PN Tierra del Fuego

Bracketing our Beagle Channel boat trip day were two day trips to Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, home to shoreline, bogs, mountains, forests and all manner of critters supported by those habitats. The first day we took a longish trail through forests along the coast; on our return visit we visited a different sector of the park where we took a bunch of short (2-3km) trails through different types of forests, meadows, a peat bog and a beaver-made lake. The first trail was lovely and pretty quiet; on the second day we were horrified to find the trailhead inundated with bus tour participants, who were there for the mirador (lookout) out into the channel. Luckily the hordes didn't venture far from the end of the road, and we soon lost them and found ourselves once again with the park virtually to ourselves.

Herewith, some photos from both excursions.

Beagle Channel pics

Ideal conditions on the channel. Looking eastward.

Wildlife a-plenty. Sea lions and cormorants.

Scratchy scratchy.

Cormorants in flight. Super-captivating to watch.

The so-called Lighthouse at the End of the World.

Cormorants.

Cormorants. Lots of cormorants. Everywhere.

Sittin' on carrot cousins at the panoramic lookout.

Vista with tourists.

The boat.

Voyage on the Beagle

A boat tour of the islands in the Beagle Channel is pretty much de rigeur for visitors to Ushuaia. Obligingly, we hit the cluster of tour operator shacks at the marina to find a boat. The first place we went to had a small yacht and sold us on its virtues: closer approaches, fewer people and less competition for railing space. We felt compelled to suss out at least one other option, since these folks were just a shade pricier than the competition. The second folks we talked to ran a catamaran with room for 300, but, bizarrely, sold us on the virtues of the other company. Either the kid behind the desk hated his job, or else he figured we young folks were not the target audience of his company, but either way he was pretty sure we'd have a better time with the first boat. That was all the convincing we needed, and we went back to Patagonia Adventure Explorer, to sign up for the next morning's excursion. The boat would leave at 10am.

We woke up in good time the next morning, and got organized, and left our lodgings with, we assumed, a good twenty-five minutes before the boat left. However, on casually checking our watches we realized that somehow we had fifteen minutes. It was a twenty-minute walk to the port. And so we started running. Even running it was going to be tight, but it was worth a shot. What happened next was the first in a series of fortuitous transportation-related events that have led us to believe the transportation gods might just be on our side, at least so far on this trip. What happened was, at the very first intersection we came to, there in that hilltop neighbourhood, where nobody else was awake (or at least on the streets) and even the dogs weren't up yet, we found a taxi stand, with a queue of taxis, no less. Impressing upon the driver the urgency of our situation, we careened down Ushuaia's vertical streets and made the boat with two minutes to spare.

And then, and then: the voyage! Calm, smooth waters, barely a breeze, barely a cloud; the day was ideal. It had snowed the day before on the mountains stretching endlessly into the distance on both shores of the channel (Chile on one side, Argentina on the other, due to the wonky border hereabout) and their slopes were dusted with more white than usual. To sum up we visited: three tiny islets that were home to colonies of sea lions and/or various species of cormorants; the misnamed "lighthouse at the end of the world" (there's one on Isla de los Estados, a few miles past the eastern mouth of the channel, that is the true title-holder); and another less tiny island where we disembarked and took a short walk to the high ground for a panoramic view of the whole shebang -- town, mountains, islands, channel. This last island was also notable for being strewn with what appeared to be rocks covered in a layer of tiny flat little plants but which were, in fact, vegetables the whole way through and distant relatives of the carrot. And true to the company's  claims, the boat got seriously close to the wildlife. We practically grazed the rocks of the islets, while the catamarans idled a hundred feet out; and while their railings were crammed with spectators our twenty-five fellow passengers were distributed with plenty of elbow-room on the yacht's deck and, er, roof-deck.

And the experience did not disappoint. It was stunning, and delightful, and unforgettable. The landscape was just fantastic, and the wildlife was abundant and awesome to see from so close, and we were on the Beagle Channel, for Christ's sake! It took white folks like three hundred years from when they first came to the region to chart it accurately; we were in a boat, in a place where ships wrecked as recently as eighty years ago. Seriously, if I come back to Tierra del Fuego it will be with a 4x4 with a Zodiac in tow, and I will explore the sounds and bays and channels and isles looking for 300-year-old boat skeletons. Someday... someday.

Here at the end of all things

I bet if Frodo and Sam were on a street corner on the tourist strip in Ushuaia instead of on a rocky island in a sea of lava on the side of an exploding Mount Doom, they wouldn’t have waited passively for what they believed (mistakenly, but that’s another story) was their inevitable exit from this world; instead they would have wasted no time in diving headlong into the molten flood rising towards them. At least, that’s how we felt, at times.

Now, Ushuaia as a whole is a very picturesque town, set in a gorgeous bay of the Beagle Channel with majestic snow-capped mountains rising behind and all around it. It’s got a colourful collection of buildings, and it rises along insanely steep streets away from the water, providing many a place to admire the view.

And it’s an unrivalled base for exploring the fantastic surrounding region of Tierra del Fuego. But despite the town being fairly sizeable it’s difficult to escape the main tourist street, San Martin. And this street is, more than anything else, Bizarro Niagara Falls. Tacky tourist shops are ubiquitous, and the sidewalks are narrow,  and everywhere there are people. Touristy, shopping-bag-toting people. Ushuaia port is the departure point for Antarctic cruises, and when there is a boat in the dock the place is overwhelmingly hectic. The steeply rising streets leading away from the water also add a sense of enclosure that prevents one from really breathing easy at their lower ends. We had one slack day in horrible weather where we spent the whole day in town, and by the end of it we were desperate to get out into the absolutely gorgeous surrounding landscapes. Which we did, and enjoyed immensely: a couple of day-hikes in Parque Nacionale Tiera del Fuego, and a boat cruise on the Beagle Channel to see wildlife and a lighthouse and take in the views on what must have been the calmest day in the icy passage’s history. It was just gorgeous. (Photos to follow, of all these things).

I think my favourite part of Tierra del Fuego, though, was the mythology surrounding it. Cruising comfortably though we were in our tourist yacht, the fact remained we were on the Beagle Channel, in the land of fearsome storms, brutal winters, epic journeys of exploration and “discovery”, and myriad shipwrecks that were testament to the less felicitous encounters between those sea-going men and the regions’s fierce weather. The bus we took out of the region crossed the Strait of Magellan, for crying out loud! (Again, the waters were calm and blue, and we were accompanied by a pod of Commerson’s dolphins to boot.) Awesome.

Punta Tombo

A hundred and fifty kilometers south of Peninsula Valdez is the penguin colony of Punta Tombo. It's the largest colony of Magellanic penguins on the continent, and when we visited the penguins were nesting. This meant there were not beaches full of penguins jostling one another and making a giant racket, which was what we were expecting. Instead, we found a coastal semi-desert landscape with sand and shrubs, incongruously dotted with little penguins as far as the eye could see. Turns out the little dudes nest in holes they dig in the desert, and so we were astonished to find thousands and thousands of holes (far more numerous than the visible penguins), each with a penguin incubating eggs hiding within. It was bizarre, and hilarious. Every once in a while a penguin head would pop out of a hole in the ground, and then a two-foot-tall resident would waddle out. They walk like toddlers, a little unsteadily but inexorably toward their destination, which in this case was either the sea or their nest, depending on which way they were walking. They were completely unperturbed by the presence of humans, often crossing the path through the landscape created for us mere steps ahead of where we were, or standing just inches from where we walked. It was phenomenal and surreal. Of the wildlife we've seen on this trip, these little guys win the prize for being most susceptible to anthropomorphic attribution.

Herewith, a few of the zillion photos I took. (It's amazing how many photos one can take of what are, to the untrained eye, essentially hundreds of identical specimens all doing pretty much the same thing.)

Nesting penguin. You can even see one of its eggs!

One of the spectators along the tourist parade route.

Jaywalking penguin.

All this guy needs is a white hat and a gun and we've got
ourselves a movie.

Whack-a-mole, Patagonia-style.

Weirdest scene ever, right? Gophers, normal. Penguins, troubling.

More whale pictures

More photos of the whales. They more or less speak for themselves. Expect a bunch more wildlife and landscape photo sets in the near future as this was the focus of the next few weeks of our journey.

Look, ma! I’m driving standard!

From Buenos Aires, we booked it south by bus for 18 hours, through the flat endless cattle country that supply the indecently well-marbled bife de chorizo steaks heftily gracing so many Argentine dinner plates, to the coastal wildlife bonanza that is the Peninsula Valdez. Home to colonies of fur seals, elephant seals, sea lions, magellanic penguins, orcas, Commerson’s dolphins,  and countless species of birds, this is where those nature documentaries are filmed where killer whales drive themselves up onto the shore at top speed to try to snare seal pups for dinner. It’s also home to one of the most significant populations of Right whales in the world, so called because their friendly personality and tendency to float when dead made them the favourite target of whalers for centuries.

We were not there at the right time for the spectacle of Orca vs Seal, alas [the climax of which is both inevitable and grisly, according to some photos we saw], but we were there when the right whales were nursing their calves, and took a tour boat to see them. We got within maybe fifteen feet of probably a dozen different mom-n-baby pairs, who seemed completely unperturbed by our presence. It was awesome.

Mom and baby right whales, at medium distance (maybe 100ft away).

But the big news from the peninsula is that I managed to get us there, around, and back in a rented manual-shift car. This was a pretty big accomplishment given I had three hours of pre-trip instruction as my lifetime total experience driving a manual car, and was a little nervous about a) doing it for real, b) doing it in the land of momentum-alone-decides-intersection-priority, and c) having an audience (a sympathetic one, but still…). But the town where we rented the car (Puerto Madryn) was very sparsely trafficked, greatly easing our escape; and the roads to and in the peninsula itself were all relatively flat and more importantly deserted for long stretches at a time. I only stalled a couple of times (per day) and only lurched into motion a little more frequently than that. Also, our hostel staff’s unslicited advice to treat unpaved roads like snowy roads was invaluable, given that all of the roads on the peninsula itself (as opposed to the highway to get there) were unsealed, and both people and guidebooks stress the dangers of driving them After Weather. Luckily for us the weather had come and gone just prior to our arrival there, and when we were out and about the roads were all pretty dry again.

Only once did I completely fail to realize an objective, and that was moving the car from one parking spot to another in Puerto Piramides, where the whale tours were based and where we stayed for a night; this involved starting on a steep hill and gaining enough speed over a very short distance to make it over a pretty steep and very uneven dirt embankment into the hostel’s proper parking area. This failure was without either internal or external witnesses, however, making it much easier to endure and then accept. It also made it much easier to swallow my pride and avoid trying again, since another attempt could conceivably be witnessed and judged should another pair of eyes wander by, and so I chose the easier option of just rolling backwards down the hill a ways and entering the parking area via another less tricky entrance.

The final moment of trepidation was when we returned the car to the rental agency – I feared that the owner, as he checked out the vehicle’s condition by playing with the shifter and revving the engine some, would discover some mortal wound I’d inflicted to the gears or clutch through rookie error. But either the car would die a slow death after our departure, or I managed to avoid mangling its innards after all, because he finished his checks,  walked us inside to where we dealt with the return-of-rental paperwork, and let us go on our way.

Magical Milonga

Being as we were in the land of tango, it seemed only logical to try to find a way to see a performance while we were in Buenos Aires. There were countless tango shows to choose from, featuring professional performances of varying scale, from a single couple in some intimate space to Vegas-style dinner theatre revues. But most of them were geared to tourists and all of them were expensive. Searching for a lower-key option, we read about milongas, which are essentially tango dance nights for regular folks, I suppose much like salsa nights at dance clubs, not that I’ve ever been to one of those either. We had no intention of participating, though (tango not being really something you can just pick up as you go along), and I wasn’t sure it was okay to just go and watch. I had visions of being a wallflower at some darkly lit little club on the second floor of some narrow, crumbling building, studiously avoiding making eye contact with anyone lest I accidentally acquire a partner, dancers twisting severely across the crowded floor, elbowing indignantly past us. I worried we would be intruding.

It was, therefore, with a certain amount of trepidation that we resolved to stop in at a milonga taking place in the neighbourhood we were staying in, put on by a collective called Parakultural, which had a few recommendations (from tourist guidebooks, admittedly) to its credit. The venue proved hard to find, however; it was not some neon-advertised second-storey club, nor was it a storefront; nor, in fact, was it identified in any way shape or form. Walking past it once without seeing it, we enlisted the aid of an elderly couple closing up shop. My simple, polite and grammatically incorrect query as to the location of the Salon Canning was met with two very enthusiastic (if simultaneous) replies. Combining the lovely old folks’ advice at last yielded the right address, which proved to be a doorway beside a shop selling tango shoes, with a small cluster of folks lingering just outside. And then, with a nervous glance at these unassuming but doubtless internationally recognized patrons, we stepped into… a hallway. Wide, brightly lit and long, it led past a few tiny shops – all closed, except a kiosko selling candy and postcards – and came to an end at last at a door through which darkness and music were perceptible. The Salon Canning, at last.

The ticket desk was auspiciously low-key: still in the corridor, a twentysomething girl, casually dressed, sat at a little table with a cash box and a friend to keep her company. Paying our modest entry fee, we stepped through into the darkness. Immediately, our trepidation vanished, replaced by utter enchantment. We were in a grand old ballroom, with a square wooden dancefloor surrounded by thirty or so tables under white table cloths, with a long elegant old wood bar along one wall. Ancient tango recordings were playing over the sound system, and it was to these that a dozen or so couples were gliding around the dancefloor. Several dozen more dancers were scattered at the various tables, taking a break or changing from their street shoes into their dancing shoes, having just arrived – we were there early, just past midnight, when the rest of the crowd was likely still not halfway through dinner. We were already in love with the place by the time we took our seats (which was about forty seconds after making it through the door).

And then we watched the dancers. They were simply outstanding. Not in the sense of being the best dancers ever, though most of them were very competent indeed; but just that they were regular people, here to dance. And the tango itself: the upright posture; the invisible signals by which the men guided their partners; the women so often dancing with eyes closed, either in concentration or out of enjoyment, it was impossible to tell; the pairs navigating in the space available to them, regardless of how much or how little they had at a given moment, and all of them floating generally counterclockwise around the floor, obeying the flow of traffic; the assured grace of the older men, in jackets to a man, in contrast to the younger guys, who tended to be somewhat more casual in their attire and more assertive in their style. In between sets of five or six songs everyone returned to their table and their friends, and after the short pop song that filled the break ended the next set would begin, and the men scanned the room or took a walk among the tables, searching for a partner. And finding one, he would lead her to the floor, and they would take up their positions, and they would wait, and wait, and wait, and then take off, and their distinctness as a separate entity from the rest of the dancers would be clear at first while they started but then gradually diminish until at last they were subsumed completely in the larger, rotating group.

They were still arriving a few hours later when, reluctant to leave but exhausted from a packed day, we headed for home. Still now, as I write this, with the Strait of Magellan a mere fifty meters to my left, four thousand kilometers further on in our trip, the milonga stands out as the most enchanting experience I’ve had.

Buenos Aires in photos

First, a few images from our wanderings through Buenos Aires. Words to follow when I have the chance to think of them.

We arrived in the capital the day after the former (and would-be future) president,
Nestor Kirchner, passed away. These are messages from the public rally outside
the Casa Rosada in the days that followed.

The street art in B.A. was phenomenal and omnipresent. This, however, was
the most epic and seemingly collaborative piece we came across.

Beer vendor at the Sunday market/concert in Recoleta.

Music lawn at the Recoleta market.

One of Recoleta cemetery's more dilapidated
structures. Take-away lesson here, don't build for
eternity using glass.

Spectators at the Teatro Colon.

Salta la linda

Salta. La linda, the fair, indeed. The city itself is beautiful, of course, and its setting is pretty sublime; but it's the culture there that really hooks you. There is folk music absolutely everywhere, and folk dancing: never have handkerchiefs been used to such seductive effect. The peñas, traditional folk music venues, dot the city almost as ubiquitously as cafes. Okay, that's a stretch: there are a lot of cafes in Salta. But you can hear the thump of that big martial drum and that vigorous multi-voice harmony spilling out of all sorts of doorways. I went to see a couple of shows, first with a British chap who was part of the traveling party from Bolivia, and then with a girl who was staying in my hostel, and both were riveting. I should mention Argentine folkloric music is not tango; it's some other creature, possibly called zamba (that' at least, is the name of the Salteño variety of folklore). These were Sunday and Monday nights. Saturday night was more of a late (but relaxed) drinks kind of affair on Balcarce street, the city's multi-block pedestrian-only bar & restaurant district. New to me, that night, was the sight of families with small children strolling past the patios and throbbing club entrances at 4:30 in the morning. Also new to me was such an environment where nobody was stumbling into an alley to puke, despite the presence of many a youthful patron. It was the most well-behaved, respectable club district I've ever seen; perhaps not insignificantly, it was also relatively sparsely attended by Western tourists, or so it seemed from our vantage point on the patio of a reggae club (they had cheap beer). Salta, in fact, doesn't seem to be a mandatory stop on the gringo trail the way Buenos Aires is; there were certainly tourists toting cameras, but almost all of those we talked to proved to be Argentinian themselves. Mostly it's just a small city going about its business, which business is simply pretty awesome.

Trees! Rocks! Colours!

And it was evening, and it was morning, the last day. After nearly two weeks, I was heading out of the desert and into a region where plant matter grew taller than your knees. The desert is a beautiful place full of wondrous and strange things, but the sparse or nonexistent vegetation was surprisingly hard to cope with. Shade just isn’t the same when it’s provided by, say, the shadow of your Land Cruiser. And so, when the bus from the Bolivian border at last descended below the tree line, it was extremely comforting to see the canopy creep up the canyon sides with more and more boldness as we made our way down the Quebreda de Humahuaca, the canyon road that leads from the border down out of the mountains to the plateaus of north-western Argentina. And the Quebrada itself seemed to rejoice in the return of the trees with a geological rainbow that evoked (deliberately?) more than anything a temperate forest at the height of autumn. The blue, green, pink, red, orange, white, black and grey bands of rock, undulating in high-amplitude ribbons along the canyon, may well have been the most beautiful rock formations I’ve seen in my life. I will regret forever not putting down the empanadas I’d purchased from a vendor at the bus station – to this day, still the best empanadas I’ve had all trip (de pollo; carne goes to an Irish bar in Salta) – to take a few photos from the bus. Never mind stopping. But the city of Salta beckoned, with its paved roads, ubiquitous electricity, cafes, peñas, and patios. Tilcara, Purmamarca, Humahuaca, these are the towns along the Quebrada – google them, project the images on your wall, and then multiply them by afternoon light to the power of deep blue sky, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a place worth exploring in detail, I think. Some other trip, I suppose.

Overland to Uyuni III

Final day: Salar de Uyuni. Nothing really to say about this, except that it is an immense, awesome, flat, white, cracked expanse that stretches to the horizon more or less in every direction. Actually, there is something to add: I had a very hard time remembering I wasn't on a frozen lake. The salt was like bizarro ice: it was the opposite of slippery, and it felt like solid ground, and it wasn't smooth, and it wasn't cold. But still, if you just look at it while you stand in one place, or you're whizzing along in your jeep, it's easy to forget those very tactile details, and then you're left with this unshakeable feeling of Canadian familiarity. Which only makes it more jarring when your ice-based assumptions are confounded yet again with the next step you take upon it.

Anyway, a few photos for you.