david the groucho

This is just to show you David outside his comfort zone! On the back of a real horse on a real estancia. We had a wonderful day: boat trip to yet another glacier (Upsala) then a stop at an estancia that was set up by English immigrants in the early 1900s, about 3 hours on a horse (not moving v fast but crossing deep cold rivers) and a wonderful meal. Top of the range tourism for our last jaunt of the holiday! Starting the long trip back tomorrow.

under the radar

We have just come out from under the radar in the Torres de Paigne National Park (Chile). 5 days trekking, rain, snow and occasional sun, staying in refuges. We arrived after 8pm, wet and tired at the first one on the first night and they had run out of beds, offered us a tent. I must have looked crestfallen (and very old) because they rustled up two bunks in the staff quarters, and very comfy they were too.
Spectacular scenery and pretty spectacular tiredness by the end of some days! The mountains there are high enough to attract their own weather (and lots of it!) so we didn´t always get the brochure views. Added disadvantage was that (after weighing every last toothbrush in the backpacks which to carry them from A to B) David brought along 800 pages of biography of Shackleton. So however cold and wet we were, Shackleton was always orders of magnitude worse off.
But there were real highlights, a pisco sour ón the house´at refuge 3 and the little colony of icebergs nestling in the lake by refuge 4, amazingly blue and cute.
Yesterday came back to Argentina, lots of border bureaucracy in true S American style. And today a beautiful sunny day and an addition to the wonder of the world list, right up there with the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls: the Perito Moreno glacier,
Its one of the last still-advancing glaciers in the world, moving quite fast- 3m per day in some places and 5Km across, and very clean (unlike most other glaciers in my experience). This adds up to truly spectacular view of the top of the glacier (pointy bits and crevasses like villi)and the side which advances into a lake. So a bit of patientce is rewarded by huge slabs of ice 200 ft high shearing off into the lake with a crack that arrives perceptibly after the slo-mo fall of the ice. Really amazing - so we waited for another and another. But with my companion wittering about stochastic processes and me always looking in the wrong direction, I missed the best bit of drama. Like watching cricket, I think.
Long bus journey tomorrow.
Wonderful news from home: it seems that Lorreta got an offer from Keele after her interview last week!

march of the penguins 2

We are staying in the Antarcticia Hostel, highly recommended in backpacker circles, quite rightly. Good grapevining. Rented bikes in the morning and headed up the coast till the road ran out. Boatride in the late afternoon timed to intercept the arrival on shore of the local (2 hours away) penguin colony. Very cute and astonishingly unconcerned about the looming boat beaching on their shore. The juveniles are still fluffy/scruffy while the adults are terribly smart. The water is very clear all the way up the Beagle channel so you could see the penguins swimming underwater, which seemed much more their element!
Barbecue in the hostel in the evening - but nobody eats before 10.30pm at the earliest, which pretty much counts me out! Nice to hear from Gik yesterday.
Off on a little plane tomorrow.

theendoftheworld

Well here we are at the end of the world. We travelled for a day and a half and it really felt like it!. Overnight to Buenos Aires - David just put a blanket over his head like a canary and slept through, while I squirmed and watched the hours pass slowly. Buenos Aires is a very functional city. We had a few hours and a change of airports to negotiate so managed a pilgrimage to the (British built) railway station and a ride on the underground (mosiacs, tiles, lovely)
Here at the very bottom of S America, the sun is shining. Ushuaia was the Argentianian gualag. Convicts built the railway which is now transformed to a bizzare touristique attraction, with station-masters dressed as the Fat Controller and menials as convicts. After a bit of ostentatious poop-pooping, the train rumbles into the local national park, where we walked for a few hours through Hobbit-y forests before missing the return train.
Ushuaia is a bit like a frontier boom-town - tin shacks next to concrete buildings, brothel bars next to souvenier shops.
Off to sea tomorrow!