On my Andes and Kneeses


On Monday (18th April) we crossed the Andes on a bus from Pucón (Chile) into Argentina in the northen Patagonia region, it´s autumn here at the moment and all the trees are bright red, yellow and orange. This area reminds me more of how I imagined Canada to look like, but it was a stunning landscape to watch as the bus struggled to climb the dirt road through the mountains. Just after we went through the border control we passed these cattle herders (proper Argentinian Gauchos (cowboys), whipping about 100 cattle into shape on the road south) it was all the cowboy movies in my head right in front of us, with the dust whipping around them as they chased the stray cattle wandering off the planned route. This was a truly magic moment with stunning backdrops hand painted by hollywoods finest set designers or that is what it was like from inside the bus.

We were heading to a town called Bariloche but we had to change bus in Júnin de Los Andes, we forgot about the 1 hour time difference between Chile and Argentina so we ended up missing the last bus out of town (well there were only two) so we booked a room and stayed in Júnin for the night. We got the tickets changed no problem and we hadn´t anything booked in Bariloche so it wasn´t any hardship. Júnin de Los Andes is supposedly Argentina´s Trout Capital but the only one to be found was the one sitting across from me, but the picturesque town with it´s many Monkey Puzzle trees was very quiet as we wandered about.

We managed to get the bus the next day, and once again it was another spectacular landscape of big country spread out infront of us as we travelled the 4 hours to Bariloche. I´m not sure if I fell asleep or something weird happened but on arriving in Bariloche the bus must have taken a wrong turning because we where now in a alpine town with evey second shop selling Chocolate or German Bier. The Surrounding mountains, lakes and log cabin buildings could easily have been in Tirol or somewhere else picturesque in the Alps.

The next day we headed out of town and wandered round some lakes and forests, the sky was the most perfect blue and the lakes glistened in the afternoon sunshine. The temperatures are starting to fall a bit the further south we travel but luckily we haven´t seen any rain in weeks. After our walk that lasted about 5 hours we headed out to dinner, "The Nuevo Munich" was our restaurant of choice for the night, luckily there were loads of Argentinian choice´s alongside the saurkraut and strudel.

Time for another further deviation on our original planned route, we hadn´t really planned to go much further south than Santiago. Once in Santiago we saw the photos of the Volcano in Puçon and that made us head south and from there it was futher south to Bariloche and now we have decided to take a big swerve and head to the deep deep south of Argentina to see the Moreno Glacier near El Calafate. If you get your maps out and look westwards from the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) you will find El Calafate in Argentina near the Chile border (we really are a long way from home now!!!).

There was one large drawback about going to see the glacier, it was going to be 31 hours on a bus (yes 31 hours!!!!), so we left Bariloche on Thursday afternoon at 3:15pm. Once on the bus we soon realised that we had the worst seats on the bus, very back row under the air conditioning unit and above the engine. The noise was like being on a large jumbo jet, one bonus was we couldn´t hear the sound of the Sylvester Stallone movies. Luckily there was a beautiful sunset to watch for a while before the night took over. I managed to get a sleep for about 6 hours, Joanne said she didn´t but I´m not sure if you can snore while awake. The most annoying thing about travelling on the bus in South America is the constant stopping, if a town has two houses they stop, if the driver runs out of hot water for his mate (herby tea drink) they stop, if they havn´t stopped in the last half hour they stop.

The bus was due to stop at 6 in the morning in Comodore Rivadiva and then leave again at 8 but to make things worse we arrived at 5:15 meaning that we had 2:45 minutes in a town which Lonely Planet described as "A town to miss with the most ugliest Cathedral in South America", and the bus station didn´t even have a cafe or anywhere selling coffee. So after a quick walk round the city centre we found a service station with some seats and we had a coffee with an Australian couple from Perth (Jenny & Shayne) who also drew the short straw of being on the back seat of the bus.

Back on the bus for the next leg of the epic journey (well as epic as sitting on a bus gets). The scenery changed from here on in, very few trees now, just miles and miles of barren flatlands with the occasional huddles of sheep, llama and small ostrich type animals. The landscape never changed in about 12 hours, and for the second time on this bus we saw the sun set. We arrived in Rio Gallegos at 8 at night, here we had to get off the bus and find a hotel or hostel for the night. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than usual, and it was also zero degrees (too cold to snow). We ended up sharing a 4 bed room with Shayne & Jenny. The next morning we had to catch another bus to El Calafate (this was only a 4 hour trip) and stayed there for a night before heading to the Glacier the next day (which was another hour and a half away).

In El Calafate we managed to get a double room and it was also in the same place as Jenny & Shayne. The 4 of us also booked the later trip to glacier for the next day so we could see the sunset at the glacier and also so we could get up a bit later. Joanne decided to make Jumbalya for the 4 of us before we headed out on the town. As it wasn´t an early start we didn´t have to really watch how much we drank (bad mistake), as we had a few bottles of wine with our dinner and the beers were slipping down vey nicely in the bar afterwards. The bar didn´t really start getting busy to about 1 in the morning, as a toast to our new friendship Jenny suggested we get Tequila shooters, so very prompltly afterwards we where licking salt, downing tequila and sucking on lemons. After a few more beers we headed back to our Hostel, i think everybody had an excellent night.

*** small note - we received an e-mail a week later from Jenny.. She had left her earings in the hostel in El Calafate, they were passing back through a few days later so she decided to go back to see if anybody had handed them in. After asking the owner by the use of various hand movements she noticed that the owner was actualy wearing her earings.... the owner sheepishly handed the earings back - ***

Next morning (Sunday 24th)... was the Rangers v Celtic game back home, so after a few hours sleep I got up to check the TV to see if it was on any of the 200 channels. So much for Celtic´s World Wide brand the game was not on one channel, I blame Setanta when Sky was showing games you could always get the big games on Fox Sports. Anyway I decided to head out to an internet cafe (it was 8:30 local time), I could only find one open and they didn´t have speakers or headphones so I had to sit watching a minute by minute text update of the game. This was very frustrating as it wouldn´t always update every minute and I was thinking maybe someone had scored and they had a lot to type in. The other thing with the videoprinter was that you didn´t get the full picture so some of my observation might be out a bit. For some reason every time a Celtic player scored he was booked, this must have been a new rule that has been brought in since my disappearing act. I also read that some Rangers fans raised a toast to Stan Petrov when he scored the opening goal, the new sense over sectarinism policy seems to be slowly filtering down to the grassroot fans. Anyway for those of you who don´t follow football Celtic went on to win 2-1 and are now 5 points clear in the league with 4 games to go, and for all my new Aussie and Canadian friends Celtic won 43 throw on´s to 32 throw on´s with no penalty goals (see it can be an exciting game).

We left for the Moreno Glacier at about 2:30 and weren´t due back to after 9. It was a bit overcast for most of the trip out, which was slightly disappointing as the day before we had beautiful blue sky´s. We stopped of at a few viewpoints along the route to look at the lakes and to see the Glacier from a distance. First impressions were yeah it look´s good but it doesn´t seem that big. The next stop was at a pier for a boat trip up to the Glacier, now we started to really see the scale of the glacier.

Joanne had about 6 or 7 layers of clothes on with a natty trouser/skirt combo but she still complained about her nose being cold. The boat trip lasted for about an hour and we managed to take about 200 photos, I´m sure if it was brighter we would have taken a lot more. The colour of the giant jagged ice peaks of the 60m high glacier was always changing, sometimes white as you would imagine and then it slowly changed to light blue and then a deeper aqua blue, the water on the lake was also a strange turquoise blue colour. While on the boat we never seen any chunks fall off the rapidly advancing glacier (well rapid in over a few years kind of way).

Next it was back on the bus to the viewing platforms above the glacier, this was when things really started to get exciting. Before arriving at the glacier I thought the boat was going to be the best bit as you got really close to the glacier, but from the platforms we could hear the glacier cracking like rifle fire as the peaks rubbed against each other. Then we could see large sheets of ice sheer off the side and splash into the water with thunderous effect creating large waves and creating large bobbing icebergs that floated along in the turquoise lake. This had the four of us running from platform to platform hoping to see the next chunk fall into the water. We stayed here for about an hour and half watching the sun set and the place get darker and darker, but we could have stayed all night watching the perpetual movement of the glacier slowly sliding towards us. This was one of the real highlights of the trip so far and had made the hours of sitting on endless bus´s worth it.

Next day it was time to head north and leave Patagonia and eventually try and get to Mendoza which we had orignally planned to go to after Santiago.