Walk on the Wild Side

On Wednesday 31^st January we arrived in Puerto Natales, this being the town from which most people depart for the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.  It’s quite a nice town and we spent a pleasant couple of days there catching up on the usual admin and domestic chores and visiting the nearby Cueva del Milodon.

The Milodon was a giant sloth about twelve feet high that lived in these parts up to about 14,000 years ago when it became extinct, but whether by the hand of man or climate change is uncertain. What is certain is that the remains of these things were found in this mighty cave that we visited.

The cave had been carved out by sea action millennia earlier, the width of it was about 150 metres and the depth about four or five hundred metres.  It was very impressive, and we much enjoyed our visit there.

Milodon's eye view of Chile

We also saw black neck swans for the first time whilst we were staying at Puerto Natales. There were dozens of them bobbing up and down on the windswept sound just outside the town, several of them with little cygnets also bobbing up and down in their wake. 

Black neck swan with cygnets

We left Puerto Natales on Friday and made our way to Torres del Paine national park. We had sight of the huge and very beautiful massif beyond the lakes long before we reached the park.  

On the road to Torres del Paine

Guanaco

The park itself was busy with visitors, many of them hiking the entire circuit which apparently takes about seven days.  Needless to say, we decided against that particular challenge, but we spent a wonderful couple of days camping in the park, walking at the base of the massif and climbing the Mirador Condor which gave us the most spectacular views.

Camping at the foot of Torres del Paine massif

Torres del Paine

The savage sharp toothed pinnacles of the Torres de Paine mountains rise precipitously from the plain and are very impressive.  The more sheltered southern slopes were still clad in show fields and these were melting to form rivulets of water and waterfalls cascading down the side of the mountain to gather together in big snowmelt rivers.

The Towers at Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine showing rock colour variation

From the top of the Mirador Condor we could see beneath us a series of lakes and lagoons, brilliant turquoise with the shadows of the clouds scudding across them, and a pattern of islands of various shapes and sizes distributed in the water. What we didn’t see was any condors, but then you can’t have everything.

Torres del Paine from across the lake

It was very windy and on the first night it felt a little bit like sleeping at the top of a poplar tree during a hurricane.  The tent was whacking around in the wind as though it was minded to go into orbit and we spent a little time wondering whether we would be looking at the stars ere long. We’re pleased to report that the tent behaved impeccably.

Armadillo patrolling our campsite

We left the park and the mountain behind us on Sunday 4^th February, crossed back over the border from Chile into Argentina and headed north to the town of El Calafate.  The 250 kilometre drive itself across the flat Patagonian steppe, much of it on long straight dirt road, was exceedingly boring. There was the occasional herd of guanaco, and a few rheas, but mostly there was dust, dust which got in our eyes and in our ears and nose and inside the vehicle and generally was a nuisance.

Family of guanacos

El Calafate is situated on the south shore of Lago Argentino and is very close to the Parque Nacional los Glaciares.  This apparently is Argentina’s second largest national park, stretching about 170 kilometres along the Chilean border and with almost half of it covered by the Southern Ice Cap. El Calafate is a pleasant if somewhat touristy town.

There is a wetland area covering about three or four hundred acres on the edge of the lake which we decided to visit, Alan as always accompanied by his telephoto lens.  It was modestly trailed as the municipal reserve so we weren’t expecting very much.  However, we were wrong.

Cinereous Harrier, El Calafate Wetland

Male Upland Goose

Female Upland Geese

We both agreed that we have never seen so many diverse species of bird in such a small wetland habitat.  There were many species of duck and water fowl, Cinereous Harriers, long tailed larks, spectacled tyrant birds, black necked swans, Coscoroba swans and three flamingos standing on one leg looking as though they were pretending to be lollipops.  We spent several hours there and much enjoyed walking the trails in the very well managed reserve.

Black Faced Ibis

Female Yellow Billed Pintail Duck

Our main reason for staying at El Calafate was to visit the huge Glacier Perito Moreno, one of the few accessible glaciers in the world.  On Tuesday morning we duly drove 70 kilometres along the access road and then parted with the lower half of our wallets to gain admission into the national park.  It was worth it.

The glacier is between sixty and a hundred metres high, up to about five kilometres wide and thirty kilometres long.  Periodically, as we were looking at it there was a sound like a pistol shot which heralded the fall of a big lump of ice falling off and then splashing into the turquoise water below.

Glacier Perito Moreno

Sue at the Glacier

Bits of glacier waiting to calve

When seen from the top we thought the glacier looked a little bit like a frozen army. The surface of the ice has been eroded and melted into a series of crevasses, domes, and shapes, some of which appear to have eye holes and some mouth holes, and it appeared to us for all the world like a ghostly army that had been transfixed by some mighty wizard.  The sight of this huge expanse of ice was unforgettable.

Glacier showing perspective

View of the glacier from the road

On Wednesday we left El Calafate to continue north on the notorious Ruta 40, notorious for being one of the longest, wildest and least travelled roads in the world. Che Guevara apparently travelled along much of it on his famous motorcycle jaunts.

We covered 350 kilometres on the first day and it was mind bendingly boring for much of the way. The only thing that relieved the tedium was the patterns of the clouds that swayed and swirled above us.  We invented a game to try and find things that were of interest and that would help keep Alan awake whilst driving.  The game was called guanacos and trees with an additional bonus point for rheas.  The idea was that the first person to see one of these would get a point.  Now when we mention that after 350 kilometres we only saw about six trees and ten guanacos and one small flock of rheas you get the picture that it was not a scenic route.

Ruta 40 - miles and miles of f**** all

Shortly after our lunch stop we were flagged down by a young couple standing in the road in evident distress. They had a problem with their fuel pump or maybe their fuel filter but, either way, their little black car was not going anywhere.  For once on our travels we were able to offer help rather than seek it and we duly towed them for about 80 kilometres (30 kilometres of it on dirt road) into the little town of Gobernador Gregores.

This was followed by a slightly embarrassing episode for Alan which involved him being kissed by a perfect stranger who was hugely appreciative of what we had done.  That was all very well but Alan is a Yorkshireman and not used to being kissed by a bloke!

That said they were jolly nice people and ultimately they arrived at the same campsite that we were staying at. After a while, when we were sitting in front of our fire enjoying a slightly carbonised sausage, they turned up with some ceremony and gave us two large mugs inscribed with Ruta 40, an unnecessary but hugely appreciated gesture.

All in all, it was a memorable day, not just for the six trees, not just for the 350 kilometres of stuff all but also for the appreciation shown by two Argentinian strangers for our help in towing them for fifty miles.

We drove a similar distance on Thursday, but the landscape became slightly more interesting with more hills and more bends in the road.  We had been given the location of an interesting canyon by a fellow traveller which we found quite easily once we turned off Ruta 40.  The canyon known as Canacoles Chico turned out to be the most isolated but the most wonderful place to wild camp.

Wild camping in the Canacoles Chico Canyon

At the bottom of the canyon was a dried up salt lake which was probably a river bed.  The walls of the canyon were high, striated red and cream sandstone, carved and buffeted by the winds of centuries into strange shapes, caves, hollows, and turrets. Alan went to have a look in one of the caves and found it to be full of guanaco bones although we could only speculate on how they got there.

Sunset in the canyon

It was a most delightful wild and wonderful place, nobody for miles around and the rocks of the canyon face constantly changed from black to red to white as the clouds passed and the shafts of sunlight luminated the cracks, caves and crevasses which constituted the walls of the canyon.

A shovel comes in very handy when you're wild camping

On Friday morning we drove a short distance to a much larger canyon, the canyon of the Rio Pinturas where we visited the amazing Cueva de las Manos. This is one of the major cultural and archaeological sites in South America and was declared a World Heritage Site twenty years ago.

Rio Pinturas Canyon

Path to the Cueva de las Manos

The Cave of Hands has a series of galleries which contain hundreds and hundreds of pieces of cave art.  Many of these are stencils of human hands which apparently were executed by means of the person getting a mouthful of colour pigment and blowing it through a hollow bone around the outline of the hand.  There are scenes showing guanaco being hunted both with spears and with bola, there are mythical creatures and also a couple of representations of women giving birth which they appear to have done from the standing position.

Cueva de las Manos - appeal from the past

Guanaco hunt

Mythical monsters

The paintings which are in red, orange, black and white are quite beautiful in their own way and are remarkably well preserved. The oldest of the paintings are 9,000 years old and gave a fascinating insight into the lives of these hunter gatherer people over several millennia.

More than 800 hands, several thousand years

After the fascinating visit to the Cave of Hands we travelled the last couple of hundred kilometres to the border town of Los Antiguos.  There we managed to sort out a minor problem with the truck and caught up on the usual admin and domestic chores. Yesterday we crossed the border for the fourth time to the little town of Chile Chico.  Today is Monday 12^th February and tomorrow we will continue our journey north on the Carretera Austral.

At the Bottom of the World

Having been reacquainted at last with Footloose Lucy, our Land Rover Discovery, we boarded the ferry to Tierra del Fuego on Sunday 21^st January, very pleased to be on the road again.

After a two hour ferry trip across the Magellan Straits we arrived in Porvenir and then drove some 90 kilometres along a desolate coastal road. The landscape was bleak and almost entirely featureless with not a tree in sight. We both agreed that it would not be a good place to come if you were feeling a bit depressed.

Then we arrived at the Parque Pinguino Rey and we saw the King Penguins! The King penguin is the world’s second largest penguin and is mainly found in the Antarctic and South Georgia but in recent years a small colony has become established on Tierra del Fuego. In order to protect and conserve the colony, tourist access is very limited, but we were able to view them perfectly well from behind a hide.

The pinguinos were absolutely lovely! There were about 100 of them and they were standing around looking rather like an upper-class cocktail party saying things like ‘So glad you could make it’ and ‘Gosh, it seems an age since we saw you’ and they were being terribly nice to their big fluffy brown chicks that were bumbling around the place.

King Penguins at cocktail party

King Penguins with young

Once we had ooh’d and aah’d at the sight of these wonderful birds for some little while we set off again for San Sebastian which is the border crossing between Chilean Tierra del Fuego and Argentinean Tierra del Fuego.

We stopped some 500 metres short of the border and had a memorable night camped on the side of the road next to the police station. It characteristically started raining as soon as we got there (not having rained for the best part of two weeks) and it got very cold and windy. However, we cooked up a very good meal and had a bottle of wine and were very cosy and warm in our tent even though it did get blown about, so that was all right.

'Exclusive' campsite by the border

The border crossing on Monday morning was reasonably painless. We had a little trouble on the Chilean side of the border on the basis that we were missing the bit of documentation that proved our vehicle went from San Antonio to Punta Arenas. Alan laid the blame squarely on Sabrina’s shoulders and they reluctantly let us cross.

By Monday afternoon we had driven 100 kilometres through the stark windswept landscape and arrived in Rio Grande, a sprawling modern coastal town. There being nowhere suitable to camp we checked into the imaginatively named Hostal Argentino.

Anyone who is the slightest bit interested in fly fishing will know that Rio Grande (the river, not the town) is a bit of a Mecca for fishermen, it being renowned for its abundance of large sea trout. Whilst most keen fishermen pay huge sums of money to stay in expensive lodges, we were only passing through, so Alan made it his business to find a fly-fishing agent who could organise a day’s fishing for him on one of the estancias. This was duly arranged for Thursday 25^th January.

In the meantime, we explored the area to the south of Rio Grande. Once we got off the main road onto good dirt road the landscape became much more interesting. There were hills and trees, neither of which we had seen much of since arriving on the island, also a very nice lake where we had lunch. We came across many herds of guanaco which were much to our liking. Looking like something between a llama and a large deer, they are exceedingly elegant creatures but also very shy. They ran off as soon as we got anywhere close, so they were virtually impossible to photograph. We also saw an Antarctic fox and a very small wild cat, both of which disappeared into the undergrowth like a dose of salts.

Herd of guanacos

Lunch stop at Lago Yehuin

Lago Yehuin

Family of guanacos

Guanaco

As arranged, Alan had his day’s fishing on Thursday. He was taken by his guide, Peter, to the well renowned Estancia Maria Behety where he paid an exceedingly large amount of money and then they went down to the Rio Grande.

The river was certainly full of large sea trout and it was not too long before Alan had hooked a five pounder which fought like blazes and he duly got himself photographed next to it with a silly grin on his face. Then, after about an hour and a half, the almightiest thump at the end of his fly line heralded the arrival of an exceedingly large sea trout.  Peter was almost as delighted about the whole thing as Alan was.  He was running up and down the bank, jumping up and down and shouting “Bueno” or words to that effect until the fish was brought to bank and had its hook removed. The fish weighed in at just over ten pounds which he never in his wildest dreams imagined he would catch, but there it was!

Alan with five pound sea trout

And this is what a ten pound sea trout looks like!

Alan fished for a solid twelve hours at the end of which he was cream crackered but exceedingly happy. He caught a few more fish during the day though none as large as the ten pounder but he was very keen to point out that it was not easy fishing. Apparently, the wind was blowing like the wrath of God behind him and that made casting a fly inordinately difficult.

After such a wonderful day’s fishing we now know why the Rio Grande of Tierra del Fuego is regarded as the finest sea trout river in the world.

Having ticked that off the bucket list, we left Rio Grande on Friday morning and made our way south to Ushuaia. The countryside became increasingly more interesting and by lunchtime we had reached the large and beautiful Lago Fagnano. We drew the vehicle up on the shingle bank at the eastern end of the lake and watched the two foot waves crashing on the shoreline.

On the road to Ushuaia

Ushuaia is the southern most city in the world and its location is certainly quite dramatic situated on a hill overlooking the Beagle Channel and with the mountains behind. We did not find the city much to our liking however. It appeared to us as a large shambling place built around a cruise liner port with no architectural merit to recommend it. The main streets were teeming with tourists, many of them from the cruise ships, and when we came across the Hard Rock Café we decided not to stay.

Instead we continued along the road another twelve kilometres or so beyond Ushuaia until we reached the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. This protects over 600 square kilometres of snow-capped mountains, beech forest, intricate lakes, and coastline.  We wild camped at a lovely spot on the banks of a fast flowing shallow river close to a mountain, the top of which was covered in snow.

Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego

Our campsite in the national park

We spent a wonderful couple of days in the national park, walking the various trails which took us through beech forests by the side of the various lakes and inlets where we sat and watched steamer ducks, grebes, and families of Magellan geese on the water. In the evenings we were joined at supper by a pair of roadside hawks who were trying to bum a free meal and a magnificent crested caracara on a similar mission and they all managed to acquire some fish from us.  At night we went to sleep listening to the river gurgling away and occasionally the wind whacking the tent.

Roadside hawk

Crested caracara - portrait

Arty shot of caracara

Fuegon snipe

Caracara hoping to hitch a lift

On Sunday we left the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego and, there being only one road, we retraced our path back past Lago Fagnano to Rio Grande, back across the border into Chilean Tierra de Fuego to Porvenir and then once more on the ferry across the Magellan Straits to Punta Arenas.

Typical derelict buildings, Porvenir

Fishing boats, Porvenir

Fishing boat, Porvenir

The end of a long day

Yesterday, Wednesday 31^st January, we bid farewell to Punta Arenas and drove 250 km north to Puerto Natales where we are staying now. From here we plan to explore the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine and so our adventure continues.