Jannis & Martine

Yesterday we have arrived back in Puerto Natales from our 6-day hike in the Torres del Paine national park.

The hike was very nice, except for the fact that our ice hike we had planned for the second day got cancelled. Luckily this was compensated by very beautifull sunny weather during the whole period we stayed in the park (this is no joke, but we know other people who have been here too won´t believe us).

We are leaving the town of Puerto Natales again early tomorrow morning for our 4-day trip with the big Navimag boat, travelling up north through the Chilean islands, cliffs, glaciers and the ocean.

As we are now packing, sorting our washed clothes out and having some quick dinner, we will tell you more about our experience in Torres del Paine next time.

But we still had some time this morning to put some more pictures on our Flickr-webpage, so you can check these ot while we are at sea. The new pictures include some pictures we took while we overflew Patagonia 2 weeks ago so you can see some overview of where we have been.

Jannis en Martine.

We are just back from El Chalten where we have walked some great hiking trails, in preparation for our 6-day walk (including 1 day of ice climbing) in the Torres del Paine national park, starting one day from now.

In contrast with El Calafete which is a very touristy and uncharming village, the 600-people village of El Chalten is very nice, situated right in the national park and near a river, surrounded by the very impressive Fitz Roy en Cerro Torre mountains, part of the Andes mountain range.

The fact that El Chalten turned out to be such a very nice village was even more strange when we heard that El Chalten is only 28 years old, and had been errected solely for the purpose of hosting all the people that are walking in the mountains around it. The village is even that young and at such a location (in the middle of nowhere) that there are:

Very, very bad and slow internet connections, no connections for your mobile phone, almost no fresh vergetables available and you could not get any money from the bank, because there are no banks and cash machines there. The cash machine thing was solved two weeks ago, since they just had installed a cash machine two weeks before we arrived. A very big event they told us. We did not know all of this of course before we left, so we had brought lots of cash money with us, as all the travelguides said it is impossible to get money in El Chalten, so there we where: in El Chalten with plenty of cash money.

Our days in El Chalten really have been one the highlights untill now, as El Chalten is situated in very, very beautifull national park covered with sand dunes, yellow flower covered hills, wild rivers, waterfalls, short tree covered bush, predator birds flying around, snow topped mountains, the very impressive Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre mountains peaks and great walking trails overlooking this impressive scenery.

We noticed that there is lots of building activity going on now in El Chalten, so we wonder if the village will stay the same nice little village in the future. As the village grows, more and more people will visit El Chalten and its surroundings, and the fact is the national park is now suffering a lot from the hordes of people visiting it. We even got a special lecture from a ranger when we arrived, telling us to be very carefull with the environment, not to leave any garbage around and not to smoke anything anywhere (anyone smoking is evicted from the park, because a burning cigarette had started a bush fire a couple of years ago). He said that all the warning signs are now also being written in Hebrew so even Israeli people could understand that they were not allowed to smoke and to throw garbage away (there are lots of young Israeli people here, doing some travelling after they have done their 3-year service in the army)….

It will be a while before we publish another post as we will be hiking arround Torres del Paine the next 7 days, but I will try to publish some more pictures on our Flickr-webpage from our travels around Buenos Aires, flying into Chili over the Andes to Punta Arenas and seeing penguins.

Jannis.

We arrived yesterday in El Chalten.

Before we arrived in El Chalten we first have spent some more days in Ushuaia and then some in El Calafate, seeing Argentina´s major tourist attraction.

First about Ushuaia, the most southern town in the world. It´s one of the prettiest towns we have ever been, laying at a bay in the beautifull Beagle channel and located in gorgeous mountains with snow covered tops.

There we visited the huge prison (which is now a museum) over there. This prison is very important to the town, as Ushuaia has become a pretty big town since the hundreds of prisoners and their guards arrived.

The prison was very impressive with an exhibition in every prison cell, giving information about all sorts of criminals, and the political prisoners who stayed there. The most famous prisoner was Carlos Cardel, the man who made the Tango famous. The prison in Ushuaia was errected a century ago to house all major criminals because it is impossible to escape from there, as there are only the ocean and mountains surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of very cold and windy pampas to escape to. This is why nobody managed to escape from it in the 50 years it has been used.

On the last day we have rented bikes to see the beautifull surroundings. We cycled alongside the Beagle channel on a pretty tough (hilly) ride, followed by a couple of hours of hiking through the bush to an estancia. An estancia is basically a big sheep/horse/cattle farm at a distant location. This estancia was one of the first around but is now abandoned, besides some dogs and horses. It still is beautifully located near the water, surrounded by forests and mountains. All of this turned out to be one of the best trips we have done untill now.

After this great trip we left Ushuaia again, to go a little up north to El Calafate to see the famous Moreno glacier.

This was a very long trip, as the Argentinian part of Tierra del Fuego is separated from the rest of Argentina, as some time ago Chili has conquered a little part in between. We had to pass the border four times to go to from (Argentinian) Ushuaia to (Argentinian) El Calafate. Every passing took about an hour, so this resulted in 20-hour bus trip. A good thing was that we had to spend some time on a ferry, where we again saw dolpins swimming along.

We spend some days in El Calafate but the only thing you can do there without spending lots of money (it is very touristy) is visisting the nearby lagoon. This actually turned to be a very nice lagoon with water surrounded by camomilla, sand dunes, wild horses, geese and other birds.

The other thing you have to do in El Calafte when you are spening money, is going on a day trip to the glaciers, of which the Moreno glacier is the famous one. This huge glacier (which is as big as big as Buenos Aires and is 60 meters high) moves about a meter a day which results in big pieces of ice dropping in the water about every 15 minutes.

We visited the Moreno glacier with an ´alternative´ tour during which we first travelled through the mountains, seeing lots of big predator birds and even some condors high in the sky. After that we went on a boat trip cruising alongside the glacier during which we could see the almost fake blue coloured ice. We also saw some big pieces dropping in the water, generating big waves coming towards the boat.

After we had a Calafte ice cream (made from the Calafate berries which grow in the mountains over there) we took the bus to go to El Chalten, Argentina´s mountain hiking centre. It includes what they call here the ´top of the world´, the Fitzroy mountain range.

We will tell you more about this next time, but this might take a while as we are surrounded by mountains the next weeks, without proper internet facilities.

Jannis en Martine.

Here a quick post since we are on a pretty tight schedule right now…

We have left Buenos Aires last week, but not before we had visisted some nice museums, the Sunday market at San Telmo again and I had gotten an Argentinan haircut. As we now had a full day to explore the Sunday market we watched lots of performances, of which a very good tango music performance by music students was the highlight.

The last day we had some very late dinner (not a problem here, since you can easily go out for dinner at 12 o´clock at night) and slept some hours at the airport (to save an overnight stay in a hotel)  to checkin for our flight to Santiago de Chili at 5 o´clock.

After we had arrived in Santiago we changed planes for our flight to Punta Arenas in the south. This flight was really beautifull since it was very clear weather and the full 3 hour flight was over the Andes mountains, so we did see lots of mountains, rivers, lakes, snow and even a couple of glaciers.

Until yesterday we have stayed in Punta Arenas which is an Chilean outpost in the southern part of Patagonia, which used to be a pretty busy city. This was before the Panama canal existed, and all ships had to sail around Cape Horn.

Nowedays it is still a pretty big city for this area with a port, a large airfield (even with ex-Dutch F16´s on it), lots of tourists to see the penguins, trees that are bended by the strong winds and colourfull wind-battered houses which are all protected by steel plating on their walls. This all results in a Scottisch looking city with the same weather and with bright coulored Scandinavian looking houses.

We did not do much here, expet for making plans for the next couple of weeks. But, we did have some very nice Chilean/Brazilian stewish soups (in a very tiny sailor type of cafe run by some Brazilian looking women), visit a very impressive museum and we did do the famous Penguin trip.

This trip really was a highlight, as we went by boat to the remote Isla Magdelane island at which about 100.000 penguins are breeding. Since you could walk in between the penguins and they were not shy at all, this was really a great experience, seeing penguins wiggling around everywhere.

You can get an impression of this by checking out our Flickr-webpage as we now are uploading our pictures from our last two weeks of travelling around Uruquay, doing the nice ferry ride across the Rio de la Plate to Tigre near Buenos Aires, flying into Chili over the Andes to Punta Arenas and seeing the penguins.

We now are in Argentina again as we have left Punta Arenas two days ago for a 12-hour bus ride to Ushaia in the Argentinian part of Tierre del Feugo (land of fires / vuurland), so we really now are at the ´end of the world´….

Here a quick post (and in English to satisfy our Oz´ readers again), because we had a suprise yesterday…

The last two days we saw groups of people with racing team uniforms, so we were wondering if there was going to be a big racing event here.

Somewhat later we also saw lots of Spanish advertising with the word ´Dakar´ on it and even frontpages on the newspapers saying things about ´Dakar´. I then rembered that the famous rally Paris-Dakar has been transferred from Europe-Africa to somewhere in South-America because Africa has become too dangerous (click on this link for the full story), so we where wondering if this rally was starting somewhere close to us.

Yesterday evening when we were going for a walk in the city center we stumbled across lots of police, roadblocks and lots of people. It happened to be the Dakar rally which was starting from the city center to race to Chile….

So we, accidently had a very great night whaching the cars and trucks crossing through the streets with everyone cheering and apploading. A really great atmosphere, getting even better as even some garbage trucks joined the race as they where racing trough the public under load cheers and laugs.

We also saw lots of Dutch cars and trucks since we heard from a Dutch fan that The Netherlands has the second biggest team present.  

As we did not have our camera with us, we have no pictures, so I quickly searched for some websites with the some pictures:

This News site for an impression, some pictures and the story;

This Flickr page for lots of pictures of the participating motors, cars and trucks.

A last note:

The coming days we are going to add the first pictures f our stay here on our Flickr-webpage, so keep checking it out. 

Jannis. 

Wat meteen opvalt in Uruguay zijn de vriendelijke mensen.  Bij aankomst in Uruguay stonden we aan de bagageband te wachten op onze backpack, maar we kregen nauwelijks kans die te pakken. Iemand nam ze meteen over, hielp ons door de douane, en dropte ons in de juiste bus met de woorden ´welcome in Uruquay´. Zo gaat het continue, als je maar even lijkt te twijfelen, komt er meteen iemand vragen of diegene kan helpen.

Zo kwamen we op kerstavond, door vertragingen vanwege de kerstdrukte, veel later in ons hostel in Salto aan dan was afgesproken.  Daar stonden we voor een dichte deur….. De eigenaar van het hostel was al kerst aan het vieren, omdat dee eigenaar had begrepen dat we de volgende morgen zouden aankomen. Ons Spaans hapert blijkbaar toch nog wat af en toe  ;-).
Iemand die toevallig langs reed en ons zag staan, stopt, zorgde dat de eigenaar van het hostel gebeld werd en bleef wachten tot we binnen echt binnen gelaten konden worden. 
Gelukkig maar, want in Uruguay blijkt rond kerstmis echt alles dicht.  

Kerstmis wordt in Uruguay vooral gevierd op kerstavond en wordt hier vergelijkbaar gevierd als oud & nieuw, dus om 12 uur ´s nachts met vuurwerk. De dagen voor kerst staan er tientallen stalletjes waar je het vuurwerk kan kopen, maar zeker niet volgens Nederlandse standaarden. Er hoeft maar iemand een sigaret in te gooien, en je hebt een echte ramp.  Ook heeft het Jannis moeite gekost om geen ´illegaal´ vuurwerk zoals mortieren te halen.

Omdat op eerst kerstdag alles dicht was, behalve gelukkig enkele 24-uurswinkeltjes waar je wat snoep en drinken kan kopen, bestond ons kerstontbijt uit soepstengels, droog brood en water (en een chocoladereep om het op te vrolijken). Omdat het rond de 40 graden was, hebben we de rest van de dag – zoals het daar hoort- vooral alleen maar op apegapen gelegen.

Alles is wel versierd, maar dat komt bij deze temperaturen toch niet echt over, dus de kerstsfeer komt pas tegen  de avond. En dan komt ook de stad weer tot leven. Tegen de avond gingen er uiteindelijk ook nog een paar restaurantjes open, en konden we dus toch nog bij een pizzaria ´kerstdineren´.

Tweede kerstdag kennen ze hier niet, dus was alles gewoon weer open. Toen hebben we alsnog heel uitgebreid (want gesponderd door Jannis´ ouders) een lekkere kerstlunch genoten!

Net voor oud & nieuw zijn we terug gegaan naar Buenos Aires om daar oud & nieuw te vieren. Heel vrolijk is de ´confetti´ die voor oudjaarsdag overal gegooid wordt. Deze confetti bleek uiteindelijk uit verscheurde agendablaadjes en rekeningen te bestaan. Dit geeft wel nogal een rotzooi in een al behoorlijk rommelige stad, waar het vuilnis overal op straat ligt.

Het oud&nieuw zelf is niet zoals wij het in Nederland kennen met aftellen, waarna iedereen naar buiten loopt om vuurwerk te kijken.  Hier blijft iedereen in de kroeg zitten en gaat verder met waar ie mee bezig is. ´Het moment´ hebben we daarom zelfs helemaal gemist. Opeens hoorden we applaus, en bleek 2009 al een paar minuten te zijn aangebroken. Toen hebben wij op een gegeven moment de rekening maar betaald om zelf wel naar buiten te gaan. Daarbuiten bleek er toch ook wel een feeststemming, maar dat zit ´m meer in muziek en dansen en af en toe ook nog wat mooi vuurwerk.

Vandaag op 1 januari blijkt net als op kerst vrijwel alles gesloten, behalve enkele duurdere restaurants, de supermarkten, kiosken en de slipperwinkeltjes. Omdat de restaurantjes om de hoek niet open zijn, zijn we vandaag dus wat duurder uit dan geplant, dus de drankjes van oudjaarsnacht moeten we dan maar een dag later compenseren.

Vandaag kan het nog en willen daarom wij bij deze iedereen ´un buenos ano nueves´ wensen!!!!!!
Daarnaast Leo een hele fijne verjaardag en voor morgen alvast gefeliciteerd aan Nick en Janne!!!