Jannis & Martine

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.