Los Pinguinos!

Our last stop in Argentina before heading back to Buenos Aires was an area called Peninsula Valdés. Valdés is famous for the thousands of Southern Right Whales that migrate each spring to the waters surrounding the peninsula, as well as a huge colony of elephant seals, sea lions and dolphins.

We were not planning to go and try to see the whales (being from BC we were sniffing our noses at the idea of whale watching) but we changed our mind and were very glad. We saw almost 10 whales, including some with their calves at their sides, and even got to see a whale breach, which was amazing. Up until only about 20 years ago, the Southern Right Whale was hunted in the same waters where we saw them, almost to extinction. In 1985, the international community persuaded Argentina to stop whaling and instead create revenue through tourists who would come to whale watch. Today, there´s about 3000 whales. They are HUGE, up to 15 metric tons!

We also saw the colony of elephant seals but must admit they weren´t quite as exciting as the whales. While on land, they are fasting and so pretty much don´t move at all! Kind of akin to a bunch of furry lumps...

Also, about 2 hours south of Valdés is a place called Punta Tomba, where there are over 500,000 Magellenic penguins! Penguins!! As far as the eye could see, there were penguins. At this time of year the penguins are nesting and the chicks are expected to arrive any day - we saw many eggs but no chicks... There are over 200,000 active nests in the area and it was quite the sight. Penguins spend most of their time in water so are amazing swimmers but are not adapted to land quite as gracefully! To us, they truly looked like cartoon caricatures, but they were definitely real. And so cute.

At Punta Tomba you can walk through the colony where the nests are built and look down over the beach to watch them play in the water - and they definitely play just for the sake of fun in waves, surfing and spinning and generally having a ball. Definitely a highlight of our whole trip to watch them in water. Also, we ran into two of our friends from Vancouver at the penguin colony! We knew they were in Argentina but it was still kind of crazy to run into your neighbour (one of them lives 3 blocks from us) at a penguin colony down south!

Our final highlight was to go out for dinner at one of the seafood restaurants along the shore of the closest town, Puerto Madryn. The area is obviously a major fishing port, with seafood such as squid and shellfish the specialties. We had a five course dinner of different kinds of shellfish and a bottle of really good wine. Hands down, the best calamari we´ve ever had. Every course was amazing quality, the restaurant was funky with good music and the service was fantastic. At home in Vancouver, we figure this would have been a $200 meal easily. We paid just over $50. They could definitely charge more and I would have paid! It´s called Vesta if anyone is ever in Puerto Madryn...

El Bolson and Trevelin

El Bolson was a welcome relief from the frosty weather in Bariloche. This little hippie town is nestled in a valley out of the wind, and was at least 10 degrees warmer than Bariloche. Such a relief not to be wearing all our jackets and still chilly!

We visited the craft market (very SaltSpring-esque) and then headed into the hills for our last patagonian trek. We couldn't do our originally planned trail due to a campground closure, so we had a bonus 10K of walking, on a dirt road past many farms with big dogs. Whee!

Once we reached the alternate trail it got rather more pleasant, meandering up a river valley along a good trail. We passed one other group of hikers and a few gauchos with 'herds' of 5 or 6 cows each. The only camping allowed was behind the refugio, in a field occasionally visited by very large Patagonian Chipmunks, that begged for food in typical chipmunk style.



The next morning we broke camp quickly and headed downriver to a lovely quiet place where we made our brekkie and chilled out drinking mate for a few hours.

Then we were off down the trail to our hostel and another few days of hippie-town relaxing. We went to the town's best restaurant on Dave's birthday and had a pretty fantastic meal of local trout grilled to perfections. The restaurant (Jauja) also has a chocolate shop and ice cream. Really, Really Good ice cream! Highly recommended! For those who've been tracking our search for the best ice cream in Argentina, this was the clear winner!

After El Bolson we headed to Esquel to simplify our bus connection to the coast. Not the most exciting town, apparently it's a good base for visiting a nearby national park, but we didn't have time. We did head to a little welsh town down the highway for high tea. Wow! The welsh tea tradition seems to have blended well with the argentine sweet tooth - after eating most of the 7 large pieces of cake we each got (Megan hid a few in her bag for the next day) we walked the 25K back to Esquel. Well, some of it - we flagged a bus before it got dark - but enough to reduce the sugar-induced jitters and let us sleep :)

Chocolate and Horses

We left the rain of Chile behind and crossed the border back to Argentina to Bariloche, essentially the start of Argentine Patagonia. Bariloche feels a lot like Whistler, it´s a major ski destination in winter and has a pretty spectacular setting on Nahuel Huapi Lake (massive and a bit chilly as it´s fed by glaciers). In the summer, it´s a center for hiking, horse riding and biking. Our plan before we arrive was to rent bikes but once we realized how windy the area was we modified :)

Our second wedding anniversary was Nov 2 and we celebrated by going horseback riding on an 'estancia', a farm where they breed cattle and sheep for steak and wool. The estancia owner was Carol Jones, who had lived on the farm her whole life and has been taking small groups out for over 20 years. The horses were actually quite nice, which for Megan was a surprising change from the normal type of horse that tourists are normally subjected to... these horses you got to ride, not just sit passively! So it was more of an adventure for Dave, who did great on his second time ever riding!! We had lunch of empanadas over a fire and shared mate with our hosts (who retrieved the water from the creek right next to our lunch stop. Since for mate you don´t actually bring the water to a boil, we were a bit concerned about the after-effects but our tummies seem to be South American adjusted now: ) All in all, a great anniversary experience.


Megan y David


Our Gaucho guides

Bariloche also turned out to be an awakening for us in terms of our plans to spend Nov and Dec trekking further south. Near Bariloche, we attempted to visit some of the mountain refugios (kind of like BCMC huts but bigger and with services...) that we had planned to link on multi-day treks.

As a quick sidenote, one other discovery we´ve made regarding Argentina is that camping here is VERY different than camping at home. Campgrounds usually have full services and are not in wilderness areas. In fact, in most parks you can´t camp anywhere 'wild', rather you must stay in the area where the services are and this often includes refugios with beds for up to 50 and a restaurant!!

We day tripped up to the first refugio in the mountains and discovered that we should have packed our snowshoes! Talking with people afterwards, turns out this year has been a huge one for snow and even though it´s technically spring, it´s still essentially winter camping (and in some cases skiing) conditions, which we are certainly not prepared or motivated for! One of our main goals this year is to avoid winter...

So our new plan is to extend our North American roadtrip to include give or take about a month in Baja Mexico. After all, our tour of the Americas can´t exclude Mexico!! Plus it´s warm and we can snorkel and paddle, one of Megan´s dreams. We will return to Vancouver briefly at the end of Nov to regroup, eat some veggies, pack and then get on the road to Mexico.

Another factor in our decision to change plans is that Argentine Patagonia, while gorgeous, reminds us very much of the Coast Mountain range of BC. We decided that a travel destination should not remind us so much of the area an hour from our house!

So, we are enjoying a few more weeks in Argentina, including the row upon row of chocolate shops that Bariloche is famous for...

Chilly Chile

Perusing our guidebook in Mendoza, we discovered that although the Acongagua Park was closed for the season, the road that stretches from Mendoza through the Andes and into Santiago, Chile was not to be missed. So onwards across and south to the Chilean Lakes district, which we believed would be a bit warmer than the Argentine side as it is lower elevation and closer to the ocean.

The ride through the Andes was pretty spectacular - we think we saw Acongagua, the highest peak in the Americas.



Following another 24 hours of travel and some unfortunate clothing catastrophes (Dave left his coat on the first bus that arrived in Santiago, we tried for hours to locate it in the lost and found. Apparently it was found on the bus but it seemed to get ´lost´again on the way to the customer service desk. We hope it will be used well. Then Megan spilled a cup of black coffee down the front of her favourite shirt. The worst part about this was that the coffee wasn´t even coffee - it was Nescafe).

However, eventually we arrived in a town called Puerto Montt, in south central Chile. Puerto Montt can best be described as similar to Port Alberni. We based ourselves there in order to do a trek in a nearby national park, the Alerce Andino. After figuring out the local bus system and finding a grocery store we were on our way. One thing we´ve discovered about both Chile and Argentina is that in rural areas, the local buses also serve as school buses! So after cramming ourselves and our packs into a bus with many children we found ourselves in the park. In fact, we were the only visitors to the park that day - the ranger seemed excited to see us, even with our fumbly Spanish.



We had fabulous weather and probably the best campsite ever - right beside a river. Definitely glad we got the trek in as the minute we caught the bus back to town it started to rain. And then it didn´t stop raining until we left Chile about 5 days later!!! If we were at all feeling homesick Chile cured us with all the rain. After our trek we headed over to Isla Chiloe, which was very beautiful and extremely green because of the mountains of rain it recieves annually... We met up with a friendly Argentine-Canadian from Canmore and went tootling around the island with him in his car. Must admit the luxury of not taking public transit for a day was pretty nice! We even had some patches of sunlight that day. We gave Chile one more shot and went to a town called Puerto Varas, a bit further inland but on a huge lake. More rain. Thankfully they had a good book exchange.



We left Chile without too much regret - we were a bit soggy and they do not have coffee except for Nescafe. Really. We had heard rumours but once faced with the reality it was difficult for Megan to cope. However, Chile is a gorgeous country with plenty of parks, camping and volcanos to climb. But maybe another time.