Thursday, November 16, 2006
Argentine Patagonia
Searching for Bad Face
I'm a Londoner. In the past I've managed to not leave it's boundaries from one year's end to the next, without noticing, and can be fairly quoted as having once said "It's nice to come out to the country once in a while" whilst sitting in Greenwich Park. So even I'm vaguely surprised I've chosen to travel across Patagonia. However it so stunningly beautiful that even I couldn't fail to be impressed by it. And in truth I've had a hankering to journey through its vast expanses since seeing a very gentle film, Historias Minimas (Small Stories), in which various characters traverse the region, including an old man in search of his lost dog, Bad Face.
Throughout this leg of my journey I've experienced glaring sunlight (sin ozone), wind, snow and rain, relentlessly long bus journeys through endless, stark, unchanging landscape, as well as having to combat more different accents - If anyone's been to Spain recently and there wasn't anyone there it's because they're currently all in Patagonia, so the conversations have been full of th-th-th as well as sh-sh-sh-che, if you know what I mean.
Switzerland only bigger
Running south through the Argentine lake district are a series of towns that are reminiscent of scenes off the tops of Swiss chocolate boxes (there is also an overwhelming number of chocolate shops in them too). When I arrived in San Martin de Los Andes, I thought it was snowing. Thankfully it was only wispy seeds being blown out of the trees, which was a relief, although they are not as pleasant as snowflakes when you catch them on your tongue. It was in this town I decided to make my first hike in Patagonia this spring...although I had a few false starts just trying to leave town, and firstly ended up at the doors of an Irish Pub, sadly closed. I left with a mental note to at least invest in some sort of map for my next hike...what was I saying about being a city dweller..?
I spent just one night in Bariloche, having stayed there for a week or so in the South American autumn, but at last I met a Norwegian man travelling - I was beginning to think they just didn't leave their own country as despite having met a vast amount of Norwegians, until now only one of them was a man, and he was old with a broken arm (although I'm sure that doesn't exclude him from citizenship). From Bariloche I went down to the rather unlovely town of El Bolson, famous for the beautiful surrounding countryside, being the "first nuclear free" town in Argentina, its (not very) alternative market, more chocolate and being "one of the seven chakras of the world" - I ask you?? Thankfully most of the holiday-hippy contingent seemed to have packed away there draw-string trousers and returned to their day jobs at the merchant banks and petro-chemical firms, although there would have been plenty to keep them happy with the market touting the usual braided tat among the home made jams and mate bombillas.
Basking in the sunshine.
My next stop took me right across the country to the Atlantic coast to a tiny village Puerto Piramides on Peninsula Valdez, where the South Right Wale turn up every year in their hundreds, to coax their calves through their first few weeks. So it was into the boats to watch them splash around, and down to the beach at night to listen to their song, (except it was so bloody cold and the wind was blowing the wrong way, so we gave it up as a bad job). On the peninsula there are also huge colonies of huge elephant seals, which are really just hilarious burping bags of blubber. There are Penguins as well, but to my mind they were disappointingly out of place in the 30 degree heat instead of perched on an ice shelf some place.
So if it's ice you're after...
A long bus ride south and then back east got me to El Calafate. I've seen a couple of glaciers before (including a rather lovely chocolate brown coloured one on Aconcagua) but down the road is the impressively huge Perito Moreno Glacier, (one of the world's few expanding glaciers). Occasionally chunks break off the 60 meter high ice wall and crash into the lake it is currently choking. I also journeyed a couple of hundred kilometres further north to El Chalten to climb on a glacier as well as see the peak of Fitzroy, but the first real snow on my trip closed in and forced us back off the mountain. The falling snow covered the Alpinesque landscape, the storm then stopped and the clouds moved out, revealing the dark jagged mountains, and then the snow melted from the lower slopes exposing the green valley spotted with yellow dandelions, so within 5 hours it was like trekking through sets from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, to The Lord of the Rings and then The Sound of Music.
I'm a Londoner. In the past I've managed to not leave it's boundaries from one year's end to the next, without noticing, and can be fairly quoted as having once said "It's nice to come out to the country once in a while" whilst sitting in Greenwich Park. So even I'm vaguely surprised I've chosen to travel across Patagonia. However it so stunningly beautiful that even I couldn't fail to be impressed by it. And in truth I've had a hankering to journey through its vast expanses since seeing a very gentle film, Historias Minimas (Small Stories), in which various characters traverse the region, including an old man in search of his lost dog, Bad Face.Throughout this leg of my journey I've experienced glaring sunlight (sin ozone), wind, snow and rain, relentlessly long bus journeys through endless, stark, unchanging landscape, as well as having to combat more different accents - If anyone's been to Spain recently and there wasn't anyone there it's because they're currently all in Patagonia, so the conversations have been full of th-th-th as well as sh-sh-sh-che, if you know what I mean.
Switzerland only bigger
Running south through the Argentine lake district are a series of towns that are reminiscent of scenes off the tops of Swiss chocolate boxes (there is also an overwhelming number of chocolate shops in them too). When I arrived in San Martin de Los Andes, I thought it was snowing. Thankfully it was only wispy seeds being blown out of the trees, which was a relief, although they are not as pleasant as snowflakes when you catch them on your tongue. It was in this town I decided to make my first hike in Patagonia this spring...although I had a few false starts just trying to leave town, and firstly ended up at the doors of an Irish Pub, sadly closed. I left with a mental note to at least invest in some sort of map for my next hike...what was I saying about being a city dweller..?
I spent just one night in Bariloche, having stayed there for a week or so in the South American autumn, but at last I met a Norwegian man travelling - I was beginning to think they just didn't leave their own country as despite having met a vast amount of Norwegians, until now only one of them was a man, and he was old with a broken arm (although I'm sure that doesn't exclude him from citizenship). From Bariloche I went down to the rather unlovely town of El Bolson, famous for the beautiful surrounding countryside, being the "first nuclear free" town in Argentina, its (not very) alternative market, more chocolate and being "one of the seven chakras of the world" - I ask you?? Thankfully most of the holiday-hippy contingent seemed to have packed away there draw-string trousers and returned to their day jobs at the merchant banks and petro-chemical firms, although there would have been plenty to keep them happy with the market touting the usual braided tat among the home made jams and mate bombillas.
Basking in the sunshine.
My next stop took me right across the country to the Atlantic coast to a tiny village Puerto Piramides on Peninsula Valdez, where the South Right Wale turn up every year in their hundreds, to coax their calves through their first few weeks. So it was into the boats to watch them splash around, and down to the beach at night to listen to their song, (except it was so bloody cold and the wind was blowing the wrong way, so we gave it up as a bad job). On the peninsula there are also huge colonies of huge elephant seals, which are really just hilarious burping bags of blubber. There are Penguins as well, but to my mind they were disappointingly out of place in the 30 degree heat instead of perched on an ice shelf some place.So if it's ice you're after...
A long bus ride south and then back east got me to El Calafate. I've seen a couple of glaciers before (including a rather lovely chocolate brown coloured one on Aconcagua) but down the road is the impressively huge Perito Moreno Glacier, (one of the world's few expanding glaciers). Occasionally chunks break off the 60 meter high ice wall and crash into the lake it is currently choking. I also journeyed a couple of hundred kilometres further north to El Chalten to climb on a glacier as well as see the peak of Fitzroy, but the first real snow on my trip closed in and forced us back off the mountain. The falling snow covered the Alpinesque landscape, the storm then stopped and the clouds moved out, revealing the dark jagged mountains, and then the snow melted from the lower slopes exposing the green valley spotted with yellow dandelions, so within 5 hours it was like trekking through sets from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, to The Lord of the Rings and then The Sound of Music. Narnia...Austria
On the way back and forth to El Chalten our cowboy-hat-wearing bus driver played country and western music and looked as if he'd be all the more happier with a big truck, with an air-horn, (although he did have a CB radio), rather than driving a bus load of gringos around. Having now listened to a huge chunk of non-stop C&W songs I have come to the conclusion that the lyrics can be split into just a few topics, which are solely dependant on speed and gender. It needs a bit of work, but so far my hypothesis is panning out like this:
Slow songs are sad. If sung by a man they are about how he got drunk and left his woman, or his woman left him because he was a drunk. If sung by a woman they are about how her man got drunk and left her, or about being a single mom, (although these generally end with her meeting a real good man, but by the next track he's got drunk and left her). Fast songs are happy. If sung by either sex, and they are about a girl dancing or a pick up truck, or a girl dancing in the back of a pick up truck. I imagine very few Country lyrics are about having a fulfilling life being black and/or gay.
Tomorrow I head for what will probably be my last border crossing of this trip, until I return home, to the snowy wastes of Chilean Patagonia...brrrr. So tonight, Bryan and Gillian, (my glacier trekking pals) and I, will head out so I can say farewell to Argentina with a huge plate of meat...mmmm. # posted by Barney @ 1:45 pm 
