| El Chalten to Puerto Montt |
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| Puerto Montt, 23 March 2005 Ola chicos y chicas, Our adventure goes on! We're almost 2 months away from home by now and we still haven't lost our appetite of traveling. It's such great fun. Today I read in the electronic newspaper ´De Standaard´ that almost half the Belgian population suffers from stress. Maybe they have to take some time-credit. For the moment we are in Chile. Probably we´re going to cross the border Argentina/Chile and Chile/Argentina a few more times and then head up to Bolivia, Paraguay (Foz De Iguazu) and Brazil. We went to Peru a couple of years ago so we're going to skip the north-western of South America although Ecuador and the Galapagos-Islands also seem to be extremely beautiful! We can't have it all, can we ? :-) The last time I wrote in our diary I ended with El Chaltén (Argentina), a small magnificent village with some excellent day treks. From that small place we walked up the fabulous Fitz Roy Range, in the northern section of Parque National Los Glaciares with a peak of 3405 meters surrounded by lakes and some other superb cerros (mountains). We definitely are one of his biggest fans if you look at the number of pictures we took from that peak; in color / black & white, in close up, from further away, with clouds and without,..... Just amazing how fascinated you can become by a couple of peaks! The scenery was fabulous and the walks to get nearby the lakes and mountain peaks were astonishing! Blue green colored lakes, hanging glaciers and dark green trees. I even saw a pyjama-striped black & yellow colored frog! We stayed in El Chaltén for 3 days and the last day we decided to rent some mountain bikes! All the roads around El Chaltén (up to about 160 km out of town) are dirt roads (unpaved with lots of pebbles) so it was great fun! That same evening we took the bus to our next stop, El Calafate, Argentina. A touristy place full of expensive handicraft stores, one of the most expensive places in Argentina but the best place to stay if you want to visit the glacier Perito Moreno, and that was our goal. From time to time we also need a pit-stop to do our laundry and update our site and El Calafate was the place to do so. We rented a car to visit the famous glacier on our own. The glacier was wonderful, a huge wall of ice, 5 km wide and 60 m high and one of earth's few advancing glaciers. From time to time huge icebergs on the glaciers face calve and collapse into the water! A spectacle for eyes and ears! A little bit of glaciology for those interested (source Lonely Planet Argentina,Uruguay & Paraguay, 4th edition - April 2002). The heart of the glacier is the accumulation area, on which snow falls. Over millennia, under tremendous weight, the snow has recrystallized into ice and this extra weight forces the glacier to move. A low gap in the Andes allows moisture-laden Pacific storms to drop their loads east of the divide, where they accumulate as snow. As the glacier pushes along, the melted ice on the bottom mixes with rock and soil, grinding it up and creating a kind of lubricant that helps the glacier keep pushing along. All that movement in turn causes cracks and deformities in the ice, or crevasses. At the same time, debris of the crushed rock is pushed to the sides of the glacier, creating moraines. Areas of the glacier that are not compacted have air bubbles into which the long wavelengths of white light are absorbed; then we simply see white ice. In the areas where the ice becomes more compact, due to the weight on the top pushing ice particles together, blue light (short wavelengths) is still transmitted. The more compact the ice, the longer the path the light has to travel and the bluer the ice appears. Where the glacier melts and calves into lakes, it dumps with it 'glacier flour' of the ground-up rock, giving the water a milky, gray color. The same sediment remains unsettled in some lakes and diffracts the sun's light, creating the stunning turquoise, pale-mint and azure colors in the glacial regions. Our boat trip from Puerto Natales (Chile) to Puerto Montt (Chile) was also great! We embarked Thursday evening (17 March) at 21pm in Puerto Natales and sailed for 3 days through the Chilean channels. On the boat we met some great people and had lots of fun together. Two of them (Jo & Anne) are a Belgian couple and they both work (they also took 1 year and 6 months off) in a school for children with mental disabilities (MPI Zonnebos)!!! You see, dear colleagues, even when I'm on vacation work is not far away! The weather wasn't super during those 3 days on the boat (rainy and foggy). We left the ship only once to visit the Kaweskar people that live in a little village 'Puerto Eden' on Wellington Island. The village was founded as a meteorological base in 1930. The people who live there are the last Kaweskar indigenous people from South Chile and Argentina. These people used to be completely naked and moved in small groups of one or two families, socially independent and that even not that long ago. By the introduction of alcohol and the fact that they covered themselves with clothes (and became less resistant to diseases) the population decreased from 800 persons in 1930-1940 to only 7 pure Kaweskars today. Only the elder people still speaks Kaweskar; the younger people learn Spanish in the school on the island (21 pupils and 3 teachers). They used to travel through the channels with canoes made from bark joined with vegetational fibers, dried and covered with mud. The man was sitting on the bow; he was the protector and the hunter of seals and otters. The women's role was fishing, collecting shellfish and childcare. Nowadays it is forbidden to hunt for seals but for the Kaweskar people an exception is made as there excistence depends on it. They use every part of it (meat, oil and skin for handicraft) and can hunt max 60 seals every year. The Kaweskar people also used to have dogs; they were using them to measure the toxic level in the water: if the dog ate the mussels and he did not die it was save for the humans to eat them, otherwise they would skip the mussels! It was also a fact that only the women could swim and dive. They were in charge of the collection of shellfish and that by a temperature of 7°c! Brrr........ Their main occupations nowadays are collecting shellfish, fishing 'centolla' (king crab) and selling handicraft to the tourists. The temperature during our boat trip through the channels was also about 7°c so we are still having our jackets, hats and gloves in the upper part of our backpack. I hope that soon we will be able to swap them for a skirt and shorts. Monday the 21th of March early in the morning, we arrived in Puerto Montt. It's a big city with colorful stalls that sell vegetables and shellfish (strange mussels and weird red clams)! Our next destination is Chiloe, a big island were they call the inhabitants 'the Chilote'! They have excellent seafood so I can't wait to get there! By the time we managed to add this report to our website, we crossed the border again and are back in Argentina. Here in Bariloche, they do not only have good internet connection but also great chocolate and delicious ice-cream. We plan to stay for a couple of days so soon you can expect our next travelreport. Hasta la proxima, Domi & Joris |