Patagonia, vol. 1 (Punta Arenas, Ushuaia) March 27th - April 1st

Oh my, where to start.. I'm really sorry it's been so long since I wrote anything on my blog, I've just been so busy, and when you don't have any computers available at your house, it's not that easy.. BUT, just today I finally got my laptop!!!:-D Well it's only been... what.. 2 months (I hate DHL!!! Or at least the customs agency they hired to get the computers out of customs, who turned out to have done NOTHING for 3 weeks..!).

Anyway, I would like to tell you about our trip to the south of Chile and Argentina.

Lasse, my Danish friend, Melanie from Germany, Rebecca from Australia and I decided to go to the south before it was too late and everything would be closed for the winter. So on the 27th of March late in the evening we got on the bus in La Serena heading towards Santiago. It was a 6-7 hours ride, but we all fell aspeel the moment we sat in the seats, and didn't wake up until the steward rudely (I thought, but then again, I was halfway asleep..) took our pillows and blankets. Then we were off to the airport to catch a plane from Santiago to Punta Arenas and arrived in the afternoon. We stayed at a very cosy hostel, and the owner was a very nice elderly lady. In the afternoon we went for a walk around the town to find a daytrip for the next day (we didn’t have much luck, though.. They were either not leaving that day or too expensive..). It was freezing cold – mainly because of the strong wind, so we found this VERY nice “chocolateria” where we had: (surprise, surprise) hot chocolate:-)!

It’s like a café – where they serve coffee – only here the main thing is chocolate! Could it get any better?!:-D We became very fond of that place the couple of days we were there. Anyway, we decided to go on a tour to see penguins on the next day, and in the evening we had dinner at this very nice and cosy restaurant we found in the Lonely Planet guidebook, “La Marmita”. The waiters were very nice and the whole atmosphere was very laid back.

The food was amazing (I had steamed eel with some kind of Chilean bulgur and the price even more amazing compared to the experience we had! On our way back to the hostel I saw the Milky Way (no, not the chocolate) for the first time! Bec, the Australian girl, was used to it, but us 3 from the northern hemisphere were rather impressed!
On the 29th we could sleep in, in a real bed – nice:-) We woke up to the sound of strong wind, but the sun was shining and the weather was great! We strolled along the beach of the Strait of Magellan towards the town centre, and actually, the way Punta Arenas looked is kind of the way I imagine a town in Greenland could look like before winter comes: Not really any snow, but kind of “wind bitten”, deserted streets, people stay indoors to keep warm, the houses come in many different colours and there are stray dogs in the streets.

We walked around the town, and in the afternoon we went to our new favourite place: the chocolateria for a cup of chocolate, a German “kuchen” and a game of UNO:-) At 16 we left with 4 other tourists to go see penguins at Pingüinera Otway by the Seno Otway. It was about an hour away on a mini-bus, and the view was… well, there wasn’t a lot to see, really.. Sometimes it reminded me very much of the landscaping of the part of Denmark where I’m from, Jutland (den Jyske hede), only it was on the other side of the world…! Amazing.. Anyway, we arrived to a sort of station by a street from where there was a path that we followed to get to the penguins. If it had been windy in Punta Arenas, it was stormy here! Normally, they said, there are around 10.000 couples (!) of penguins in this area, but now there were only few left. Most of them had gone north for the winter; up to Brazil, for example (they aren’t stupid, them penguins:-)). So I think there must have been around 40 left, from what we saw….. The walk was about an hour, and we did see some penguins; it IS a funny animal. And I don’t know why, but whenever you see them waddle, you can’t help but try to walk in the same way – am I right?!:-D

Anyway, even though we had hoped to see more penguins, we saw what we came to see, and went back to Punta Arenas. In the evening we decided to save a bit of money and cook at the hostel – steaks, of course, so because of all of the smoke in the small kitchen, we also managed to set off the fire alarm, haha:-D

On the 30th, we spent the whole day on a bus from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia in Argentina; known as “The end of the World” (even though there IS a town in Chile which is more to the south..). The landscaping was as flat as we had seen around Punta Arenas:

but when we passed the Magellan strait at Punta Delgada on a ferry, we saw some sort of black and white dolphin playing in the water. When we got closer to Ushuaia, there were more mountains with snow-covered tips, and we also saw cows, sheep, lamas and flamingos! We arrived around 21 o’clock and had very little time to find out what we wanted to do on our whole day in Ushuaia. So on the next day, the 1st of April, we ended up just staying around Ushuaia. The view in Ushuaia is amazing. Everywhere you look there are mountains and snow (at least on the top of the mountains), and a beautiful “fjord”.

We went up some of the mountains behind Ushuaia in a taxi, and got the chairlift even further up towards the glacier Glaciar Martial. It’s around 1000 meters above sea level, so not much compared to what we have seen and experienced (unfortunately, this time I couldn’t blame my shortness of breath on the lack of oxygen in the air…), but I couldn’t help thinking back on the days on the Lares Trek in Peru when we trekked/hiked up to the glacier:-) Following some guys in front of us, I think we might have gone off-track, but the “paths” weren’t that easy to spot anyway, so we just went straight up to the glacier. The guide at the tourist information and the map said that it was a 40 min. trek, I think, but after 2 hours we still hadn’t got all the way to the glacier, so yeah, we definitely got “off the beaten track”. When we got up there, it started snowing a bit, and the view was amazing! The ice of the glacier was blue at some spots (later on we learned that it has got to do with the absorbtion of the light… I think:-)). Bec and I going up in the chair lift

When we got down to where we hopped on the chair-lift, we went to this cottage, that was a restaurant. It reminded me a bit of after-skiing; we were all tired, in our warm clothes, with red noses and had a glass of hot red , “Glühwein” – uhmJ! At the restaurant they offered something called canopying – you’re tied to a cable, and then you just slide from one tree to the next! Of course we had to try it!:-D We had 2 instructors with us for about an hour in the forest. They taught us some basic techniques, and then we just hit it off like Tarzan in the jungle!:-D It was soo much fun! In the evening we were just tourists around Ushuaia, and then we had dinner at this fish and seafood restaurant, “Volver”, that we also found via the Lonely Planet guidebook. It was really delicious; that is, Lasse and I had starfish as a starter (I thought, why go for the regular starter now that there’s something a bit different on the menu), and it also looked good… But the texture was like chewing on very blurry snot, basically…:-S But hey, I gave it a shot!

In the evening we just hung around the hostel (Hostel Antarctica – very precise now that we were only a few 1000 km. from THE Antarctica:-)) and played Trivial Pursuit.