OK, don’t look – can you name the five largest lakes in the world? A quick clue, one of them is a sea.

Iris, a British lady of considerable character and pluck, is on a 23 week overland expedition from Quito in Ecuador to Caracas in Venezuela. After this, she plans to do a 3-month voluntary placement in Ecuador, and then visit Central America for another overland trip between Panama City and Mexico City, ending up with perhaps another 2-month voluntary placement somewhere in South America again. This amazing journey will take Iris one year. Here is an extract from Iris’ journey notebook.

15 of our overland gang left us in Ushaia – not because they had come to the end of their trip but because they wanted to spend more time in Ushaia and so, at their own expense opted to stay on in hotels longer and to fly up to Buenos Aires (BA) in order to spend more time there as well. They would then join up with us in BA when we arrived there after spending five days travelling overland.

The remainder of us, 8 including our drivers/tour leaders, then travelled up to BA in a marathon 3,000 km plus journey, so that most of our time was spend on the road, with only two short visits to a petrified forest and a penguin colony to break the monotony and to give us a bit of extra comfort, we opted to drive further on one particular day so that we could spend a night in a hotel! The rest of the time was spent in rough camps along the way!

The petrified forest was in the middle of nowhere. It was very low key, just a park warden looking after a solitary outpost, guarding relics from some 5 million years ago and which they considered were the remains of an enormous forest full of gigantic trees which had suddenly and catastrophically been buried after several natural disasters and which had miraculously been uncovered again in subsequent earth movements. It comprised some enormous trunks lying on the surface of the ground over an extensive area and looked to this lay person’s eye like the remains from some ancient logging ground where the chain saws had been removed and the trunks just left fragmented where they lay. But they were of course now turned to stone. We arrived in the evening at about 1800 and had about an hour to walk round and look at these relics, but unfortunately none of us could really appreciate them because we had such little information as to why they were considered so significant. There was a museum housing fauna and flora of the region and depicting the course of events over several 100 million years but as everything was in Spanish and only one sparse leaflet in English, it was rather disappointing that we did not have a suitable guide to explain it all to us.

We stayed that night in a really rough camp site, again, in the middle of nowhere, which seemed frequented more by roaming labourers from local roadworks rather than the normal tourist place. We lit up a barbecue and ate good steaks that night, all the food having been purchased in bulk before leaving Ushaia.

The next day we pressed on, without pause to a place called Rio Gallegos, eating our lunch on the truck. We prepared it too in the truck on the move. Because the truck was so empty with just 6 instead of the usual 22 people in the back, it bumped and rattled and lurched over the rough roads perhaps more than it would have done if it had been fully laden, and so some accidents did occur with chopped salad etc, as we attempted to fill baguettes for the lunch-time snack!) But Rio Gallegos, gave us a welcome respite from camping as we stayed in a hotel that night and so had the luxury of beds and en suite showers! We went for a meal soon after booking in, and chose the restaurant on the other side of the road to the hotel, where family groups were eating three course meals at midnight! This is the norm in Argentina, as people tend to go out to eat in the late evening, but not before 2130 and even later!

Our next excursion was to a penguin colony that was situated near a place called Camarones, where we camped for the night close to the beach. We spent just an hour and a half at the colony. Penguins breed there and apparently stay for three years, growing up, before making any sea journeys. The whole area was full of young penguins, some already moulted, others younger and still covered in baby fur and all sorts of others in the in-between state looking as if they had all rescued their coats from moth infested wardrobes! However, although it was great to walk among them (along a designated footpath from which we were not allowed to stray) the penguins ignored this. They were allowed to stray on to the footpath and so we had a few very interesting encounters, as they are inquisitive birds, totally unfazed by humans walking around, and so they would pause and swivel their heads almost through a full 180 degrees to try and focus on us and work out who we were!

These two visits were the sum total of sightseeing on the 5 days it took to travel in our overland truck from Ushaia to BA and so we arrived in that capital city ready for a rest and some comfortable beds!

Next Month, Buenos Aires and Uruguay.

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

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