Buenos Aires, Argentina

Beautiful Buenos Aires... so much to do in so little time. Normally Johannes, Amelie and I are not fans of the big cities and the orginal plan was to stay for only two days. After 5 we had trouble tearing ourselves away. What an incredible place with great food, music, dancing, markets, architecture, neighbourhoods, anything and everything you dream of in a city.


We were immediately captured by the place. We saw an incredible tango musical, ate the most amazing meal at an ´all you can eat´parrilla (grill) restaurant, wandered around countless beautifully different neighbourhoods, had foam fights in the street for Carnaval... and the list goes on.


Tango in the sunday market palce in San Telmo.
Colourful buildings in La Boca
Giant old museum in Tigre.

I will definitely be coming back to this city. Wow!

ARGENTINA: Sarmiento, Camarones, Penisula Valdez

We have now been in Argentina for almost three weeks. We left Punta Arena, Chile on February 8 with our new friend Johannes from Germany. We ended up taking the non touristy route up the Argentine coast and made our first stop in the town of Sarmiento, famous for it´s petrofied forest. Here are Johannes and Amelie in the desertlike landscape. Practically the entire southern third of Argentina is pampa, pampa and more pampa.


We happened to find ourselves in the small town of Sarmiento of the weekend of the yearly Rodeo festival! What luck! The town was doubled in size for the festival and full of Argentine tourists. As far as we saw we were the only foreigners. Above are the three of us at the rodeo... a pretty strange sport if you ask me... but interesting to see at least once.

From Sarmiento we made our way to another even smaller, non touristy town called Camarones where there is a major penguin colony. We walked around among hundreds and hundreds of them. Close by there was also a sea lion colony, but they were too far away for photos.

They made me feel extra tall!

We then went farther north up to Puerto Madryn where we chilled out for a few days after the week of intense travelling. We took a day trip to the Peninsula Valdez where we saw tons of seals, and elephant seals. This photo was taken through Johannes´binoculors. The black ones are the puppies. They were all so cute playing together in the waves.

This is a Pichi... Amelie´s new favourite animal. It was scurrying around the parking lot at one of the look out points on the peninsula.

Argentina has turned out to be so incredibly different from Chile, far more than I had expected. The culture, language, traditions, daily routines, etc. are all so different. We are now used to the fact that businesses are all closed between 1pm and 5pm and practically every town has a plaza in its centre that comes to life at night full of free show, artesans and music. As we´ve been moving farther and farther north the climate has been getting hotter and hotter, a major change from the chilly south of Chile. It´s been difficult getting used to the heat.

Patagonia - Parque Torres Del Paine, Chile

Our seven days in the park began with gorgeous weather. We were not so lucky after that with rain at some point every other day and having to pack up wet tents three out of six mornings. The water here in Pehoé lake was crystal blue!
The enormous Grey Glacier, one of the largest ice caps in the world! This field of ice goes on as far as the eye can see. We camped close by for two nights...chilly.

An evening tea beside the glacier - an absolutely essential part of the day! The sun sets super late. It is almost 10pm in this photo! I am getting really good at the self portraits! Here we are the whole treking team - René, Mandy, Amélie and me - and what a great team we were too!

I took this photo during a short break in the rain. We made good use of our rain gear and water proof pack covers.
You can see the trail off to the left. It was soooooo windy in this valley and at times the trail was extremely narrow with a steep drop off to the right.... scary!

Amélie and me with the famous Torres del Paine (blue towers), the mascots of the park.

What a trip! Walking through cities with our heavy packs is now super easy after hiking with them through frigid, windy, rainy mountains

Chiloé and then down south to the Chilean Patagonia

Posting photos has kind of gone bust for the moment... frustrating! So I´ll have to give the update in writing only for the time being.

After Villarrica we spent five days on the Island of Chiloé where we stayed with the most charming family who were very happy to put up with our basic Spanish. We quickly became like part of the family, playing soccer with the two year old Bastian and building sand castles on the beach with ten year old Alina. With our elementary vocabulary it is extra easy to relate to kids! We spend a couple of days in Ancud and took a day trip to Castro where there are pretty little houses along the coast on stilts!

We then took a 36 hour bus ride all the way south to Punta Arena...yes I DID say 36 hours! It was painful... I even got car sick as we twisted and turned through the mountains.... not fun. In Santiago we had met a couple from Germany who happened to be on our same bus to Punta Arena. We ran into them again the following day in Punta Arena and decided to go on a trek in the Patagonia Mountains together. We spent one crazy day in Punta Arena preparing for our trek in Torres Del Paine National park. There is a duty free shopping zone here where we bought a sturdy little tent for only $50 CDN (cheaper to buy one than to rent one for the week!). We then set off for the spectacular Chilean Patagonia where we treked through snow capped Mountains, giant glaciers and ice caps, crystal blue lakes, and crazy cliffs with winds up to around 70 km per hr. We camped for 6 nights and hiked between 6 and 9 hrs per day... with our heavy packs full of all our camping gear and food. It was truly wonderful, terrible, exciting and exhausting all at the same time! We arrived back in Punta Arena late last night and are now trying to figure out where to go next... most probably to Argentina in the next couple of days. It is mighty cold here in the South of Chile (not like Canada...) and we´re ready to start heading back closer to the equator. It is reassuring though to know that we brought warm clothes and sleeping bags for a good reason.

I will try again to post photos soon.