfboards from the LAN office where Mum and Dad had dropped them off (thanks again!) aand managed to get them checked in without having to pay the $100 fee that we were supposed to (I think it was Jack's charm... or the fact that the girl had never seen surfboards before).
Anyway, we got ourselves settled in the second last row of economy, conveniently located next to the toilets and galley, for a comfortable 8 hour flight with the best service money can buy. Well the best service American Airlines can provide for the money you pay. Think stereotypical evil cafeteria matron types who seem to openly hate you and think you're speaking Spanish when you're actually speaking English with an Aussie accent. Miami here we come!
