The honeymoon is over

Ok, holiday is over, perhaps that should read.

Tomorrow, we fly back to London. Bugger. Friday, the 25th, we arrive in London, 7am Terminal 4. We have arranged some temporary accomodation, so we will head there and dump our bags, and then its action time, going to the bank, boring stuff like that.


Our car, aka ´the DL´, is up at my old work, so on Saturday we have to go and get that. Gerhard has been looking after it for us, taking it for a run once a week, that kind of thing, and apparently she is still all fine. We called her the DL after the District Line tube, because she is green (so is the district line on the tube map) rickety, and slow (so is the district line).

The weekend is a bank holiday weekend, and I start work on the Tuesday. Yep, already. I am going back to the M1 job I was on, but in a different department - earthworks. Apparently the team leader up there has been asking about me every second week or so. So it will be lots of running around with a GPS putting in lots of pegs for me. They are paying me more than last time, yippee. Its only a 6 - 8 week contract at this stage, but that´s what they said last time. I hope it´s only that, and then I can start something new, get my teeth into something different.

So, its all over for us, back to the grind!

I am an IDIOT

You may or may not have read about how I lost both my cashcards in ATMs some time back - Peru, I think.

We are in Buenos Aires, and the silly ATMs will only give us 300 pesos at a time, which is not much. So I suggested we go back to the room and get Richard´s second cashcard and see if it will give us another 300. So we did that, but Rich was pretty crook so I went out by myself.

Put card in ATM. Enter Pin. Withdraw Pesos from Savings account. 300 of them come out. Would you like another transaction, hmm, I thought, yes, lets try and see if it will g ive me another 300 from visa account. Yippee, out comes another 300 pesos, I am so happy we could get 600 out in one day, that I turned around and walked out the door and back to the hostel, jubilant. Walk in and say, Rich, I was so clever, Ig ot 600 pesos out (sinking feeling that something is wrong) and Rich says, excellent, can I have my card back.

After you get the money out, it waits a few seconds (which is when I walk out) and THEN asks you if you want another transaction, and after you hit no, it gives your card back. Which is the bit I forget. At home, you get your card before you money, which I think is a MUCH better system!!

Iguazu

We did a very very long two overnight bus trip job to get up here from Puerto Madryn.

The town itself is pretty quiet, sleepy, not a whole lot going on. Which suits us perfectly, so we have stayed here for four nights. We had a nice little guesthouse with a lovely garden and the best included breakfasts we have had, so that encourageed us to stay a while too.

Did the trip out to the falls, the park is very very well set up for tourists, with excellent catwalks going to various parts of the falls, and a free train to reach the further away areas, eg the garganta del diablo. I am having trouble downloading pics on this computer, so I will do that bit when we get back to Buenos Aires. And finish this story off!

Puerto Madryn

We are right near Peninsula Valdes, famous for wildlife. At various times of the year, you can see penguins, sea lions, orcas eating sea lions right off the beach, whales, elephant seals, foxes, and maras, kind of a wild hare. Oh and Armadillos.

Right now, maybe an armadillo and a hare if you are lucky. I heard someone in our hostel say they saw a whale. But the penguins went south a couple of months ago, and it is not yet sea lion eating time for the orcas. So we skipped the rather expensive day trip out to the peninsula and are just hanging around. Went for a walk down to the beach, the weather is nice. Still need two jumpers and thermals, but its nice and sunny.

Decided to finally put up the map of where we are and what we have done, here tis!

Tomorrow we get a bus up to buenos Aires, and dependign how we wre feeling after 19 hours on a bus, maybe another that night up to the Iguazu falls, our only remaining must see destination. I would like to get over to Uraguay for a couple of days as well, we will see how we do for time.

El Cafe Latte

Actually, it is El Calafate, but Richard´s annoying bastardization of the name is kind of catchy.

So after two nights in a row on a bus, a day in blustery Comodoro Rivadavia, and a half a day on another bus, we arrived to El Calafate. Its a little town that basically exists for people to base themselves in while they visit the glaciars. Which is precisely what we did. We stayed in a great hostel, with gorgeous views out over the lake, ringed with snowy mountains. Here is a sunset photo I took from our room, you can make out the snowy mountains and the lake.
We got busy as soon as we got to town, for a change, and organised two trips. The first one was a boat trip up the lakes, to see a load of glaciers. Teh first was seco, which is a little one that is retreating and doesn´t reach the lake any more. The second was Spegazzini, a big one, at 130m height. This one isn´t retreating. I got right up the front of the boat as we were approaching, and I tell you, I have never been so cold in my life, the boat was going fairly fast. This photo is cool because you can see the glacier cruising on down the mountains. (Spegazzini)

Then we headed off further up to the Upsala glacier, which is really wide, about 60 kms, and 80m high. This one also has moraines in it - the brown streaks you see on the ice, which is all mushed up rocks and stuff that is forced up to the surface by the ice.

(Upsala glaciar, note in the middle, slightly to the right, there is one very very blue iceberg.)

After Upsala, we pulled in to puerto Onelli, and walked 15 minutes to Onelli Lake, into which Onelli Glacier pours, plus a couple of others. Here we stopped for lunch, and the guide mentioned that we were there on perhaps one of the best days they will get in the year, dead still, no wind, warm, sunny, and absolutely no cloud obscuring anything. He said they only get or so days a year like that. Sometimes the wind there is up to 80kmh or so, enough to tear out the trees and push up 2 m waves on the lake. So I guess we were lucky.

(Lunch spot at Lake Onelli, at least three glaciars in the background)

Then we cruised on back to the port, and home again. We decided we would do a bit more cooking for ourselves, as the hostel had a decent kitchen, and Argentina has decent steaks. $2 AU buys a big slab of Sirloin, big enough for both of us, and $4 AU buys a decent bottle of Malbec. You can actually get drinkable wine here for under a dollar a litre, Mum, you would love it.

Ice Berg, as seen from the boat!

The next day we did the ´mini trekking´trip, which involved travellig by bus to the Perito Moreno Glacier, crossing the lake by boat in front of the glacier, strapping on crampons and walking around on the glacier for a couple of hours, before crossing back to the other side of the lake again, and having a couple of hours to spend on this series of boardwalks that they have put up to view the glacier. I will put up a whole bunch of photos from this one, as I took hundreds, and it was absolutely breathtaking. Pretty amazing sight, and probably my favourite experience in South America yet.

Perito Moreno from the top of the boardwalks

Out on the ice, and yep, it is snowing!

Ice, ice, baby. Thats one big crevice.

Strapping on crampons.

That was an ice fall!! See the splash!

PM from the south side, taken after the ice walk on the way back to the refugio for lunch.

And now, we have travelled from Lake Titicaca along the entire length of the Andes by bus. Thus, we have to make the long journey back up again!

NExt stop Puerto Madryn, just a staging post on the way north for us.

Bariloche - chocolate country

We went from mendoza to Bariloche, a cute little swiss chalet type of town nestled between some hills and a whole bunch of lakes. Its a ski resort in the winter, and a hiking destination in summer. As we were there in neither, we didn´t do alot. They make chocolate there, so we decided to sample the local stuff, went to three chocolate shops and bought way too much, went back to the hostel and tested it all out. Definitely over-rated. We felt decidedly ill.

So we thought we should do something, and on saturday, went for a day trip to nearby el Bolson, another cute little town in some mountains, famous for its market of all kind of stuff, you know, the usual artisan handmade everything. Oh, and there are raspberries. I bought a big punnet of them, and ate them, very very nice. See Richard´s blog for pics of me eating raspberries.

The next day we got a local bus out to a peninsula, where there is a very very nice hotel and a cute wooden church, complete with Saint Bernard dog with barrel around its neck, posing for photos with the tourists.

I won´t put any pics up because Richard put pretty much all of our Bariloche photos up... we didn´t take many (cos we didn´t do much).

It was nice there for a few days. Then we continued the bus journey south. 12 hours or so to Comodoro rivadavia, a windy spot on the Atlantic, where we had a 12 hour layover before our ongoing night bus (a further 12 hours to Rio Gallegos). Not much was going on in Comodoro. The bus station was open, and a servo, a bakery and one coffee shop. Yep, we managed to pick a public holiday, very very cold and windy one, to spend there. So we ate alot at the bakery, had a coffee at the coffee shop, and another at the servo, and waited around at the bus station. Next bus, another 12 hours to Rio Gallegos, where we only had to wait 4 hours for the next bus. And onwards El Calafate we went. The scenery was bleak, cold, and nothingness, followed by bleak, cold and snowy... I was most excited about the snow.

This photo I actually took on the return journey, of a couple of Guanacos (a type of llama) in the snow. Poor Llamas. Amazingly on the trip I also saw two rheas, which look like slightly fatter emus.