Traveling Tye

Patience and Flexibility: The Tools of a Traveler

It started at 2PM on May 2^nd: guests at my Mendoza hostel said their farewells only to return a short time later, bags in hand. Long distance bus drivers nationwide had gone on strike and travel in Argentina had ground to a halt. One day gave way to the next and information was in short supply. All a trip to the bus station could garner was a hopeful ‘check back tomorrow.’ After two days the hostel began to feel like a posh refugee camp, with over half the guests more or less trapped there against their will. On day three, those with tight schedules and sufficient funds began booking flights out of town. Several flew to Buenos Aires while others went farther afield. Flights are frighteningly expensive for foreigners in Argentina. Most stayed on, hoping for the best.

Around the time people started booking their flights, word got out that there was one bus a day running to Cordoba. Perhaps it was a scab bus. Five days after the strike had begun, ten days after my arrival in Mendoza, I joined a few folks who were hopping the bus to Cordoba. Cordoba hadn’t really figured into my travel plans, but I was ready for a change. At the station, we joined a larger group of people who gathered outside the PlusUltra ticket office and followed a man with a clipboard out of the building and down several side streets before arrive in a large parking lot where our bus was waiting. I’m not sure why we didn’t leave from the station…I can only assume its because the striking drivers might have tried to obstruct our way.

The next morning we arrived at the Cordoba station to the exciting news that the strike had broken. Soon travel life would return to normal.

Mendoza, the City of Wine

As I sat outside a trendy café on my first afternoon in town, enjoying the large complimentary glass of that accompanied my salad and thinking about the complimentary all-you-can drink wine happy hour that my hostel apparently offered every night from 7-8 which would then be followed up by an asado and another wine binge starting at 9PM, it struck me that this city is really all about wine. It was a nice thought.

On my second day in Mendoza, I realized that incessant wine binging just isn’t my thing. I moved out of the hostel with the wine happy hour and into another, much more comfortable place. I needed to make the move…the young party crowd isn’t my preferred group, and the owner was a half mad Kiwi with a serious drinking problem. I’m convinced she was only in the hostel business to ensure she always has someone on hand to drink with. 

After the move, things settled down. A new project at work meant that I had to spend most of the week working from my hammock, but the arrival of two friends I’d made in Patagonia meant that I had a nice posse to venture out with from time to time. The most memorable of these ventures was a full day private tour of some of the area’s wineries. Now I’ve visited my fare share of wineries before, but this tour took it to a whole new level. It included three wineries of decreasing size and in each case we got a behind the scenes look at the operation along with the chance to sample wines right out of the vats, in different stages of production. The first winery included a view of industrial level production while the second provided an opportunity to quiz the owner on his branding strategy over a delicious lunch and 15 or so wines. The final winery is it little fuzzy, but it included a tour of the vineyard with the fifth generation owner.

As I post this I’m drinking another free glass of wine…my last in the city. After tonight I’m sticking with beer for a while.

The Journey Out of Patagonia

This post is long overdue. About two weeks ago I began heading from El Chalten to Mendoza. When you look at the two locations on the map it seems like a pretty simple trip north, but things were complicated by three factors. First, Argentina is HUGE. Second, the Argentine transportation system is expensive and far from optimized. Third, I’m incredibly stubborn.

Basically, the first two factor’s meant that to go by bus through Argentina would be time consuming (30 hours on a bus followed by 20 hours on another bus) and expensive ($250-300). The third factor came into play because of Argentina’s two-tiered pricing scheme, which hits foreigners with higher transportation prices (particularly on flights) than nationals. That obviously pissed me off, so I decided to backtrack through Chile in order to get north, even though it was only a slight bit cheaper and quicker.

I took the 3 hour bus from Chalten back to Calafate, then the 5 hour bus back across the border to sensible Chile where I spent another night in Puerto Natales before taking a 2.5 hour bus to the airport in Punta Arenas. From there I flew back up to Santiago (fourth visit of the trip) to stay another night in my friend’s apartment before taking a night bus back across the border to Mendoza.

One thing that I didn’t know when hatching the plan was that in late April the pass over the Andes between Chile and Argentina often closes down due to foul weather…which ended up happening the night before I headed out. Luckily, things were open again when I went to catch the bus, but the closure created a backlog that resulted in a 5 hour wait at the border: 2 hours of sitting before getting out of the bus for immigration, half an hour in the freezing cold at immigration, 2 more hours in the bus to drive the 100 meters to the customs building, then another half hour in the cold for customs. In the end I made it to Mendoza and all was well.

Remembering a Mango

Last night as I prepared my dinner, I was once again astounded by how delicious the avocado and peaches are in Chile…and that got me reflecting a mango that I had a couple months ago.

Mangos have never been my fruit. The first time I tried one as a kid I immediately lumped it together with papaya in the ‘tastes like ass’ category. Several years later while in the Philippines I found myself on an island that was meant to be famous for its quality mangos. I tried the fruit again and promptly got food poisoning. I don’t know if there was an actual connection between the Philippine mango and my subsequent discomfort, but from that point forward the very mention of the fruit caused me to flashback to the night I spent sick in a run down Manila hooker hotel with two friends and a broken toilet.

I tell you all of this so you’ll understand just how strong of a mango critic I am and hence my natural skepticism when a Swiss friend returned from a horseback riding trip to the most remote stretch of Easter Island and offered me a mango no larger than mandarin orange. In my day I’ve eaten sheep brain, raw horse, live octopus and toasted ants. I approached this fruit with the same level of apprehension, but for once, I was not only pleasantly surprised, my culinary worldview was rocked to its foundation. Here in my hand was the most fantastic fruit I’d ever tasted…and it was a mango.

I’m not likely to go out and buy a mango anytime soon, but I can no longer talk about the fruit in absolutist terms, for while I might abhor the average mango there is a small mango tree in the most remote corner of one of the most remote locations on earth that produces the fruit that is unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. I suppose I’ll never taste it again, but I like it that way.

Ps. Yes, I’m back in Chile, for reasons that will be explained later.

El Chalten at the End of the Season

El Chalten is a miniscule town in southern Patagonia. It was created in the 1980s as a way for the Argentine government to strengthen its claim on a stretch of territory that was disputed by the Chileans. In recent years though, it has grown to become the trekking capital of Argentina, thanks to its close proximity to the Glacier National Park and the stunning Fitzroy Mountain Range (whose profile you might recognize from the Patagonia Clothing Label).

After spending four nights working in El Calafate, I hoped the three-hour bus to El Chalten with two former Peace Corps volunteers I’d befriended in Puerto Natales, and knocked out two days trekking around another one of the most breathtaking places on the planet. The scenery rivals Torres del Paine and the accessibility of the trails beat the Chilean rival hands down: all the park highlights can be reached by day hikes that originate in the town and there isn’t a park entrance fee.

One thing is blatantly obvious though: this town is 100% seasonal. The weather was still pleasant and the trees maintained a majority of their now colorful leafs, yet the town was already shutting down. Bus service had been slashed, only a handful of the dozens of hostels around town appear to be open, and the restaurants seem to be operating at reduced hours. On our first day we wandered clear across town before we found a restaurant that was open for lunch. Sadly it was a ridiculous “waffleria” that seemed to be out of every menu item I requested.

Despite the inconvenience of these reduced hours, I couldn’t be happier to have ended up down in Patagonia at this time. The entire region is so flush with tourists during the high season that advanced reservations are all but required for almost everything, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why everyone puts up with crowded hostels, buses and trails when the weather in mid April has been absolutely beautiful. Well, that’s my take on it, now its time to start the journey back up north.

The Perito Moreno Glacier

During my first week in Southern Patagonia, several factors caused me to fall well behind in my work. Upon returning from Torres del Paine, I had to buckle down and play catch-up. I spent several days more or less stationary in my hostel in Puerto Natales and then progressed across the border to El Calafate where I booked into a hostel that provided a good atmosphere and around the clock coffee.

After a couple more good days of work, I decided to take a day to visit the area’s biggest (and only?) attraction, the Perito Moreno Glacier. People flock from around the world to visit this offshoot of the Great Southern Ice Field because of its high level of activity. It is progresses at a rate of about 2 meters a day, and as a result pieces are constantly calving off of its ice wall and falling into the lake at its base.

There are three main options for visiting the glacier. You can view it while on a boat cruise, you can trek out onto the ice using grampons, or you can take a bus to the viewing platforms directly opposite the tallest section of the ice wall where it reaches a height of over 60 meters (180 ft.). Now the boat cruise doesn’t really get you any closer to the glacier than the platforms (otherwise they risk getting hit by a chuck of falling glacier) and is reputed to be the haunt of old folks and families, so I obviously wasn’t going to waste my money on that. Everyone who went on the ice trek came back raving about it, but it was pretty expensive (150-200 USD) and I’d recently climbed up a mountain glacier in Chile using grampons so after a lot of thought I decided to give that one a miss as well. I mean, you can walk on a glacier anywhere (OK, not anywhere, but in various places around the world) whereas what makes this one so famous is the stuff constantly falling off its ice wall.

A girl I’d met in Puerto Natales was planning to head to the glacier on Thursday and wanted me to come along, so we got the fixing for sandwiches and a bottle of wine and headed out. I can only assume that during the high season the area around the glacier must be an absolute zoo. They had some pictures posted and it looked like a nightmare with walkways so crowed that they could be mistaken for a line at Disneyworld. Thankfully, in mid May we were well into the off-season. There were a lot of tourists around for the first hour and a half, but after 4:00 everyone headed back to town and over the following three and a half hours we only came across five other people. Now if you’re doing the math here, you’ll realize that we spent a solid five hours walking around staring at a glacier. That may sound boring, but it wasn’t. This glacier was alive, I had someone to talk to, and there was a bottle of wine to look forward to ;)

Every five to ten minutes there would be a mighty pop, like the crack of a shotgun. Although we never saw one form, this was evidence of a new fissure in the ice. From time to time a small piece of ice would plummet into the lake, but those moments weren’t exactly photo worthy. About two hours in, we watched a large sheet of ice slide off but it was too far away to capture. Then, three and a half hours in, I got what I came for and the timing was perfect. We had just changed trails and were emerging from the trees when a massive calving occurred directly in front of us. It started small and grew successively larger as four consecutive pieces broke off over the course of about 45 seconds. The final piece was the size of a multistory building. It sent a wall of water about 70 meters into the air and shot ice shrapnel across the narrow stretch of lake and onto the beach below us. I captured the majority of it on a video. In that moment the day became a total success and it was time to break open that wine for a final hour and a half of relaxed glacier watching.