Argentina (Tierra Del Fuego): 2nd April - 5th April

From Santiago I flew down to Tierra Del Fuego and what Argentina likes to call the world's most southerly city, Ushuaia (there is actually a town in Chilean Tierra Del Fuego which is further south, but in fairness it is very small). I didn't realise it when I booked the flight but I was actually arriving in Argentina on the 25th anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Before travelling to Argentina, I had wondered what their attitude to the issue would be, and it soon became abundantly clear. Everywhere you looked in Ushuaia were reminders that the Argentines certainly do not consider the issue settled, even after 25 years. It was there to see on car bumper stickers, on small footnotes at the bottom of official documents, in a big monument near the sea front, and on posters like this; the big text at the bottom proclaims, "the fight is not over".span>

Ushuaia sits on the shores of the Beagle Channel, at the foot of the southernmost stretch of the Andes. Its location is stunning but I found the town itself somewhat disappointing. Due to its position as the main jumping off point for boat trips to Antarctica (only 1000km away), the town is used to catering for a large number of cruise passengers which results in it being not much more than an expensive, somewhat tacky tourist trap.

Thankfully just half an hour away is the Parque Nacional Tierra Del Fuego. I went there for a day trip to do a bit of hiking. Around the park HQ it was tour bus hell and large crowds of people but thankfully most of these people didn't want to venture more than five minutes from their cafeterias and public toilets, and once I got away from them I was alone in the stunning mountains and lakes of the park. This is Lago Roca, not far from the HQ and the start of the trail up to the 1000m peak of Cerro Guanaco, which was my goal for the day.

Near the summit of Cerro Guanaco, looking down at Lago Roca. It was a fairly easy three hours or so up to the summit, with a fantastic 360° view of the park and the Beagle Channel, right the way down to Cape Horn in the south. A good warm up for the Big Adventure which was next on my agenda: Torres Del Paine.

Chile (Torres Del Paine): 5th April - 13th April

Torres Del Paine is one of the most famous national parks in South America, reputed to be amongst the most extraordinarily beautiful places on Earth. My plan was to hike the seven day Circuit right the way round the main range, including the side trips up the two main valleys into the midst of the mountains. In short, I wanted to see everything. So I hired tent, sleeping mat, and cooking equipment in nearby Puerto Natalaes, and stocked up on porridge, noodles and tea bags enough for seven days camping in the park. By the time everything was crammed into my backpack, it weighed close on thirty kilos. I took the bus to the Laguna Amarga ranger station at the entrance to the park, where I hoped to join up with some other trekkers as I started out on the circuit. To my surprise I was the only passenger to get off the bus. Never mind, I thought, bound to meet some people on the trail or at least at tonight's campsite. Weather on this first day was super, warm and sunny, and even though the Torres didn't quite want to show themselves from under their cloud cap (you can see them there right in the middle of the photo), I was still in great spirits and glad to be on the trail.

After a couple of hours' walking, the weight of my pack was beginning to take its toll, as were the new, not-yet-broken-in boots which I had been forced to buy in Punta Arenas just two days earlier (because my old boots literally fell apart). But still the weather was great, the scenery living up to expectations and I was looking forward to getting to the campsite so's I could pitch my tent at the campsite, cook dinner and meet some people to trek with for the rest of the route.

I reached Camp Seron, after a fairly leisurely five hours of walking, to find it completely and utterly deserted, the shop and toilet block boarded up and not a soul to be seen anywhere. I was completely alone. I'd overtaken nobody on the trail and it was unlikely that there was anyone following along behind me, because there were only two or three buses per day from Puerto Natales to the park and at least two of them were at Laguna Amarga as I arrived. So it looked like I was condemned to walking at least the back of the circuit, as far as Glaciar Grey, on my own. Once I got to the glacier I would be onto the more popular route known as the 'W', and expected to find more people there. But for the moment I decided to make the most of the situation and enjoy my isolation. As I sat in my tent and cooked dinner, I found myself wondering: would I have set out on the Circuit, had I known I'd be the only person on it? That question would answer itself a couple of days later...

The next day I awoke quite late after a good sleep. I had planned to get on the trail by 8am, because my plan was to make it that day all the way to the Los Perros campsite, a good nine or ten hour hike from Camp Seron. If I managed that then the next day would be a relatively short walk over the highest point of the circuit, the 1241m John Gardner pass, and then down to one of the campsites alongside the Grey Glaciar. Sleeping a little later than I planned meant I wasn't ready to start on the trail until 9am, putting me somewhat behind schedule but making it to Los Perros was certainly still on the cards. The first hour or so of the days walk picked up where it had left off the previous day: a wide trail through flat, open meadows. The weather though, had closed in somewhat and although it didn't feel like rain, the dark grey clouds were getting steadily lower and starting to hide the peaks of the mountains behind me.

I reached Lago Paine quicker than I'd expected, feeling strong and enjoying the walk. The clouds threatened a good soaking, but for now the rain was holding off.

I arrived at the Lago Dickson campsite at about 2:30pm. According to my map, it was a four hour walk up to Los Perros, and as it got dark at around 7pm, it was going to be possible to make it there before nightfall, but only just. I spent a while deliberating whether to carry on, but in the end the wonderful setting of Lago Dickson, and my aching feet and back, persuaded me to spend the night camped there and then to set off really early the next morning to make it over the pass.

Next morning I was awake and up before dawn, collecting milky water from the lake and cooking my breakfast porridge in the dark. It had been a freezing cold night during which I had discovered the hard way that my sleeping bag wasn't really up to the job. I set off on the climb up to Los Perros at about 8am, which again was later than I'd hoped. The trail led up through thick silent forest, only the distant rush of the Rio de los Perros and the occasional bird disturbing the peace. The map said it was four hours up to Los Perros and sure enough, shortly before noon, I emerged from the forest and saw the glacier just ahead of me.

I left the shelter of the forest, and started climbing the jumbled rocks of the glacier's terminal moraine. A freezing cold wind picked up, blowing strongly down the valley from the pass above. As I reached the top of the moraine and the shore of the lake it held behind it, gazing across at the glacier dropping almost vertically from the mountains above, it began to snow.

I carried on through the gently falling snow for half an hour or so from the Los Perros campsite before stopping in the shelter of a copse of trees to eat my lunch of muesli bars, peanuts and fruit. I put an extra couple of layers on underneath my rain coat then carried on up the trail. I climbed above the tree line, just small shrubs and heather now, and as the mountains closed in on either side, so the clouds closed in on me from above, bringing more and heavier snow until the trail ahead became hard to make out.

I carried on but the higher I went, the heavier became the snow and the stronger grew the wind. There was no trail to follow now; the route was marked by orange poles and paint marks on the rocks. At first this was simple enough, but as the snow grew heavier and deeper it was taking me longer and longer to spot the next pole that I should be heading for. It was tough to look ahead because the gusts of wind were driving stinging snow into my eyes; more and more often, I found myself having to wait two or three minutes for the wind to die down for a few seconds, then desperately scanning the area ahead for that vital orange pole. If I didn't find it before the wind gusted again, I'd have to wait another couple of minutes for the next chance. While I was on the move I was plenty warm enough, but felt myself getting cold during these enforced breaks while I tried to figure out the route. I contemplated putting some more layers on but that would have meant taking my raincoat off first and that was out of the question. Still the wind grew stronger, gale force, practically picking me up off my feet; I reached a point where after five, maybe ten minutes I still couldn't figure out where the trail led. Still getting colder, I began to worry that I might soon get too cold, and that my brain might start slowing down if hypothermia should start to set in. Being up on this mountain, in this weather, alone, had been getting rapidly less attractive a propostion since my lunch stop, but now it seemed positively dangerous. Another prolonged gust of wind nearly blew me off my feet. I looked back, the way I'd come: I could neither see my own tracks anymore, nor any orange poles or paint marks that might lead me back down. There was no longer any option other than to give up, turn back and try to find my way back down to the Los Perros campsite. I spotted the last orange pole I'd passed and headed towards it; as I made my way down I was amazed to discover that areas that had been bare rock on the way up an hour and a half previously were now almost knee-deep in snow.

I got down to the Los Perros campsite at around 4:30pm. It was still snowing heavily, and although the campsite was sheltered pretty well from the wind, still it seemed a very bleak and forlorn place to spend a night in an inadequate sleeping bag. Nor did I really fancy having to trudge up the following day through knee-deep snow over that pass. And what if the weather tomorrow was the same as it had been today? I'd fail on that pass again, face another bleak night at Los Perros and not have enough food left to make it all the way round the circuit to the Torres Del Paine themselves. I decided I couldn't face that pass again; I'd head back down to the Dickson campsite, backtrack the way I'd come, go straight to the Torres via the most direct route and finish the trek a day early. But with it getting dark shortly after seven, it meant I had 2½ hours to go back down a trail it had taken me four hours to come up. There was nothing for it but to walk. I walked like I've never walked before, in places I ran, with 25kg still on my back. I don't know where that energy came from but I'm glad it came from somewhere. I felt it was a desperate race against time. The light slowly faded but I held off getting my headtorch out for as long as I could. It's amazing how much the human eye can see even in near darkness :-) Eventually, at about 7:30, there was simply no light left on that cloudy night and I had to get the torch out, but twenty minutes later I reached the flat ground of the Dickson campsite, back where I started after nearly twelve hour's walking.

Next day I got up to find the weather the same as it had been the previous day. Up towards the pass, the sky looked stormy and snow-laden. Some comfort maybe, a sign I'd made the right decision in backtracking rather than taking another shot at getting over the pass. My goal today was to walk the thirty kilometres to the Las Torres campsite; a back-breaking task for sure, but then I'd reward myself tomorrow with an easy trek up to the Torres themselves with a light pack, before returning to the same campsite in the evening. Thirty kilometres along a route I'd mostly already walked in the opposite direction wasn't exactly fun. There wasn't much wildlife to be seen to liven things up either; this sole guanaco and a very large bird (I think a condor but I'm not sure) were all I saw. Along with a couple of groups of trekkers coming up the trail, to whom I took great pleasure in describing my experiences on the pass!

Reaching the Las Torres campsite felt like summitting a very high mountain. The sense of relief was enormous as I dropped my pack to the ground, knowing that the next day I could leave tent, sleeping bag, etc in the camp and head up to the Torres without all that weight on my back. The hike up to the Torres really was a walk in the park compared to my experiences of the preceeding few days, but that didn't diminish the experience when I reached them, nor the sense of achievement I felt about my whole Torres Del Paine adventure.

Me at the Torres Del Paine. These incredible thousand metre tall granite spires definitely rank up there with Uluru as the most amazing lumps of rock I've ever seen...

The next day it rained solidly all morning but I didn't care. I had just seven kilometres to trek back to Laguna Amarga and the bus for Puerto Natales. When I climbed on that beautiful warm bus it was the biggest sense of relief I'd felt on this whole trip. During the ride back to town I decided I'd take a rest day in Puerto Natales, to recover my energies, work on my web page and just enjoy being warm and comfortable for a while. But when I checked my emails I found one from Pieter and Kristal, who I'd met in the Galapagos, telling me they were in El Calafate. That was my next destination anyway so I decided to head straight back to Argentina the next day and try to meet up with them there.

Argentina: 13th April - 23rd April

Welcome back to Argentina. This big sign stood at the border crossing from Chile. Now, it is not the intention of this travel log to be political, but please forgive me this exception: the Falkland Islands are British, and Argentina had better just get its head round that fact.

I met up with Peter & Kristal in El Calafate, and next morning we headed up to El Chaltén, to try and do a few hikes and maybe even a spot of camping in the Fitzroy mountains. However the weather had other ideas; the day we arrived was freezing cold, windy and snowy, not in the least camping weather although pleasant enough for a short day hike. Unfortunately we couldn't see any mountains through the clouds.

We also saw a few of these striking red headed Magellanic woodpeckers. Next day we were planning on another day hike but we woke up to pouring rain, which didn't let up for the whole day, so we spent it in the bar of the hostel, drinking beer and watching football. Which was a perfectly fine subsitute for a day's walking.

That night we returned to El Calafate. Next day I said goodbye to Peter & Kristal, who were leaving for Puerto Madryn that morning, and headed off to the nearby Perrito Moreno glacier. As I got there, the weather was continuing its cold & wet theme from recent days and I was starting to get thoroughly fed up with Patagonia in the autumn. Still the glacier was an awesome sight, stretching as it did more than four kilometres in width and thirty kilometres in length. The vertical face of the glacier is sixty metres high; check out the boat in the lake to the right of the glacier to get a sense of the scale (you can just about see it - look for its V-shaped wake).

After an hour or so viewing the glacier from a variety of heights but pretty much always the same angle from the boardwalks opposite its snout, I took an hour-long trip on a boat to get a close up view of the awesome ice cliffs from water level. Amazingly, during that hour the drizzle stopped, the clouds began to break and huge snowy mountain peaks began to appear above the glacier. After the boat trip I went back up to the boardwalks, and the weather just kept getting better and better.

The Perrito Moreno glacier is an incredible and beautiful sight, especially in the sunshine. Every conceivable shade of blue is there to be seen in its icy face, and the sounds of cracking, splintering ice ring out continuously, echoing around the surrounding hills like rifle shots. Every few minutes, large sheets of ice or precariously balanced pinnacles come crashing down into the water of the lake, so large that they almost seem to fall in slow motion.

Next morning I began a hefty 32-hour bus ride northwards to Bariloche in the Argentine Lake District. Despite the good weather at the glacier, I was pretty fed up by now of the generally cold and wet conditions in Patagonia and I was looking forward to better weather further north. This bus journey was the longest of this trip so far and it gave me plenty of time to reflect on things and, more importantly, to put together a plan for the remaining few weeks of my trip. I only had three weeks left and lots to fit in. In particular I was seriously starting to consider returning to Bolivia to fill in the blanks I had left there, namely a trip to the Salar de Uyuni and a climb of Huayna Potosí. The Patagonian landscape did little to distract me from my thoughts, hour after hour nothing passing the window except flat brown sheep or cattle pastures and the occasional farm or village. When my bus finally arrived in Bariloche, it was raining heavily again. I got out of the bus to find it was cold and windy too. This was too much for me. Faced with more bad weather and so much to fit in to my remaining time, it just seemed pointless to spend any time at all here. So I bought a ticket on the next service to Mendoza and a couple of hours later I was back on an Andesmar bus heading north. Another 18 hours passed and I was in Mendoza. Fifty hours on the bus and counting.

The weather in Mendoza was much better but still I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to see a few things in the nearby Andes so I was straight onto yet another bus for the final four-hour ride to the village of Puente Del Inca. In the photo you can see the puente (bridge) itself, a natural arch spanning the river, formed by sulphurous deposits from hot springs. Unfortunately it has recently been closed so it's no longer possible to walk across it, and no longer possible to visit the thermal springs. It isn't really much to look at in fact, but the village made a good base for visiting nearby sights.

Next day, after my first night in a bed in four days, I took a bus up the valley to Las Cuevas, the last town in Argentina, near the entrance to the tunnel that leads under the Andes to Chile. From there I hiked up the old road that for four hundred years was the main trading route between Buenos Aires and Santiago. At the top I came to the pass that divides Argentina from Chile, marked by a statue of Christ the Redeemer which was erected jointly by the two nations in 1904 to commemorate a treaty between the two countries guaranteeing everlasting peace.

Aconcagua, all 6962m of it, reflected in the still waters of Laguna Espejo. It's the highest mountain in South America, the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere, the highest mountain in the western hemisphere - in fact, it's the highest mountain anywhere outside of the Himalayas. Somehow just didn't look all that high though...

The perfect weather conditions made an ascent of the mountain suddenly seem like an attractive proposition. It looked like an easy climb. Looks can be deceptive of course, and I was set now on heading back to Bolivia, so I decided to save Aconcagua for another trip ;-)

Later that day I took the bus back to Mendoza, where I spent just one night before another overnight bus journey took me all the way up to the town of Jujuy, from where I got yet another bus to the Bolivian border at La Quiaca.

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