Well, citizens, it's been a month and of course, we've been having a phenomenal time. We began the trip with about a week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That city is absolutely frenetic. It was a bit overwhelming, really. We're still unsure about when exactly they work. Things seem to open up around 10 or 11 am. Everything closes for 3 or 4 hours from anywhere between noon to 6pm. Even the grocery stores just shut the doors. Restaurants start opening up around 8pm, but nobody is really eating until 10 or 11 pm. Then everything is open all night. All the while, the streets, parks, public spaces are all absolutely packed with people. Packed.
From Buenos Aires we got on a boat to Colonia, Uruguay, spent a few hours in this beach town, then headed down the coast to Montevideo. It was a wonderful, slower change of pace from Buenos Aires. A large city with beautiful architecture, boulevards, and lovely people. Everyone is incredibly friendly, speaks nice, slow Spanish, and is generally quite relaxed. They are obsessed with drinking yerba mate, making gigantic sandwiches and putting strange and delicious condiments / pickled veggies on everything. You should look up pictures of chivitos... their "national sandwich." One easily stuffed both Tara and me.
After 5 days in Montevideo, we headed back to Buenos Aires and were surprisingly happy to be back. We were swept back up in the constant-action and it was great to see some old familiar faces of people still lounging at our hostel. People would seem to get stuck there for weeks. This very thing happened to us...
We were planning on a couple more days, then heading south, but we kept finding ourselves adding more time to our stay. We took some Spanish lessons, which really helped. The local dialect is pretty gnarly, but just as we were starting to learn the tricks, we flew to Ushuaia, Argentina.
This town was absolutely gorgeous. Claiming to be the southern-most city in the world, it's actually just north of a Chilean naval town... but who wants to see that, right? Sunrise is at 3:30AM and sunset is 11PM. It's surrounded by the snowy and rocky Andes Mountains and the Beagle Channel. Stunning to say the least. We managed to avoid getting ripped off by the National Park down there and instead just hiked out of town and up to the base of a glacier. All in all it was about 10 miles a day and very picturesque. We sprang for a b&b with our very own room here, too! After a couple weeks of dorm life, we relished every moment of staying in this little chalet. We also met an old gentleman from Salem, OR, there. Of course we did.
From there we took a 16 hour bus-ride to Puerto Natales, Chile. This town is sort of the jumping-off-point for hiking in Torres del Paine National Park. At our hostel we made quick friends with a young couple from New York City, Eaman and Archana. They're also traveling for a year or so, and it turned out they were planning the very same route on a 5-day hike as Tara and I. It was nice having some buddies on the trail.
The hike out there was all kinds of majestic. The first day we took a bus to the park, got on a ferry across an ultra-marine blue lake , which then dropped us at the trail head. We hiked up a valley and camped at the terminus of a massive glacier. This thing flowed out of the of the mountains and ended on a minty green lake. It appeared to taper from about 1000ft thick to the 30 ft vertical wall that would drop large chunks of ice into the lake (though we never saw this). We sat watching and listening to it rumble and crack for several hours until sunset. Being from states which have glaciers all over the mountains, we'd never had much interest on the subject. But we'd never seen or heard anything like this. We are glacier people now. Deal with it.
The next day we hiked all day to the base of a valley and camped. The following morning, we left our stuff, took some water and went up the valley 4 miles to this humongous three-sided bowl. One side was covered with snow and glacier-plastered mountains and the two other sides with glacially-carved granite towers (torres). On the one side, snow and glaciers were breaking up and shifting sending avalanches of varying size down the banks of the mountain every 15 minutes. It was a thunderous and again, ethereal experience.
We returned to camp, packed up and hiked down to yet another camp, one which had showers, beer, wine and snacks... roughing it! The next day we hiked to, and camped at, the base of the Torres del Paine themselves. That evening, climbing higher and higher, the 50mph wind gusts began to contain hail and ice. Freezing, we reached the Torres and were again blown away (pun intended). Such strange beauty... check out the photos, which of course don't do anything justice, but will give you an impression.
We hiked out the following day and then caught a bus to El Calafate. Now sitting in our comfy hostel's living room and looking over the town, we're taking a down-day. Tomorrow we head to El Chalten and begin a 3-day hike around Mt. Fitz Roy. Another strange spire-like granite peak surrounded by beautiful tooth paste-green lakes. Or so they say. We'll hike out on Christmas Eve and enjoy Christmas at a hostel in El Chalten. Being beef country, they'll undoubtedly slaughter a beast for the occasion.
Needless to say, after a month, all is well here.
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