Still in Argentina, after El Chalten, we journeyed on to another place called El Calafate where again we spent three nights and it was here that we saw our most spectacular glacier ever, the Perito Moreno glacier which is enormous, rising many metres in the air and looking like a massive landlocked iceberg but much more spectacular than any other iceberg.
We took a trip on a catamaran to go right up to the face of the glacier and the catamaran stayed an hour, just circling so that we saw the glacier from every angle and were able to photograph it ad infinitum. Some people used up an entire film or more just on this incredible natural phenomenon, as following the boat trip we were taken to a viewpoint on land where we could carry on gazing at the glacier from different levels. Many of our group refused to leave at the stated time as they were convinced they were going to see great chunks of ice break off. One chunk did fall off, which I didn’t see.
Then we moved on from El Calafate to the Torres El Paine National Park in Chile. Judith and I weren’t too impressed with the actual walks we went on there as they just did not match up to the 12 hour one we had done before and the glaciers we had seen then, as the weather was not good in the park, very misty and although we managed the walk (8 hours again but we did it in 7 hours), we considered it mediocre, and a lot of hard work climbing for very little reward. However, the camp site where we stayed, on Lake Pehoe was superb with the most magnificent view of the mountains with their snowcaps and this marvelous lake beneath them.
The actual facilities at the camp were atrocious, as the camp site was large and well used by an incredible number of people but there were only two loos for the women with one sink to wash at, and similar for the men, and only four communal showers in a different location which only produced out hot water from 8 to 11 in the morning and from 1900 to 2200 in the evening and very often we had to leave to go on our excursions before the showers were hot in the mornings and often arrived back too late to take advantage of the evening sessions!
The only good aspect of the camp was the tiny shop which was hardly bigger than a garden shed but sold the most amazing range of wines, beers, biscuits, snacks, cigarettes etc to suit just about every taste and did not rip us off as other places appeared to be doing. While there, we also went on a bus ride to a glacier (yes, this particular area both on the Argentine side and the Chile side is renowned for its glaciers) and although we could only see the end of the glacier at a distance we were able to walk around a beautiful lake with the most fantastically shaped and coloured blue icebergs which obviously had broken away from the glacier at some point. And this little place in the middle of nowhere had the most beautiful toilets we had seen in a long time as it had obviously just been built, was brand spanking new and had toilet paper as well as soap and hand driers and doors that actually locked and believe me that really is luxury in the public loos here!
And now I am in Ushaia, the city at the end of the world, on the little island at the base of South America called Tierra del Fuego and we discovered, Judith and I, with a visit to the little well run and very informative museum here that it was so called because when the first white men arrived they saw all these fires burning on the hills that the natives had lit, but whether this was to welcome or frighten away the intruders or just to keep the natives warm, is not known!!
It is extremely cold here all year round and 15 degrees is considered hot! The sun does shine but there is always a cold wind blowing and that gets worse in winter and spring apparently! We took a boat trip up the beagle channel yesterday and saw a colony of cormorants and a colony of sea lions and circled the lighthouse at the end of the world and yes, we took dozens of superfluous shots of everything in sight! But the boat was also a luxury as it was the first boat trip we had been on which actually served food on board and hot drinks and alcoholic drinks and for the men provided these two very attractive young ladies to serve it! And these young ladies would dress up in their navy blue topcoats with brass buttons to come out on deck and tell us all about the sights and scenes we were seeing, and informed the more ignorant of us that no, that wasn’t a colony of penguins we were viewing but cormorants! (They looked very similar with black backs and white chests and from a distance and even close to looked very penguin like).
Next month: en route to Buenos Aires and real penguins.
If you’d like to contact Iris, whether to wish her luck with her trip or to ask questions about her itinerary and places visited, I am sure she would like to hear from you. She can be contacted on: irisej2002@yahoo.co.uk