Apparently the photos I posted in the last blog entry took up all the space, so the text is continued here:
We were told that sometimes there is little action from the Perito Moreno glaciar, but our day was magical, with several small gun-shot ice breaks while we traversed the catwalks, and four amazing, thunderous breaks (with resulting crashes and waves) on the one-hour boat tour. We learned to look for small chunks falling and then train our eyes to that spot, to be rewarded with enormous ice spears parting from the mass and crashing to the glacial green waters below, the waves so large that they made our ship bob and weave like a rubber ducky.
We even experienced a phenomenon which only happens once every two or three months - a hulking, deep-blue compact mass of ice from the bottom of the glaciar (still clinging to a chunk of bedrock) suddenly rising up from below, surfacing like a whale or an alien submarine. It floated away, joining the other brilliant blue icebergs in the opaque green lake. Incredible! (My vocabularly is limited to that one word for Patagonia.)
Perito Moreno-watching is better than going to an exciting sporting event, and it occured to me that it would be a great extreme-gambling venture - think "Rat Race."
We left for Chile the next morning and had an uneventful bus ride to the border until, as we exited Argentina, Kapil learned that he may not be able to cross into Chile without a visa. He had called the Chilean consulate in Chicago to inquire and checked a web site, both assuring him that he didn't need a visa (with an Indian passport). But Nupi had obtained a visa, and sure enough, at the Chilean border, Kapil was taken into the back room. Despite much begging on his behalf by Ursula, we had to leave him at the border!
The air on our bus was thick with disbelief and disappoinment. What was going to happen to our group without "the boys?" Kapil and Nupi together brought humor, lightheartedness and infectious laughter to every situation on our tour. For me, the strangest concept to grasp was that the worst thing to happen on my 3 month solo journey so far was losing a fellow traveler!! How did that happen?
Adding to the morose mood was a change in weather - after all our sunshine luck, the rain had finally set in, and we arrived wet, cold and depressed to Puerto Natales, an unimpressive first glimpse of Chile. The mood did not improve when Ursula didn't appear at the appointed time to introduce us to our Torres Del Paine guide (Tadeo) and walk through the trip. Jonas was also strangely missing, and so our group - short three people - hobbled through the briefing ("Where do we rent sleeping bags?") until Ursula appeared sleeping from her room after we finished. She lost track of time. Oops!
The next morning, still raining, we boarded a private van into the national park and took an amazing 20 km hike up to a boulder scramble on a glacial morraine, to a lake with grand views of the famous torres. "Torres del Paine" means Blue Towers in the Tehuelche language, because the natives were herders living on the plains and these great towers of rock appeared blue in the distance (like all faraway mountains). We saw many guanacos (llama family), condors, one rhea, many sheep and horses.
Because of a few slow hikers and the need to regroup, we didn't arrive back at the van until 9:30 pm! Happily, the sky had cleared, turning the clouds and torres a rosy pink, the full moon appeared, and the hordes of people trampling the trail had disappeared. It's always magical to see a mountanous outdoor setting outside the hours of 10 - 3 pm, which is why I love camping.
What we did could not exactly be called camping, however, because our van pulled up to a small refugio, really a patch of grass on a sheep farm. We crawled through barbed wire to reach the seven NorthFace serious backpackers tents already pitched & waiting with sleeping mats inside. We threw down our duffels and rented sleeping bags and headed to the yert-like structure for an amazing spread. With our first unobstructed (by clouds) view of the Torres in the sunset, we ate olives, cheese, tea, Pisco Sour, wine, pea soup, salad with avocado, cucomber and tomato, baked salmon, rice and fabulous homemade flan.
The meal was made even more special by the surprising and joyful homecoming of our long-lost Kapil. He had pulled up in a private car to the refugio at the same moment as our van, and his reunion with Nupi was so victorious and joyful that it made me tear up. At dinner, Kapil regaled the group with his 24-hour adventure, which involved hitching a ride with Mariano to the provincial authority on the Atlantic coast, having luck with the head consulate (who spoke English), bussing back to the Argentine border, convincing six other foreigners to join him hitchhiking to Chile rather than waiting three hours for the next bus, finding a Chilean woman with a van at a grocery store, fabricating a story about how one Swedish girl's mother was a friend of the woman driving and they were all coming to visit her, sneaking across the border, of course not without saying hello to his Chilean buddies who he killed 6 hours with the day before, and then catching a ride from a friend of Mariano's from Puerto Natales to our refugio in the park.
More later...
We were told that sometimes there is little action from the Perito Moreno glaciar, but our day was magical, with several small gun-shot ice breaks while we traversed the catwalks, and four amazing, thunderous breaks (with resulting crashes and waves) on the one-hour boat tour. We learned to look for small chunks falling and then train our eyes to that spot, to be rewarded with enormous ice spears parting from the mass and crashing to the glacial green waters below, the waves so large that they made our ship bob and weave like a rubber ducky.
We even experienced a phenomenon which only happens once every two or three months - a hulking, deep-blue compact mass of ice from the bottom of the glaciar (still clinging to a chunk of bedrock) suddenly rising up from below, surfacing like a whale or an alien submarine. It floated away, joining the other brilliant blue icebergs in the opaque green lake. Incredible! (My vocabularly is limited to that one word for Patagonia.)
Perito Moreno-watching is better than going to an exciting sporting event, and it occured to me that it would be a great extreme-gambling venture - think "Rat Race."
We left for Chile the next morning and had an uneventful bus ride to the border until, as we exited Argentina, Kapil learned that he may not be able to cross into Chile without a visa. He had called the Chilean consulate in Chicago to inquire and checked a web site, both assuring him that he didn't need a visa (with an Indian passport). But Nupi had obtained a visa, and sure enough, at the Chilean border, Kapil was taken into the back room. Despite much begging on his behalf by Ursula, we had to leave him at the border!
The air on our bus was thick with disbelief and disappoinment. What was going to happen to our group without "the boys?" Kapil and Nupi together brought humor, lightheartedness and infectious laughter to every situation on our tour. For me, the strangest concept to grasp was that the worst thing to happen on my 3 month solo journey so far was losing a fellow traveler!! How did that happen?
Adding to the morose mood was a change in weather - after all our sunshine luck, the rain had finally set in, and we arrived wet, cold and depressed to Puerto Natales, an unimpressive first glimpse of Chile. The mood did not improve when Ursula didn't appear at the appointed time to introduce us to our Torres Del Paine guide (Tadeo) and walk through the trip. Jonas was also strangely missing, and so our group - short three people - hobbled through the briefing ("Where do we rent sleeping bags?") until Ursula appeared sleeping from her room after we finished. She lost track of time. Oops!
The next morning, still raining, we boarded a private van into the national park and took an amazing 20 km hike up to a boulder scramble on a glacial morraine, to a lake with grand views of the famous torres. "Torres del Paine" means Blue Towers in the Tehuelche language, because the natives were herders living on the plains and these great towers of rock appeared blue in the distance (like all faraway mountains). We saw many guanacos (llama family), condors, one rhea, many sheep and horses.
Because of a few slow hikers and the need to regroup, we didn't arrive back at the van until 9:30 pm! Happily, the sky had cleared, turning the clouds and torres a rosy pink, the full moon appeared, and the hordes of people trampling the trail had disappeared. It's always magical to see a mountanous outdoor setting outside the hours of 10 - 3 pm, which is why I love camping.
What we did could not exactly be called camping, however, because our van pulled up to a small refugio, really a patch of grass on a sheep farm. We crawled through barbed wire to reach the seven NorthFace serious backpackers tents already pitched & waiting with sleeping mats inside. We threw down our duffels and rented sleeping bags and headed to the yert-like structure for an amazing spread. With our first unobstructed (by clouds) view of the Torres in the sunset, we ate olives, cheese, tea, Pisco Sour, wine, pea soup, salad with avocado, cucomber and tomato, baked salmon, rice and fabulous homemade flan.
The meal was made even more special by the surprising and joyful homecoming of our long-lost Kapil. He had pulled up in a private car to the refugio at the same moment as our van, and his reunion with Nupi was so victorious and joyful that it made me tear up. At dinner, Kapil regaled the group with his 24-hour adventure, which involved hitching a ride with Mariano to the provincial authority on the Atlantic coast, having luck with the head consulate (who spoke English), bussing back to the Argentine border, convincing six other foreigners to join him hitchhiking to Chile rather than waiting three hours for the next bus, finding a Chilean woman with a van at a grocery store, fabricating a story about how one Swedish girl's mother was a friend of the woman driving and they were all coming to visit her, sneaking across the border, of course not without saying hello to his Chilean buddies who he killed 6 hours with the day before, and then catching a ride from a friend of Mariano's from Puerto Natales to our refugio in the park.
More later...
Comments
Post a Comment