Wanderings: A Travel Journal

After nine days of trekking/camping in Torres del Paine National Park, we returned to Puerto Natales yesterday, enjoyed a deserved bottle of wine and enormous hamburguesas completas last night, and reflected on a fantastic trip. I won’t go into a day-by-day rundown of how it went down, but will instead list a few highlights below:

The Back Trail: We opted to do the full circuit rather than the abbreviated ‘W’, and were really glad we did, both because of the scenery on the back trail that, while not as famous as the must-see places on the W, was still quite stunning, and the lack of crowds (on the third day, for example, we did not see a single other person during the four-hour hike from one camp to another). Visual highlights of the back trail were the Dickson and Perros glaciers, the forest walk on Day 3, numerous picturesque lakes and trudging through the mud and snow to reach the John Garner pass on Day 4.

Being Inside a Glacier: On Day 3 we arrived at camp pretty early and one of the campsite staff recommended a one-hour side trip to the Glacier Puma, which we’d never heard of. Six of us went together and although the glacier was not nearly as beautiful as Grey, Perito Moreno etc, it offered something completely different that made it especially memorable: an ice tunnel that we could walk into, putting ourselves inside the glacier, surrounded by bubble-filled ice on three sides, with a glacial stream running along the ground and a vertical shaft leading up to the blue sky above. It’s hard to describe how awesome that was.

Glacier Grey: After trekking slowly through mud and snow to the 1241m John Garner pass on Day 4, we caught our first view of the glacier that would dominate the trail for the next two days as we walked above it. Glacier Grey is enormous and as we sat on top of the pass (the best place to appreciate its vastness), it stretched far away in all directions, and we were even able to see part of the 350km long Southern Patagonian Ice Field (the Hielo Sur) to the north. On Day 5 we were lucky to catch a rainbow shining over the glacier and when we finally reached the ‘snout’ later that day it was almost as beautiful as Perito Moreno, which is not something you say lightly.

Hot Showers on Days 5 & 7: ‘Nuff said.

The Social Trail: Before we started hiking, we figured we’d spend most of our camp time huddled up in our tent trying to stay warm. But we made friends on the first day and the social aspect turned out to be one of the most enjoyable things about the hike. Our new hiking buddies ranged from married Canadian veterinarians to an American father-daughter combo (he admirably hiked the entire circuit at age 70) to a Belgian-Israeli pseudo-couple. But most of all we befriended a well-hiked New York history teacher named Darin, who followed the same itinerary as us for nine days and will now be a friend for life (or at least a friend in Ushuaia later this week…).

The Complete Absence of Wind: All we’d heard before visiting the park was that it would be the windiest experience of our lives and that we would return with all sorts of crazy wind-related stories (as long as we were lucky enough to actually survive the trek instead of being blown off the side of a mountain). And for the first half-an-hour or so after we got off the bus, it seemed like everything we’d heard would be true. But then a funny thing happened: the wind died down, and basically didn’t blow again for the next nine days. Compared with El Chaltén, Torres del Paine was a paradigm of stillness.

And, finally, the unfortunate disappointment of the trek:

The Torres del Paine: At sunrise on clear days, the four towers that make up the Torres del Paine and give the park its name are bathed in red in spectacular fashion. So, at 3:45am yesterday we duly woke up, rolled out of our tents at the Campamento Torres and trudged for 45 minutes in the dark and drizzle up to the look out point at the base of the towers. But to our great disappointment the granite peaks were almost completely shrouded in mist and there was no red light to be seen. Cold, wet, tired and pretty miserable, we walked back down once ‘sunrise’ had passed and went back to sleep in our tents. In the meantime, the sun came out, the fog cleared and Darin, who had stayed at the viewpoint despite the conditions, ended up with some great views and photos of the towers, albeit not red ones. It wasn’t the finish to the trek that we’d hoped for, and we considered staying an extra day to try again for the sunrise views, but in the end we decided that eight nights was enough, and we headed back down and out of the park.

Today is a scheduled rest day in Puerto Natales, but fortunately we are not as sore as we feared we would be. Tomorrow we continue our journey south by crossing the Straits of Magellan to the Tierra del Fuego and onto Ushuaia, the world’s southern-most city.

We arrived in El Chaltén, the base for forays into the northern part of Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, with a reasonable weather forecast in hand and hopes for a five-day, four-night trek around the Mt. Fitz Roy area starting the following day. How quickly things changed. Behind Fitz Roy and the surrounding peaks lies the Hielo Sur, which at 350km long is the second largest non-polar ice sheet in the world and basically dictates the weather around it which can – and did – change at virtually a moment’s notice. The new forecast was for bad weather for the next two days, so we holed up in our wood-cabin-hostel and tried to stay away from the devastating winds and occasional rain (and even snow), wondering all the while why anyone even bothers to trek in this region given the volatility of the weather and how much it affects outdoor activities.

After three nights in El Chaltén, we modified our trek to a three-day, two-night one and with a three-day forecast of party cloudy – sunny – sunny, it was time to go. Having bought sleeping mats, a camping stove and a cooking set in Buenos Aires to go along with our sleeping bags and Chinese tent, we were completely self-sufficient for the first time, and looking forward to our first multi-day trek since we were in Kyrgyzstan in August.

Day 1

We arose at 6:30am on Tuesday, slung our packs over our shoulders and started walking. The sun was out, there was no wind, and for the first time we realised that this trek might not be a disaster after all. Leaving El Chaltén, we climbed up forested hills into the National Park, seeing a wild rabbit and quite a few woodpeckers (some with glorious red heads) along the way. The path was pretty easy, and even though we detoured to both a viewpoint (though it was pretty cloudy by now) and Lake Capri, we made it to our campsite for the night well before lunchtime. In Argentine national parks, ‘wild camping’ like we did in Kyrgyzstan (i.e. pitching your tent wherever you want) is not permitted, and you need to camp in designated sites. This takes away a bit of the serenity of the experience, since you’re pitching your tent next to a dozen others, but so be it. The Poincenot campsite is surrounded by trees to shelter campers from the wind, but a short walk leads you to views of Fitz Roy – although by now it was completely shrouded in cloud.

With the afternoon being overcast, cold and a bit windy, we bunkered down in our tent and spent the rest of the day and night trying to stay warm and hoping the forecast for the following day would hold and that we would see what we came for.

Day 2 

I’ve seen a few amazing photos of dawn light on the rocky massifs in this part of the world, so we set an alarm for 5:30am and woke up to find that it was more or less clear at this hour and that Mt. Fitz Roy was visible and bathed in soft red light. We soaked it up for a few minutes and then set off for our climb to the Laguna de los Tres, which affords the best and closest view of Fitz Roy for those not game enough to try to scale it.

I didn’t feel too well on the way up and had to stop more than usual, so it took us about 1.5 hours to make it to the lake. By now the sky was almost completely clear and the views of the Fitz Roy massif and the jagged peaks surrounding it were stunning. We met a few hikers on their way back down while we were still going up and so by the time we made it, there was no one else there and we had it to ourselves. The lake itself was completely frozen and snowed over, and the sight of the peaks rising above it, too sheer to hold snow, was really stunning. Fitz Roy itself, the highest peak in the park, is ‘only’ 3405m above sea level (for reference, we were about 2000m higher than that when we crossed the Thorong La pass on the Annapurna Circuit last October, looking at 8000m peaks), but it is still a really impressive mountain and deserves its fame.

After admiring the views for a while, we headed back down, packed up our tent and walked on a perpendicular trail to meet up with the other main trail of the region, which heads towards Cerro Torre, the second most celebrated peak in the park. We passed by three lakes, creatively named Mother, Daughter and Granddaughter, and ate our pasta lunch alongside one of them before joining with the Torre circuit. There we had our first (cloud-obstructed) views of Cerro Torre – which, like Fitz Roy, is to the west of the trails and thus best viewed in the morning light – and made it to the Agostini campsite by about 3pm (the mountaineering history of the park is dominated by French and Italian climbers, hence these names). We pitched our tent, ate a chocolate bar and then collapsed onto our sleeping mats after a pretty tiring day.

Day 3

We woke up at 5:20am but found that the sky was overcast and that the very top of the needle spire of Cerro Torre was covered in cloud. But we got up anyway and walked to the Laguna Torre, which still afforded magnificent views of a Narnia-style winter scene despite the dullness of the day. In the foreground, icebergs that have fallen from the glacier at the far end of the lake float to shore, while rising steeply from the snow, 3102m Cerro Torre and two surrounding tower-peaks could almost pass for a gothic church, complete with snow-covered flying buttresses.

After a while we headed back to the camp, a little disappointed in the conditions but at least happy that the main peak, Fitz Roy, had been clear the day before. But as we packed up and got ready to head back to El Chaltén, the ever-changing Patagonian weather took a turn for the better (for a change) and the sky began to clear, revealing Cerro Torre which was now bathed in sunlight and climbing up to a mostly blue sky. With this stroke of luck, we went back to the lake and I re-took my photos (not as good as Fitz Roy, but still decent), and then we headed back to El Chaltén. We made it back by 11:45am, early enough to eat some tasty empanadas before taking the 1pm bus back to El Calafate.

Yesterday we crossed back into Chile and, back in trekking mode, we are now primed to take on an even bigger challenge: the 10-day circuit of what is regularly described as the most spectacular national park in all of South America: Torres del Paine.

Our first taste of Patagonia was not of the windswept mountain and glacial scenery that has made the region famous, but of a coastal area as close to Buenos Aires as to Parque Nacional los Glaciares. After a long bus trip from Córdoba we arrived in Puerto Madryn on the Peninsula Valdés on Argentina’s east coast, roughly halfway down the length of the country. The highlight of our stay there was a whale-watching boat trip at Puerto Pirámides – we saw two sets of mother-and-child whales, and one swam right past our boat (easily within five metres). It was pretty thrilling to see what you could see, but I don’t think whale-watching is as great as I heard it described by others the day before, since you simply don’t see enough of the animal.

From Trelew a bit further south from Puerto Madryn, we considered a dolphin-spotting trip and an excursion to see penguins, but in the end we didn’t do either (the latter because we know we’re going to see penguins shortly in Antarctica). Instead we visited the excellent dinosaur museum in Trelew, which was very well presented and contained impressive fossils, and otherwise tried to stay out of the rain.

From the coast we took another overnight bus trip that took more than 24 hours all told, with a stopover in Rio Gallegos, past the never-ending emptiness of Patagonia to the heart of the region – or at least its tourist heart. (In the meantime, less than two months after being further north on the globe than we’d ever been before in Estonia, we’re now further south than we’ve ever been.) Around the Glaciers National Park are the two things we most wanted to see/do in Argentine Patagonia – visit the famous Perito Moreno Glacier, still advancing even as almost all other glaciers in the world are retreating due to climate change, and experience Patagonian trekking for the first time in the area around Mt. Fitz Roy. We started with the glacier, and were very lucky in this cold, windswept land to have a sunny day for our visit (especially as every day since has been overcast, very windy and a bit rainy).

There are barely enough superlatives in any language to describe the wondrous glacier. Imagine jagged glacial cliffs as tall as skyscrapers (60 metres high), sparkling white and a gorgeous light blue in the sunlight. Imagine the thunderous roar of the glacier as it creaks and groans and then imagine the sight of chunks of ice bigger than cars breaking from the main structure and plunging into Lake Argentina below with a deafening crash, now resigned to the life of a floating iceberg. And finally imagine that what you’re seeing is just – pardon the pun – the tip of the iceberg: the glacier stretches back 30 kilometres. We spent four-and-a-half hours looking at the glacier, mesmerised the entire time. I rate it not only as the biggest highlight of this second South American trip so far but also, along with the glacier and peak of Mt. Rakaposhi in Pakistan and the 8000m peak amphitheatre of the Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal, as one of the top three natural sights I’ve seen (with apologies to the Egyptian White Desert, Cappadocia in Turkey, Laguna Paron in Peru, Fairy Meadows in Pakistan, Zhangzhajie in China and many others).

Sunburned but happy, we left El Calafate a couple of days ago for El Chaltén, the base for trekking expeditions into the northern part of the same national park that contains Perito Moreno. Pending the weather (always an issue in Patagonia; we will not get the eternally blue skies of our Nepal or Kyrgyz treks here), we’re hoping to do a multi-day excursion into the national park for views of Cerro Torre and Mt. Fitz Roy, and several glacial lakes as well.

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because we haven’t been anywhere in the past two weeks nearly as captivating as Valparaíso, and because I’ve been pretty busy this week taking Spanish classes in Córdoba, losing my credit card, trying to book a trip to Antarctica, etc.

The day after my last post, we left Santiago after a brief stay and took our second trip over the Andes in as many weeks. This one wasn’t as spectacular as the first but was still quite impressive, and we emerged on the other side back in Argentina and in the city of Mendoza. Mendoza itself doesn’t really have many (any?) major tourist sights, but it is a surprisingly pleasant place, well laid out, with shady, tree-lined streets, sidewalk cafes and restaurants, and a slow pace vibe. We only stayed long enough to do the almost obligatory wine tour in the vineyards outside town, where 70 per cent of all Argentine wine is produced. We stopped at two bodegas (a small, family-run one and a larger, commercial one), a family olive oil factory, and an liquor-making house, where the tasting of the alcoholic chocolate mint drink was so good that we had no choice but to buy a bottle to take with us.

Heading north (as part of our rather unusual route that is supposed to be leading us south), we stayed a couple of nights in the town of Alta Gracia, where Che Guevara lived as a boy. His house is now a museum, and we stayed next door to it with an Argentine poet and his Cuban wife, who have turned their house into a restaurant for the museum visitors and also rent out a couple of rooms. After staying in hostels for the previous week or so, it was nice to enjoy the quirky atmosphere of a poet’s house for a couple of nights. The museum itself is well done and worth a visit, especially for Che aficionados like me. The other highlight of Alta Gracia is a Jesuit estancia complex in the centre of town, featuring a church, two open courtyards, a smithy, various residential halls etc. We liked the small-town atmosphere and good food and spent two relaxing days in Alta Gracia preparing ourselves for the upcoming week in Córdoba.

Córdoba itself is an OK place, with a few nice colonial buildings and a lot more ugly, brick high-rises. With seven universities and a strong Jesuit history, it’s one of the main learning centres of Argentina and I decided to comply. Having been pretty discouraged by my level of Spanish comprehension at the wine tour in Mendoza, I decided to take a week of classes in Córdoba to help my on my way to the ever-elusive level of fluency that I’m aiming for – in all, 15 hours of one-on-one lessons spread over five days. I’m really glad I did it, as I learned a lot and now pretty much know all the grammar that I need to know – I just need to put it all together and improve my vocabulary and everything should be fine. In the meantime, there’s no rest for the wicked, as I’m reading my first real Spanish book and loving it – the first volume of the fantasy trilogy Memorías de Idhún, and my pseudo-Spanish-teachers from afar, Ben and Marina, are launching Notes in Spanish Gold on Monday which could keep me busy for a while!

After my last class this afternoon, we’re taking an overnight bus to the Peninsula Valdés, our first taste of Patagonia, where we’re expecting to see whales as well as penguins with (hopefully) very newborn chicks. After that it’s onto the Fitzroy region and the first of several long treks.

I’m not quite sure how to begin an entry on the quirks and unorthodox beauty of Valparaíso, but here goes anyway: it’s somehow fitting that such an unusually shaped country like Chile should contain within it an equally unusually shaped city, and it is the geography of the city more than anything else that defines most of its significant charm and character. Valpo, as it’s known locally, is a coastal port city on the Pacific, but the land at sea level is only a few blocks wide, with forty-two different hills, or cerros, rising steeply from it.

Thus you have the geographic uniqueness of Valparaíso: a flat, narrow commercial centre at the city’s heart, with hilly residential districts climbing up from it in three directions, offering sweeping views of the port and the ocean beyond. And the character and economic division of the city is also thus formed: in the working-class lower city (called ‘Plan’), there’s a rough, gritty charm similar to that of Naples or Palermo, where you don’t have to search too far to find trash strewn everywhere on street corners, homeless people sleeping in the bus station etc, and when we wandered around the port area one morning three different local people came up to us within five minutes to tell us how dangerous it was and that we should be extremely careful. But there’s something about the realness of the city – in the street markets, in the graffiti, in the way you see the locals interacting with each other – that is inherently attractive despite the dirtiness and the stray dogs and everything else.

And then, when you’re on the cerros, the atmosphere is completely different. Here the pace of life is slow and peaceful compared with the bustle of the lower city, the old houses are virtually falling down but still beautiful in their bright colours, a ‘museum’ consists of a series of murals on adjacent streets, and a cemetery of ‘dissidents’ in fact houses tombs of Protestants. If ‘Plan’ is not to everybody’s liking, then the cerros should be. There are endless hours – no, days, or even weeks? – of exploration to do on the cerros, and we must admit that we only scratched the surface, focusing mainly on a handful of them. But every street is a delight to walk on and around every corner, you don’t know if you’ll find a gorgeous purple house, or a street-long mural, or a lookout to the other cerros and below to the city and the bay, or art students with pen and sketchbook in hand drawing their city, or who knows what else – and that’s one of the most exciting things about the city. But even though the cerros are Valpo at its prettiest, they don’t in any way project a Singapore-style artificial version of the city. There are abandoned buildings everywhere, crazy amounts of haphazardly installed power lines on every street, and teenagers drinking on steps and street corners. And, around the same time we were heeding the advice of locals and getting out of the port area, two French tourists we met at our hotel the night before had their camera stolen from out of their very hands while on the Cerro Alegre in a popular tourist area. So while the cerros might represent an idealistic Valparaíso, it’s still Valparaíso, after all.

Between these two cities within a city are the 15 ascensores (usually translated as elevators, but that’s misleading in this case; they’re more like funicular railways), built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferry the porteños (citizens of Valparaíso) from port and city centre to their houses on the hills. These creaking ascensores still run today (or at least they do when the operators are not on strike) and form one of the most unusual modes of public transportation within a major city I can ever recall taking; for about US$0.50 you hop onto a small wooden carriage with about 10 others and, after a few groans and rumbles you slowly climb above the city on tracks which can be as steep as 70 degrees. The trip is over as quickly as it began: a minute later, you’re off the carriage and it’s as though you have been transported to another world.

The common thread in both parts of Valpo is the street art and graffiti, which tells you more about Valparaíso’s character and story than any written description could. A couple of my favourite pieces were:

> Two 1970s television sets placed on top of each other on somebody’s front porch, with these words painted on the two screens: Apaga la tele and Vives tu vida (“Turn off the tele, live your life”). Later, in Santiago I saw someone wearing a T-shirt which had on its front a drawing of this exact scene.

> One mural on the side of a house which merely depicted a bunch of pieces of old furniture and other junk piled on top of each other as though it had been left for a council collection – such an uninspiring theme that yet manages to somehow so perfectly describe the character of Valparaíso.

I knew before I arrived that I would like Valparaíso but I didn’t imagine I would like it that much. Among large cities in Latin America (with Rio de Janeiro being the only obvious one I haven’t been to yet), the only one that rivals Valpo for me is Havana, which also offers its fair share of ‘rustic’ charm. Valparaíso doesn’t show itself off, or clean itself up, or promise you anything, but if you have the right mindset it’s really fabulous. Having glorious weather every day we were there helped, and staying one night in the lower city and two nights on Cerro Concepcíon gave us some insight into both sides of the city.

So with some regret, we took a bus yesterday to the Chilean capital Santiago, knowing that it could not come close to matching Valparaíso. Santiago doesn’t have much to offer the tourist – I was pretty convinced during our walk around the main sights this morning that you can experience more in five minutes in Valparaíso than in a whole day in the capital – but it’s certainly a well-developed city with solid infrastructure and a pleasant atmosphere. This normally wouldn’t count for much, but since it’s one of the five cities that Wendy can be posted to for her UN position in the coming months (years?), we have been examining Santiago a little differently than we usually would. The best part so far? It’s only 101km from Valparaíso! (And since my project of taking sepia photos of all the ascensores is only 2/15 complete, I need to return.)

With that, the first part of our Chilean journey comes to an end, and tomorrow we cross back to Argentina.

South America – what a continent! (Please excuse me while I gush like a child for a paragraph.) In many debates over the years with Wendy or other travellers, I have tended to choose Asia as my preferred continent for overland travel (especially if I get to include so-called ‘West Asia’- the Middle East – as part of Asia), given the extraordinary diversity of people, cultures and religions, unmatched by any other continent and, indeed, it would still be unmatched even if you could combine all the other continents together. But what South America lacks in diversity of peoples it more than makes up for in diversity of landscape. And it’s not just that it ticks all the landscape variety boxes – jungles, deserts, beaches, mountains etc – but it seems that everywhere you look on this continent there are natural phenomena that you just don’t see anywhere else: here, pink-purple-and-orange rock hills; there, geysers rising to the surface from rivers running underneath the world’s driest desert; over there, miles and miles of crystal salt flats; now look, dinosaur fossils, etc etc.

And so it has been for us over the past few days. Travelling over the Andes from the magical Quebrada de Humahuaca in Argentina on Thursday, we saw llamas, vicuñas and flamingos from the bus windows and drove past active volcanoes, through blinding white salt plains and alongside bright yellow mountains. We crossed the Chilean border in the afternoon and promptly arrived in hot, dusty and infrastructure-lacking San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town in the Atacama desert and an unusual introduction to the most politically stable and economically prosperous country in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States. I didn’t think much of San Pedro, which virtually only exists for tourists, and was a bit cynical at first of joining the hordes in taking minivan tours throughout the surrounding countryside, the type of travel that we normally eschew if possible. But I need not have worried at all – the desertscape was spectacular and the three tours we did (even the one that departed at 4am) were all very worthwhile.

Our first trip was the sunset tour to the Valle de la Luna, which I feared might be like sunrise at Poon Hill in Nepal or Mt. Bromo on Java – nice, but with too many other tourists around to really allow you to enjoy the nature. But fortunately it wasn’t like this at all; the view from the sunset lookout of jagged hills, deep grey sand, and little canyons was truly spectacular, and there weren’t nearly as many people as I thought there would be, and since those who were there were spread out along a ridge, I barely even noticed anyone else. Considering only the views, this was the highlight of the region.

The next morning, we rose at 3:45am for our trip to see a field of geysers two hours drive from San Pedro; the geysers are only active in the early morning when it is still cold. It was, as I hinted at above, pretty extraordinary to see these bubbling geysers and the mist that rose from them in this otherwise completely barren desert. The geysers reach about 85 degrees Celsius, and as such our guide boiled eggs in one of them and heated up chocolate milk to make hot chocolate while we walked around the place. One geyser in particular violently erupts every 10 minutes or so, then completely calms down and stops bubbling entirely – then repeats the process over and over again.

On our final afternoon in San Pedro, we went to the Salar de Atacama, the world’s third-largest salt flats and home to flamingos and other bird life. The salt flats were rockier than both the ones we passed on the bus a few days before and the more famous Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, but it was still pretty extraordinary to see them stretch out before us at sunset to the foot of the nearby Andes, with a full moon rising behind the mountains. I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t allowed near the biggest concentration of flamingos, but I still managed to get a few good shots anyway.

After three days of happy touring in the northern desert, we hopped on a 24-hour bus and headed south to the centre of the country, where we’ll spend the next few days in the cities of Valparaíso and the capital Santiago.

Fortunately, our travels in northwest Argentina in the past week have proved more successful than our previous foray into the northeast. The northwest is a charming, indigenous land a world away from the pace of Buenos Aires; to me it feels like a mixture of the Mexican Bajío (the colonial towns, the local music) and the Bolivian Altiplano (the llamas, the indigenous people, and some of the landscape), with some Midwestern United States thrown in for good measure (in the red rock canyons). Our regional travels have been in Salta and Jujuy provinces, the latter being quite close to both the Bolivian and Chilean borders.

We began in the city of Salta, which is no match for some of the gorgeous colonial towns of Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, etc, but is enjoyable enough, with a couple of pretty churches and a decent central plaza (called Plaza 9 de Julio, like so many others in Argentina; in my experience elsewhere in Latin America they’re usually called the Plaza Mayor or the Plaza de Armas). The colonial ambience aside, the other highlight of Salta was the ‘High Mountain Archaeological Museum’, which contains three child mummies aged six, seven and 15 who were put in a rock enclosure and left to die 500 years ago near the peak of a sacred 6700m+ volcano as a sacrifice, and only discovered during an expedition in 1999. Only one is displayed at a time (they are rotated every few months), and we saw the seven-year-old girl, extraordinarily well preserved because of the low temperatures, with a deliberately deformed skull and features like hair and teeth still as visible as if she had died yesterday.

We used Salta as our base for further exploration into the eponymous province, which included the Valles Calchaquiés and the Quebrada de Cafayate. The former is a plateau 2000m above sea level, about four hours from Salta on a road that was scenic but not as beautiful as it was hyped up to be. In the valley we visited two small towns, Cachi and Molinos, enjoying the colonial chic-boutique atmosphere of the former and the off-the-beaten-track nature of the latter. Both were noteworthy for their adobe architecture, pretty churches and cactus-wood decorations and ceilings, and for their diminutive size – Cachi has about 2000 inhabitants and Molinos about 900, so this was really small-town Argentina, and we were glad to have experienced it.

After a couple of nights in the Valles Calchaquiés, we returned to Salta and headed south through the Quebrada de Cafayate (now that was a spectacular ride) and disembarked mid-canyon to see two famous gashes in the rock that produce small canyons-within-a-canyon: the Garganta del Diablo (the Devil’s Throat; I’m beginning to realise that every other province in Argentina contains something with this name) and the Anfiteatro (Amphitheatre), the more impressive of the two. We brought our tent with the intention to camp nearby for the night and return to Salta in the morning. With only rocky ground near the road and sandy ground near the river that runs through the canyon to choose from, we picked the latter but found that the pegs wouldn’t hold and, as such, we couldn’t pitch the tent. Instead, we laid it out on the ground and put our sleeping mats and sleeping bags on top, and enjoyed a lovely and fortunately balmy evening sleeping under the Southern Hemisphere stars, which confused my Northern Hemisphere wife quite considerably.

Returning once more to Salta, we picked up the rest of our stuff from the hostel and took a bus further north to Jujuy province, bypassing the eponymous capital and heading straight for the Quebrada de Humahuaca, which was recommended to us many years ago and for good reason: the extraordinary colours of the rocks here have made the canyon the highlight of northwest Argentina for us. From the window of our hospedaje in Purmamarca we can see the Cerro de los Siete Colores (the Hill of the Seven Colours), and though I’m having a bit of trouble tracking down all seven, I can at least see brilliant oranges intertwined with whites, deep purples and ochre reds – all combining to make a pretty spectacular scene. We walked a 3km circuit around the hill yesterday morning on a glorious day and the contrast of the colours was really fabulous, so much so that we walked it again in the afternoon (but there were some clouds about and the light was not as good).

Finally, I’d better explain the title of this post. We saw a sign in the central plaza of a small town we passed on the bus en route to the Valles Calchaquiés that said: ‘Prohibido atar caballos alrededor de la plaza’ (‘Tying up horses in the plaza is prohibited’) – which we thought was an apt summary of the timelessness of the region. Now, having seen and done everything we wanted to do in this area, we’re taking a bus to San Pedro de Atacama tomorrow for our first exploration of Chile, and then we’ll cross back and forth between the two countries over the coming weeks as we head south and eventually arrive in Patagonia.

The upheaval of the week after my last post seems distant now, but it was pretty chaotic at the time and I didn’t have a chance to post about it while it was happening. To cut a long story short, two weeks ago we tried and failed on a Monday to postpone our Friday flight to Buenos Aires; flew from Riga to Rome on Tuesday; Wendy changed airports straight away and flew to Geneva for a meeting on Wednesday, returning to Rome that night; and in the end we took the Argentina flight anyway and by Friday night we found ourselves in the welcoming apartment of our friends Seb and Diana, not exactly sure how we had gotten there or what lay ahead of us in our attempt to ‘complete’ the South American continent that we abandoned midway through Bolivia four years ago to take jobs in Doha.

We spent five days in Buenos Aires, but we had quite a few things to buy, we wanted to spend time with our friends and relax a bit, so we didn’t spend as much time exploring the city for pleasure as we would have liked. We spent half a day in San Telmo for its Sunday market, enjoying the street tango, puppet shows etc, and visited the Plaza de Mayo and around. Beyond that we didn’t see that much of the city, but we know we’ll be back in due time anyway as it’s sort of the crux of this South America trip – I have a flight to Vancouver from B.A. at the end of January, and if we’re able to return after that and last until the middle of next year we still have our return flight to Rome from Buenos Aires in June.

From the capital we took an overnight bus to Puerto Iguazu, and even though we bought the cheapest tickets (for class semi cama, or semi-bed), it was the most luxurious bus I’ve been on in 70+ countries. You get served food on board (while DVDs of 1980s music, a throwback to our time in the Philippines, are shown on the numerous televisions), there’s an exceptionally clean bathroom, and the seats recline a fair way – it’s basically the equivalent of business class on a plane.

The Iguazu Falls that straddle the Argentine-Brazilian border are generally considered the most impressive waterfalls in the world, but unfortunately our visit was a pretty massive disappointment. It rained and hailed (yet again) on the day we went to the Brazilian side of the falls and had been raining the previous several days, leaving us with poor visibility (sometimes we would look out from a viewpoint and literally not be able to see the falls at all), and the water completely brown (think of the waterfall at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory). We went to the Argentine side the next day, but the Garganta del Diabo (Devil’s Throat) lookout point – the biggest highlight of both sides of the falls – was closed because of high water levels. The boat trip on the river below the falls to a small island was also cancelled for the same reason, so in the end we didn’t even bother entering since there was not much else left to see and we knew we would be bitterly disappointed again.

We left Iguazu on Monday, stopping briefly at San Ignacio to see the ruins of a Jesuit mission in the jungle. These centuries-old missions are scattered throughout the region in modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and while the best ones are said to be in Paraguay, we both need visas to enter and figured it wouldn’t be worth the $90. San Ignacio is considered the best of the four missions in Argentina, and we thought it was quite interesting and well worth the stopover.

Getting back on another insane luxury bus in the afternoon, we journeyed out of the northeast of Argentina to the completely different landscapes of the northwest, and 19 hours later found ourselves in our current location, the colonial town of Salta, which will be our base for exploring the colourful rock formations and indigenous villages of the region over the next few days. Though, since some New Zealanders we became friends with at the hostel last night got robbed this morning by an Argentine staying in their dorm, it hasn’t been an auspicious start…

Vilnius is harder to characterise than the two other Baltic capitals. It doesn’t have a medieval core – it’s instead a baroque city with the occasional medieval building or, more frequently, newer buildings with a few medieval bricks from the original foundation displayed – and it’s certainly not as beautiful as either Tallinn or Riga. It’s rougher around the edges than both of them as well; graffiti and beggars are commonplace in the old town (the latter so much so that the tourist office hands out pamphlets to tourists that the tourists then give to the beggars; the pamphlets give information on how homeless people can get help). But Vilnius is also a more pious city, with Catholic pilgrims streaming in from nearby Poland to visit the Mary shrine inside the Gates of Dawn and other sites frequented by the late Pope John Paul II, and the resulting rise in the number of stores selling religious paraphernalia. And when you walk down Gedimino prospektas, a classy tree-lined avenue with designer stores inside baroque palaces, you can squint a little and you’re almost in Paris. Yet in contrast to this baroque vibe is that Vilnius has Eastern Europe’s oldest university, historic and beautiful enough that its 13 courtyards are now a tourist attraction. So in the end, you look out over the city from the medieval brick tower on the Gedimino Hill and are left viewing a mixture of different eras, styles and futures.

While in Vilnius we made two day-trips to nearby attractions. The first was to Trakai, with its gorgeously located medieval castle on a tiny island reached by two footbridges from the mainland. As a defensive castle it’s not much good, since attackers by land would not even pass it and attackers by sea could easily bypass it, but as a fortified palace it’s quite charming.

The more interesting trip, however, was to the controversial neo-Soviet ‘theme park’ known officially as Grutas Park and unofficially as Stalin World. In the fiercely anti-Soviet Baltic states (where there are ‘occupation’ museums in all three capitals), the opening of a park for the display of Soviet sculptures so soon (within 10 years) after the fall of the Soviet Union was met with some resistance. But in fact the purpose of the park is not to glorify the Soviet era and it is actually very anti-Soviet, detailing the terror the regime inspired in Lithuania, and is very well presented. Walking in the cold around the forest past the sculptures – which included about a dozen Lenins and two prized and (I imagine) rare Stalins (one bust and one full-body sculpture) – with Soviet music playing from nearby speakers was an eerie feeling, and the reflection that it inspires makes it, I think, a place that Lithuanians should visit to help them contemplate their recent history.

From Vilnius we headed back north to Riga, and celebrated seven years of being together last night at Rozengrals, a fabulous medieval restaurant in the old town, which I highly recommend for the ambience and experience of dining underground in a building first mentioned in 1293. As I write now, we are at Riga airport awaiting our flight to Rome, and while I’m excited as usual to be going to the Eternal City, Wendy is only staying long enough to dump her bag before turning around, switching airports, and flying to Geneva for a meeting tomorrow. To compensate for her absence, I have promised friends that I will drink twice as much at Campo de Fiori tonight…

The old city of Riga was certainly nice enough, but had it not marked our first steps in Europe for over a year, we probably wouldn’t have been greatly impressed – there were no city walls or gates, and only one tower, and it was the type of old city that you can spend two hours in and be done with. But as it was, we were thankful to be back among churches and cobblestones after a year travelling in Asia, and we headed north from Riga expecting a similar experience in the Estonian capital Tallinn. And even as we approached the old city of Tallinn on foot from the north, past the Swedish-built pentagonal bastion, we had yet no idea what awaited us inside: surely one of the most picturesque medieval cities anywhere in Europe, one with a timeless atmosphere more like that of Carcasonne or Siena than of a European Union capital.

Every street in old Tallinn is an adventure, and the city is made for unplanned exploration. As you walk on the cobblestones for the first time, around every corner there could be a new find: a stone tower topped by an orange tiled roof, or a tunnel passageway through to an open plaza, or a church spire climbing high into the sky. This was the Tallinn experience for us – four days of discovery upon discovery in one of the most enjoyable walking cities I can ever remember visiting. We climbed up towers, walked through tunnels under the bastions, explored 13th century Dominican monasteries, looked out over the old city from numerous viewpoints and ate at medieval restaurants. We liked it so much that we abandoned our planned visit to Kuressaare and spent all our time in Estonia in the capital instead, and it was worth every minute. The city is extremely well preserved and (with the sole exception of the token and tacky ‘torture museum’), the ‘Ye Olde Medieval Tallinn’ aspect has been authentically and tastefully done, most notably at the Olde Hansa restaurant and shop (or is that shoppe?).

From Estonia, the northern-most of the three Baltic states, we travelled by bus for nine hours yesterday back through Latvia to Lithuania, the southern-most of the three. About an hour outside the capital Vilnius, we saw the most amazing rainbow I’ve ever seen out the window to the east – the entire arc of it was lit up by the late afternoon sun. With such a spectacular sight as an introduction, we arrived in Vilnius at dusk and woke up this morning prepared to explore our last city in the region before heading back to a more familiar European capital – Rome.

Meanwhile I’m having some trouble embedding photos into this post for reasons unknown, but there are plenty of shots of beautiful Tallinn here.