From Argentina to Chile

May 15, 2024April 29, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

We returned to El Calafate after an epic 3 days hiking the Sendero al Fitz Roy in El Chalten. We only had a two-day break before starting our second major hike – 5 days in Torres del Paine National Park. I must admit, these two days were a bit miserable for me. I had caught a cold a few days before and it peaked on our time off. Honestly, it was better than dealing with a cold on the trail, but I was a bit irritable in between.

It’s a 1.5-hour drive from El Calafate to Perito Moreno glacier, which is one of the biggest attractions in the town. Interestingly, both the Sendero al Fitz Roy and Perito Moreno Glacier are located in Los Glaciares National Park, which extends along the border throughout the mountains. Both attractions are extremely popular destinations for tourists, but while Fitz Roy is free to camp and hike, Perito Moreno has a 10,000ARS ($10USD) entrance fee.

Perito Moreno is very well developed as a tourist attraction, with a large visitor centre and several kilometres of extremely well maintained boardwalk extending along the hillside to provide viewing balconies for the glacier. It really bothered me to pay for Perito Moreno and not Fitz Roy. The facilities on the Sendero al Fitz Roy are in terrible condition (I’m mostly talking about the outhouses), and I really wish the government would charge campers $10 a night to upgrade some of the park facilities along the trail. The environment really needs it!

Our driver dropped us at the trailhead for the glacier balconies and we spent several hours walking the boardwalk and viewing the glacier. The weather was drizzling, but it wasn’t full on raining and it started and stopped a lot. The trail was quite empty when we arrived, which was surprising, but I think we were ahead of all the big tour buses, as it did get more crowded later, although it was never overwhelming.

Perito Moreno glacier is unlike any glacier I’ve ever seen. It’s a massive ice sheet that comes down through the mountains from the larger Southern Patagonia Icefield. The glacier extends all the way to the lake, where it discharges into Lago Roca and Lago Argentino (which is right next to El Calafate). The ice extends almost to the walkways, so you’re incredibly close to it! Until 2020, the glacier had remained constant for 100 years, meaning it was neither growing or receding, but it has started to recede since 2020. It has a large impact on the water level in the lakes and can cause flooding in years where there is a high melt.

We spent a few hours walking the boardwalks and watching icebergs calve off from the sheet. You can pay to take a boat out into the lake to get slightly closer to the ice, but you’re so close already, I don’t regret saving our money and lazing around at the balconies. There is a visitor centre with food, but there’s no food available along the boardwalk, so we had brought lunch with us and enjoyed it along some of the benches.

We spent about 3 hours at the balconies in total and then got picked up by our driver. I slept on the way back to town again, while Seth continued to count rhea and guanaco through the window. I decided that I wanted to eat guanaco before leaving the desert and Seth found us a “hip” restaurant with guanaco burgers that turned out to be a dingy pub. Unfortunately, the burger was very disappointing, but I blame the restaurant more than the animal. It was decidedly not hip, but at least I got to try something new on our final day in Argentina.

The next day we had to take a 6-hour bus across the border to Chile. In classic Maria fashion, I didn’t sleep well because I was up all night worrying about missing our bus. This resulted in us getting up early and waiting around for a bus that obviously left late. I was a little bit nervous about crossing into Chile because I had read online that their border control is very strict. We’d dehydrated all our own food for the trip, which was a pleasure to eat on the trail, so I really didn’t want to get it confiscated at the border. Argentina didn’t care at all about what we brought in, but because Chile has a big agricultural industry, they ask you to declare all food. If you don’t, you may not get caught, but if you do, you could be facing large fines. So if in doubt, declare.

To make my dehydrated food look more legit, I actually heat sealed everything into those little foil lined bags used for loose leaf tea, and created fancy labels for each packet. The vibe I was going for was “farmer’s market, but commercially sealed”. It ended up being overkill as no one even bothered to look at it. I wonder if the border guards may have been interested if I entered through an airport, but they don’t even make you take your luggage off the bus when you cross by road.

We did have to get off the bus and put all our day bags through screening, and a border agent inspected the inside of the bus, but no one checked any of the luggage (although the hold may have gotten a sniff test from a border dog). We still declared what we had, but when I said it was “dried hiking food”, they didn’t ask any more questions. I could have saved myself a ton of time on the packaging and just used Ziploc bags like I normally do. They seem to mostly be interested in confiscating any fresh fruit or vegetables. Several people did have fruit in their bag that they did not declare, which got taken, but no one on our bus got fined. It seemed like very normal border control to me, and not scary like what I’d read online.

We arrived in Puerto Natales in the late afternoon, which is the jumping off point for anyone visiting Torres del Paine National Park. It’s an interesting town. It was similar in size to El Calafate, but it had a much different vibe. El Calafate had the feel of a town that was built around tourism, whereas Puerto Natales felt like a town that tourism happened to. We selected our guesthouses based on proximity to the bus depot, so in both instances, it was a walk to get to town, but somehow it felt a lot further in Puerto Natales. The town didn’t feel quite as welcoming to me, although there were a lot less stray dogs (I’ve never seen more stray dogs anywhere than in El Calafate)!

Our guesthouse in Puerto Natales was top notch and had the comfiest king sized bed! After dropping off our gear, we had a lot of errands to run. We’d eaten all of our food from Argentina (to avoid crossing the border with it), so we had to stock up on snacks and breakfast food for our Torres del Paine trek. I’d read online before the trip that it’s easy to find hiking food locally and to not bother bringing your own, but I’m so glad we did! It was so hard finding breakfast and snack food that was filling, enjoyable to eat, and lightweight; I was so glad I didn’t also have to find 5 days’ worth of lunches and suppers! We spent a long time at the grocery store trying to find enough snacks for our week long hike, and it was chaotic because we didn’t have a coin for the shopping cart, so we were forced to run around the store with armloads of food.

Eventually I piled enough food into Seth’s arms that I figured we wouldn’t starve on the trail (obviously we ended up buying way more than we needed) and we went in search of dinner. Everyone eats late in Argentina and Chile and a lot of the restaurants don’t open until 7pm. I wanted to be asleep by 9pm and we still had to re-pack, so we walked around until we found a nice little spot that was open. It was a good meal, but the staff didn’t speak any Spanish so I ended up with something very different than what I thought I’d ordered. I thought I was getting grilled white fish (which is a comfort food for me and I was still sick), but I ended up with the most ridiculous mixed seafood platter. On any other day, I would have been pumped to eat it, but it wasn’t really a “eat mystery seafood” kind of day for me. Fortunately, it was tasty and it ended up being fine.

Seth on the other hand, had ceviche. It was a delicious meal and he savoured every minute of it, but it was many a little too ambitious for his travelling stomach on the day before a major hike. He ended up regretting it the following day (if you catch my meaning). Fortunately, there was no issue that evening and we returned to our guesthouse to repack all our food and bags to start our 5-day trek on the W-circuit the following morning! Check back next week to read about the trek!

Tierra del Fuego National Park

April 17, 2024April 24, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

On our second day in Ushuaia, we were determined to visit Tierra del Fuego National Park. I was really tempted to check out some of the hiking trails in the area, but I felt that visiting the park was a unique experience that I didn’t want to miss, so we opted to do the much more touristy activity. We signed up for a tour and got picked up at our hostel in the morning to drive towards the park. The bus dropped us off at the train station and we had the opportunity to travel into the park by train instead.

Tierra del Fuego is already an interesting geographic region at the end of the world, but it has an interesting history as well. We didn’t have the opportunity to learn very much about its indigenous history, except that there were a number of indigenous Fuegian groups living all over the coastal south region and the interior of the island. They had a very unique culture and were never colonized by the Incans (like many other parts of Argentina and Chile), but like many indigenous groups, they were devastated by the arrival of the Europeans and diseases like measles and smallpox.

Unfortunately, the park doesn’t really focus on this history. It’s a common theme we noticed in both Argentina and Chile, with the bypassing of indigenous history, save for our guide in Santiago, who shared more indigenous history with us on his 3 hour tour, than we learned on the rest of the entire trip. The National Park is heavily marketed to tourists, but they’ve decided to focus on the colonial history of Ushuaia and the surrounding area.

Ushuaia was initially founded as a penal colony in the early 1900’s and as it expanded, a railway was constructed to transport the prisoners into the forest to harvest timber to support the town’s growing needs. The train has been refurbished and is now known as “el tren del fin del mundo”. Today, it transports hundreds of tourists 7km into the park, showcasing gorgeous landscapes and educating visitors on the history of the railroad. It was a cool experience – it’s very picturesque and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn about the history – but I have to say, the entire experience is a bit tasteless.

The train has a very dark history, as many of the prisoners were severely mistreated during this time period. I felt that the tour didn’t understand its intention, in that it didn’t think critically about the experiences of the prisoners or respect them. The audio tour starts off by talking about how progressive it was to offer the prisoners work, and that many of them loved the opportunity to get outside and enjoy nature. But then later in the tour it expands on how the prisoners were starved, beaten, and mistreated while working in what was essentially a labour camp. It’s not like they were given the choice to participate in labour, so it didn’t seem very progressive to me and felt rather tone-deaf.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the Park also has paid actors running around everywhere dressed as goofy prisoners. They make you take a photo with them before boarding the train where they encourage you to pretend that you caught these naughty prisoners trying to escape (and then later try and sell you the photo of course). I found the entire production to be disrespectful and insulting to the people that suffered in this prison at the start of the century. It’s a good learning opportunity, but it was too commercialized and executed poorly.

It’s a one-way train journey, so our tour bus picked us up at the end of the line and we spent the next several hours exploring around the park. This part of the tour, I really enjoyed. First we visited the post office. It’s not the most southerly post office in the world (that honour is reserved for the one in Antarctica), but it is known as the “end of the road”. The road in question is the Pan-American highway, which stretches 30,000km from Alaska to Ushuaia. The post office is located on a beautiful beach, so we sent ourselves a postcard (stamped with a penguin) and then enjoyed the views.

Our next stop was Lapataia, which is the real end of the road and has a beautiful mirador of the Beagle Channel. Our bus dropped us off 1km away from the parking lot and we did a short walk through the forest to Lapataia and then explored the viewpoints. It was a nice day – not super warm, but a mix of sun and clouds. I really liked the forest walk, which smelled amazing after rain from the previous night. Our last stop was to Lago Roca, which is a huge lake located on the border between Argentina and Chile. Our tour guides shared some local spirits with us at the end of the tour (which was actually delicious, a very caramelly whisky), before returning to Ushuaia.

We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping around the downtown area. Seth was determined to find a bird guide and we visited some of the outdoor stores, of which there is actually a large number due to the many expeditions leaving from Ushuaia. But our main goal for the rest of the day was to sample the king crab that Ushuaia is known for. Our tour guides all recommended the same restaurant, a small place called El Viejo Marino, but given how small it was and how often it’s recommended, we could not get a table. Seth did a bit of research and found a place called La Casa de Los Mariscos, which I would highly recommend!

We got to the restaurant 15 minutes before it opened and were the first in line for the night, but a long line quickly developed behind us and by the time the doors opened, the entire restaurant was immediately filled. It was a great choice and one of the best meals I had on the entire trip! The popular dish is the parmesan king crab, which is basically a full crab baked with parmesan cheese. It was delicious and we ordered one to share with a seafood paella that came with squid, scallops, shrimp, clam, mussels, and white fish! We topped it off with a full bottle of wine for the low low price of $9. There was a guy performing life music throughout the night as well and the whole restaurant had a great vibe!

It was a wonderful way to end our time in Ushuaia. It was a very quick trip to the end of the world, we only really had two days there as we flew out to El Calafate early the next morning. I found our trip to be a bit airplane heavy on the front end with the excursion down to Ushuaia, but once we landed in El Calafate, we wouldn’t be flying anymore until the end of the trip,

El Calafate is further north than Ushuaia (everything is), but is located squarely in the center of the Argentine Patagonia. It’s the jumping off place for anyone looking to explore Los Glaciares National Park. Like Ushuaia, it was not at all what I expected. I thought El Calafate would be smack dab in the middle of the mountains, but Patagonia is quite different from the other mountainous regions I’ve visited. Mostly in that it’s still true wilderness. There are not very many towns actually located in the mountains. The mountains are crowded around the Argentina-Chile border, but east of the border mountains, Argentina is pretty much all flatland desert. It’s very dry and barren.

El Calafate is located right on the enormous Lago Argentino. It has a nice view of the mountains across the lake, but the town is characterized more by the desert than the mountains. We stayed in a nice little guesthouse, arriving around noon. We were starting our first trek the following day, so we spent the afternoon picking up some groceries for the trip and sourcing other things we couldn’t bring with us, like fuel for our stove. We enjoyed some beers at Patagonia Brewing and then spent the rest of the day birdwatching at Laguna Nimez, a reserve next to the lake. We saw lots of birds, but the most interesting was probably the Chilean Flamingo! There were dozens of them hanging out in the lagoon and they’re pretty goofy to watch.

In the evening, we re-packed our bags, leaving a suitcase at the guesthouse and getting our backpacks ready for our first trek: 3 days on the Sendero Fitz Roy!

Birdwatching in Ushuaia

April 10, 2024April 24, 2024 / Maria / 3 Comments

We arrived in Ushuaia very late at night and took a taxi to our hostel. It was a harsh welcome because Buenos Aires was 30 degrees and Ushuaia was more like 10 degrees. It didn’t help that our room at the hostel could only be accessed from outside and no one had turned on the radiator before we arrived, so it was freezing on the first night.

We had a full day excursion booked, so it was an early rise the next morning with a 6am wake-up call. But it was worth it because we were taking a tour to Isla Martillo to walk with penguins! We were very lucky that it was a gorgeous day, which can be hard to come by in Ushuaia. Ushuaia is the most southern city in the world, and is popularly known as “the end of the world”. So even though it’s summer in February, the weather can still be quite harsh. It didn’t get much warmer than 12 degrees the whole time we were there and it can get extremely windy. One of the locals told me it does get up to 25 degrees sometimes, but there was fresh snow on the mountaintops while we were there.

We were up early enough to catch the sunrise as we walked down to the waterfront to find our tour. Ushuaia is in Patagonia, but it is more commonly associated with Tierra del Fuego, a large island at the bottom of South America. Ushuaia is located on the famous Beagle Channel, which separates Argentina from Chile. It’s also the starting point for most cruises to Antarctica, so there were a lot of ships of all sizes docked in the harbour. We enjoyed the sunrise over the channel and then jumped on a bus to drive 1.5 hours towards Haberton Ranch to catch a zodiac to Isla Martillo.

One of the most popular activities in Ushuaia (aside from Antarctica), is to cruise the Beagle Channel to see penguins. There are a ton of pleasure cruises that leave from Ushuaia and motor down to Isla Martillo to observe the penguins that nest on the island. There is just one tour (Piratour) that allows you to actually go on the island. It was definitely a costly tour, but I don’t regret paying extra for it because it was fantastic!

There are only 20 people allowed on the island at a time and you have to be accompanied by a certified guide. Our group was split in two and we spent the first hour visiting the Museo Acatushun at Haberton Ranch, while the other group toured the island. The Museum has the largest collection of marine birds and mammal bones in the world. It’s an eccentric place – the owner was an enthusiastic collector of whale bones, but they can be pretty stinky, so she basically bought the ranch as a place to store all her bones and then turned it into a museum. She’s since passed away, but the museum is now staffed by energetic biology students, who run daily tours and then clean bones in their spare time.

Tierra del Fuego is a great place for a bone museum though because it seems to be the place where whales go to die. We saw one dead whale washed up on the beach on our way to the ranch, and another one from the boat on our way to the island. But it’s a cool place and the students that give the tours are very knowledgeable. We had a fun time and it’s a super scenic location. It was quite chilly and windy and it really contributed to the “end of the world” vibes. It kind of hit me at that moment, the gravity of where we were and how lucky we were to be there. I’ve wanted to visit Patagonia for at least 6 years now, and it felt unreal to actually be doing it.

As cool as the Museum was, the penguins were infinitely cooler. We took a zodiac for about 15 minutes to Isla Martillo, where we disembarked with our guide to walk the island. There are two types of penguins that nest on the island – Magellanic Penguins and Gentoo Penguins. Occasionally you can see King Penguins on the island as well, but they don’t nest there. The Magellanic Penguins don’t really like the cold, so from what I remember, Isla Martillo is one of the most southerly colonies of Magellanic Penguins and they only migrate there in the summer to nest. The Gentoo Penguins are more traditionally found in Antarctica, but this colony can be found on the island year round.

I would hate to have to be one of the guides shepherding people around the island. It’s really important to stay together as a group and to always be with your guide so as to cause the least disruption to the penguins. But as you can imagine, people more or less lose their minds the second they see a penguin, so there was a lot of trying to keep the group gathered together. But it’s really such a cool experience. The boat drops you right on the beach and you visit the Gentoo colony nesting on the rocks first. There are Magellanic Penguins all over the island, so after that, you walk a little bit inland to see some of their burrows. They don’t seem bothered by people and it was cool to watch them waddling around. But my favourite was watching them swim. They’re so slow on land, but they absolutely whiz through the water!

We spent about an hour on the island before getting picked up by the zodiac and returning to Ushuaia via bus. We had a few hours of break time in the afternoon and we spent some time exploring the town. Ushuaia was not at all what I expected. It’s the “end of the world”, so I was expecting a very small town and was completely shocked to find dozens of mid-level high rises stretching across the oceanfront. The town is nestled on the foothills of the Patagonian mountains and because of the Antarctica cruises, it’s absolutely crawling with people. The actual town population is ~82,000, but I’m sure that balloons quite a bit with all the tourists.

Because of its location, seafood is easy to find and we quickly learned that the delicacy in Ushuaia was king crab. We decided to save that for our second day and instead, found a nice restaurant selling roast lamb, another Patagonian delicacy. We ordered lamb with roast potatoes and vegetables for two and received a ridiculously delicious and large portion of lamb! We ended up bringing half of it back to the hostel and eating it again for lunch the following day.

In the evening, we returned to the waterfront for our cruise of the Beagle Channel. Cruising the Beagle Channel is one of the biggest attractions, and like I said, a lot of people ride all the way down to Isla Martillo to view the penguins from the boat. We didn’t need to cruise that far, but I didn’t want to miss the channel, so the evening cruise was a great compromise!

One thing I loved about coming from Canada to Patagonia in February was the increased amount of daylight. Sunset was still 5pm in Vancouver at that time, so it was a real treat to enjoy a 9pm sunset every night in Ushuaia. Our cruise left at 6pm, but instead of having to motor all the way down to Isla Martillo, we got to circle around the Channel observing all the marine life! I think it may have been Seth’s favourite day of the entire trip and we had a blast on the boat because there were a ton of other very enthusiastic bird nerds on board that we quickly befriended.

It was pretty cold, so a lot of people stayed huddled inside the heated part of the boat, but we spent the entire cruise on the roof. Seth had his binoculars of course, but most of the other birders were sporting very large cameras. We hadn’t been able to find a quality English bird guide yet, so we took advantage of the other birders identification skills and had a great time spotting wildlife.

The highlight of the cruise for the birders was spotting a Blackish Cinclodes, which is a pretty unremarkable little black bird, but apparently it’s super rare and was flying around the boat for a solid hour, so all the nerds were in a tizzy over it! I’m not sure what my favourite bird was, I’m still pretty partial to oystercatchers, so maybe them, but it was cool to see an albatross.

The highlight of the tour for non-birders is probably Faro les Eclaireurs, which is a small lighthouse structure on a barren rock. It’s probably known as the “lighthouse at the end of the world” if I had to guess. It did have a bunch of sea lions hanging out on it at least! What I found more intriguing was the fact that the Channel is basically the border between Chile and Argentina, so while you’re cruising around, you have Argentina to the east and Chile to the west!

The tour finished around 9pm and we made a quick exit back to the hostel to try and catch up on some rest before another big day exploring Tierra del Fuego National Park. Check back next week for that!