Long time no post! After 8 months of traveling in North America we decided to change the setting a bit and spend the remaining of our pre-wedding voyage in South America.
The new plan involved buying a camper (or any car with a bed inside), travelling 3 months through South America, and most importantly after our trip to Yukon and Alaska, visiting the other end of the American continent: Patagonia.
We landed in Santiago de Chile at the end of January and in one week, bought a car from a Czech-Dutch couple who travelled with it a similar route to what we were planning. It’s a Nissan X-Trail from 2009 with a simple bed inside, a cooker, and enough storage place for food, backpacks and the rest of our stuff. We left the city immediately (it was 38°C !) after stocking up on all necessities and headed south.
After following the Pacific for some time, we crossed central Chile, where the wildfires were devouring huge areas of forests. Two of the national parks we had planned to visit were closed due to this, and the air was thick and the sun was red. We visited Pichilemu, a famous surfing spot, and crossed into Argentina. This was our first border crossing with this newly bought car and it was quite busy and messy. It took us 4h to wait in line in front of the various offices in order to collect all required forms and stamps, but the setting was grandiose: Old volcanoes and forests of Araucanias (a living fossil tree that predates the apparition of pines, diplodocuses were eating those!)
We arrived in the vast dry planes of Argentinian Patagonia (or „the land of giants“, named like this because the local Tehuelche people were allegedly quite tall when Magellan anchored here). Those endless planes are only populated by quantities of guanacos (local wild llamas) and ~nandus (small ostriches) and estancias (ranches) as nothing else could resist the famously strong Patagonian wind.
We decided to go straight to the Atlantic coast to visit Gaiman, a small town that rose from Welsh communities that established here in XIX century, and visit a Palaeontology museum that contains bones from the biggest dinosaur ever found: the Patagotitan. The museum was a bit disappointing (the patagotitan was actually on a world tour), but we were lucky to meet a young fellow scientist working there who brought us in the reserve and in the labs, where we could marvel at freshly found bones and have a fascinating discussion with him and his colleagues. They were preparing for the digging of a new site with hadrosaurs (the ones with bony skulls).
Magda’s father has always dreamt of seeing Patagonia, hence for the second time we met with him and Agnieszka for a two weeks van trip. We followed the Atlantic coast all the way to Punta Arenas where their plane landed, and made a visit to the local museum that looked more like a “cabinet de curiosité”, with stuffed animals, bug collections, whale foetus in jars, pictures from the missionary settlers, as well as ship wreck pieces, local native tribes artefacts, and various other things.
We went on together across Tierra del Fuego all the way to Ushuaia, the end of the road. The town started as a British mission established in second half of XIX century by the relentless efforts of struggling pioneers, that sadly resulted directly or indirectly in the vanishing of all the local indigenous tribes (diseases, alcohol, internal conflicts due to land loss, manhunt, and assimilation). We then took a boat across the Beagle Chanel (named after the HMS Beagle that carried onboard young Darwin while he was forming his famous theory), and saw some tiny penguins from very (too?) close.
After this, we rolled to the Harberton estancia, built by Thomas Bridges and his sons after he decided to leave the mission in 1886. This settlement was still nicely preserved, and between the old house, the decorative whale bones, the nice vegetable & fruits garden, the boats made by the eldest son, the rolling hills, the cemetery, the sheep shaving equipments, and the grand-niece working at the reception we felt like we were back in 1890s.
Patagonia is definitely strange and even fully colonised by sheep farmers and road-trippers, it kept some of its mysterious charms. Following the pages of a famous travel book (In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin), we went to visit caves back in Chilean Patagonia, where incredibly well preserved remains of the mylodon were found a century ago (a giant sloth that disappeared together with all the mega-fauna, coincidently when humans arrived 13000 years ago). Since then, all the pieces flew to museums around the world and left the caves empty of remains but full of cavemen dreams.
Our next stop was the last for Bogdan and Agnieszka, and one of the most famous in all Chile: Torres del Paine, an impressive and colourful mountain massif surrounded by glaciers, and a hikers’ paradise. After getting lost all around the park and seeing icebergs, guanacos, birds of preys, and condors, they left us and went back to Punta Arenas while we started our tiresome but rewarding journey hiking and camping around the massif.
We did the O trek, so around 130 km in 8 days, with several steep 900m+ ascents to the various view points and a high snowy mountain pass. The beginning was a good test of our will power since it rained for 3 days, and we had to do long hikes in unbelievably muddy terrain with our heavy backpacks, desperately trying to dry our clothes, shoes and bones every night. On the other side of the range it was easier and more sunny but also more crowded. Assuredly, the sights were breathtaking and the facilities were nice.
The Andean side of Patagonia contains the largest continental ice-field (apart for Antartica), which leaks between the mountain peaks in the form of many glacier tongues, which melts (every year faster) into electric blue and milky green rivers and lakes. We crossed the border to Argentina to see the glacier that is on everybody’s map - The Perito Moreno in El Calafate. It is a ~150m thick ice tongue floating on a lake, which regularly breaks in spectacular pieces, creating surreal waves and sounds. Afterwards, we visited El Chalten, a hike enthusiasts mountain village known as the Argentinian equivalent of Torres del Paine. Impressive mountain peaks, many hikes, wild camps, and beautiful glacier lakes await in surrounding forests.
After rushing a bit southward to meet with Magda’s father we are now slowly traveling northward trying to connect some interesting points on our map. One of those innocent looking points was Cueva de los Manos, a canyon hidden in the steppes where generations of nomadic tribes left traces of their passage in increasingly abstract symbols and in many printed hands. The oldest were ~9000 years old but three main groups seem to have visited the place. We can guess (from the many guanaco pantings) that they were guanaco hunters following the herds. They were nomadic people like we were all since 200 000 years ago, and until quite recently (~10 000 years is the beginning of the Neolithic in the middle east). They were roaming freely through a vast a wild land like we forever long to do.
Right now, we are driving the famous Carretera Austral in Chilean Patagonia. We will post photos soon!