Los Glaciares National Park- Calafate

One of the main reasons for our six week tour of Patagonia (besides avoiding the sultry Buenos Aires heat of December/January) was to use our three night stay at a fancy Calafate hotel (Hotel Kosten Aike).   Dave won our stay at a silent auction at the charity ball at the British embassador's residence ( 400 people ) last spring, and from the champagne welcome to the phones in the shower, this place was indeed luxurious.    After lots of bus travel and trudging our rolling suitcases over cobble stoned  little towns, Calafate was like arriving in Vegas after crossing the desert on mule back.  Lots of European 20 year olds, fit and outfitted to the max in the latest climbing gear....Calafate is the gateway point of lots of major trekking in the Andes, both the Argentina and Chile sides...We met up with Oregon friends Denny and Annie and had some great fancy food, spent much time at outdoor cafes, and instead of trekking off into the sunset, rented an airconditioned car and rode out to see the Perito Moreno Glacier.  Los Glaciares National Park has been designated by UNESCOas a World Heritage Site and I can see why...This glacier is the only one in the world any more that is advancing .....- approximately 3 inches per hour -  The size of it is truly overwhelming, along with the SOUNDS when ice breaks off and plummets into the lake.  for an additional thrill, google earth for the patagonian ice fieldwith a dozen glaciers moving out from it.  a journey for the younger and tougher.

 

 

I took this shot from a cruise boat that got right up close...I couldn't get over the color .  The ice is swimming pool blue.  A guide said that eons of compression drives the oxygen out of the ice.  Lack of oxygen somehow effects how light rays are perceived....the more blue it is, the older it is.

  

this cavern is formed by the slight current between the two lakes, actually one lake, until the ices blocks it.  then one half, with a larger feed system starts forcing a channel through, under, the glacial block.

  

  

Right in the middle of this pic is where the glacier meets the land and keeps breaking off...sometimes forming a bridge that then collapses..

  

And this is my favorite arty pic of rock (and what amazing colors of rock!) halting that slow glowing flow of blue glacier ice.... 

Puerto Deseado...off the tourist trail....

 

now, for some ocean and river stuff.  puerto deseado, home to the huge ships of the calamari and langostino capturing industry.  one of our primary reasons for the visit was eating some of same, fresh and lots of it.  not a tourist place at all,  not many hotels, restaurants, but a pretty brisk excursion business via boat for dolphin, penguin, and, sometimes, killer whale watching.  it's just a couple hours from more touristy zones, and , yes it's pretty cold, and we are getting more south all the time.  the best fresh fish restaurant in town looks out on this not so spectacular residential scenery.

of course, it did have some moments of architectural uniquity

But the very best, most wonderous thing to do in Puerto Deseado is to go on a pontoon boat up the river.  The place is teeming with wildlife...dolphins chased the boat...we saw two kinds of cormorants, South American Sea Lions...

 

and thousands of these guys, not at all people shy, as they get visited by a good hundred humans daily

 

A young french illustrator, with drawings and subjects all in one photo

 

this is the one that jamye danced with for half an hour.  and back at the dock, a representative of the local tourist bureau greeted us.

This little town is definetly trying to be tourist friendly... I kinda hope it stays small and quirky...

Esquel, Piedra Parada and the Canyon de las Biutreras

Esquel is south of El Bolson and the Lakes District, still at the edge of the Andes. 

It's a hub for Chubut Province business and tourism, so seemed a bit more worldly than other neighboring towns we passed through.    Dave got real excited  when he heard there was a huge rock out east of town in the middle of the pampa.   There were no buses that went there, but he found a guide with a car....After two hours of driving on a bone racking gravel road across a very barren, flat, gravel plane of nothingness, here is what we found:

so, this  is the place called Piedra Parada; literally, rock stop.  it's maybe 200 ft. through and 500ft. tall.  Apparently, it was a cooled hunk of lava that suddenly burst through due to internal pressure and a weakening of the surrounding rock.  so, instead of rock stop, maybe rock plug is closer.  This was kind of impressive, but only shrunk in comparison to the next batch o' geology. 

We got to hike and marvel in Canyon de las Biutreras, about a mile from the rock.

that's probably me, part way up one of the narrow draws.  all of these strong and sudden formations bespeak geology at it's most unbelievable suddenness.  it seems as if all of this exploded from the center of the earth at once.  cultural history made it a perfect weather and game trapping spot for the original Indians.

this particularly large protected opening has been the site of ongoing archaeological digs.   lots of bone tools and flutes, plus remnants of basket weaving and cured hide clothing and shelters.

took a hundred or more photos, will go back here again some day for a thousand more.

although this is a federal protection zone," no cussin', no spittin', no campin,'" there are two areas where rock climbing enthusiasts are allowed.  the little tiny white dot in the lower quarter of the center photo is of a guy, very slowly moving up. click on the photo to see him bigger..

and here we are, feeling very small.

Over to the Atlantic...Playa Union, Puerto Rawson, and Trelew

I apologize for not keeping to my schedule of a post every Sunday due to lap top explosion three weeks ago while on the road.  But we are back in Buenos Aires now, settled into a new barrio and a new apartment, with a computer up and running. 

Our 6 week tramp around Patagonia reinforced my belief of "good travel" .

  The touted tourist destination towns and attractions are indeed easier to navigate, with better service structure (taxi's and ATM's and English understood).  The researched and planned trip, reservations made, does make for more relaxing, less harried travel.  For me,though, the most memorable and thought provoking are the towns, people, restaurants and sights off the tourist path, the unplanned event, the times when one is stranded and stymied and has to work out the next step.

We had scheduled the first 20 days of our trip pretty tight, but after the Lakes District and El Bolson we had 16 unplanned days to meander down South to Calafate. We opted to take an overnight bus back to the Atlantic coast to Playa Union ( barely mentioned in guide books), just south of Puerto Madryn.  Puerto Madryn is in ALL the guide books for seeing whales and other marine marvels, but we had seen enough whales in Oregon.  Playa Union turned out to be full of tourists, but mainly Argentine ones.  Its a vacation beach town with a long board walk, with the Atlantic on one side and on the other, rows of tiny bungalows interspersed with restaurants and ice cream stores.  I loved walking down the boardwalk in the evening, peeking into the living rooms of all the bungalows, being a voyeur of argentine vacations.  That's were we saw the guy at the top of the page...he was sipping a martini, watching the people go by.  When I gestured through the window asking if I could take his picture, he leaped up and came outside, told us his story, then puffed up a bit for his photo.

The town of about 1,500 full time folks seems to be doing pretty well, with lots of fancy houses going up...

And here is what the other side of the boardwalk looked like... lots of kids on their summer break, and the big group down on the sand was watching the regional team hand ball playoffs.

We found this great old dance pavilion in the bigger town of Trelew, a Welsh farming settlement, a 15 minute busride from Playa Union.

And a 20 minute walk got us to the tiny fishing port of Puerto Rawson, where the one restaurant  gave us our first good seafood of the trip....

San Martin de los Andes and lots of fish!....

Bariloche was a city stretched out around a great lake of about $30,000 population. It's grown fast and furiously with tourism.  Our next stop, San Martin de los Andes, is a bit smaller, is a tourist town too, but sure felt better to me.... it still felt like a town, with different neighborhoods..better laid out, with the town folks putting restirctions on high raises etc.   It's a town with lots of roses and gardens and stone and timber houses, and all the food we had seemed to have more care taken in preparation.... again lots of wild game and berries and great locally brewed beer...

this was just too much like Oregon, no?  but there is far more variety in trees and plants due to long hard winters and less chance of one species taking over (like the variety you see in Northern Alaska). This house was right across the street from our old classic hotel, Hotel Tourismo, $30 dollars a night with breakfast.

We signed up to go fishing with these two brothers (pic below,http://www.caleufutrip.com.ar/ )  in the Lanin National Park....about an hours drive from San Martin de los Andes.  This is the volcano in the park, taller than Mt. Hood. 

yeah, well this is one of about forty fish caught.  rainbow, brook and german brown.  we were in a 12 foot pontoon boat and it was blowing a little much for heading to the middle for deep down trophy browns.  trolling the shallows - with great huge wet fly streamers -  was great. we pulled over in wind protscted coves and were equally succesful with dry stuff.  nobody goes to this lake. There are 50 lakes and 50 miles of stream within a half hour of the city, so, why drive far?

On our drive to the park, I saw my first authentic gauchos at work.....  4 or 5 batches of cowboys and maybe 200 head movin´on up tp the high ground summer grazing.

...just another regular fish.  our guide fishes some very southern argentine streams that empty through chile into the pacific with his dreams on the really big chinook.  felt bad about not having some show off photos.

Dave was in heaven.  jamye still caught more fish

da lake, looking towards chile, yes it´s summer and cold.

art is maybe best when it´s fun. 

 

so, this is the red deer of south america, of course, a life size likeness, but seems to me to be a smaller elk.  saw some huge racks on retaurant walls.  it is also available in restaurants.  some are farm raised, some hunters with special licensing shoot, process and sell to restaurants.  same with the wild boar.  and is that a great taste treat.  on the way to the south coast for, hopefully, giant prawns and langostinos caught the same day.

Bariloche and San Martin de los Andes... Lake Tahoe like area of Argentina?

Last week  I got sidetracked with the amazing scenery on our bus trip from the Atlantic coast to the Andes and the Lakes District.  We stayed in Bariloche in a small cabin  for 6 days, then another amazing bus ride and 6 more days, including Christmas, in San Martin de los Andes.  Down the hill from our cabin in Bariloche was the lake and the highway, with a bus running every 20 minutes. This year's weather has had everyone baffled, as instead of mild summer days, we had torrential rains, grand wind storms , followed by sun... all in an hour or two....

(Dave's words in italics)         

this place is kind of lincoln city, pretty dressy, lots of rentals, lots of things for tourists to spend on, pretty spendy.  gorgeous mountains and forests and huge deep lakes.  like the high cascades except our trees are bigger and our mountains are but speed bumps along side the andes.  but, moving on.

downtown bariloche, sidewalk table, 90% tourists.  that doesn't mean foreigners but people from buenos aires taking their drawn out summer break in the mountains.  like i intimated, good stuff ( the food ), very dressy, and a bit more expensive than it warrants.  hell with it, we're vacationing too.

the classiest buildings in the city, real stone, real log construction are all government spots.  the fancy hotels, restaurants etc. have the look without the constructivist detail and necessary skilled dudes.  this government takes care of itself first!

the tiny cabin at the very top middle right below the ridge line was our place.  little fridge, two burner gas cooker with one cubic foot oven and a view that most people would try to buy immediately.  300 feet sbove the lake, another 500 feet to snow level ( this was, after all, the first day of summer ) and about 20 kilometers from the city center. - the bus comes by every 20 min.,  two kilometers in each direction encompasses maybe a dozen restaurants.  all for us, the bloody tourist life blood of this naturally brilliant place.

next stop, san martin de los andes, christmas eve.  a capella quartet, really excellento, performing christmas tunes in the street.  german, italian,  english, spanish - all that they sang was in the language in which it was writ, terrific.  we are on the terrace of an ok restaurant across the street and the music turned the meal into a very special treat.  the day after next, we go fishing at the foot of a volcano, but more about that later.    

And here was our best holiday meal ...it knocked my socks off.... everything beautifully done that this region is famous for... roasted wild boar and  patagonia lamb.. subtle yet rich sauces, fantastic.