Exploring Tierra del Fuego & Santa Cruz, Patagonia, Argentina, in a chevy... and getting to Punta Arenas in Chile.

Wednesday 15^th to Friday 24th December 2010

How fast 10 days goes…

We left Ushuaia in a rental car bound for El Calafate with a little over 800kms to travel.  The car we got was a Chevy Corsa, everything manual – no central locking, manual window winders and mirror adjusters, no latch to release the boot or the fuel tank.  It’s not exactly cheap to rent a car in Argentina but worth it for the independence for a short while.

Driving on the opposite side is something to get used to – Roy has driven in the US & Europe but this was the first time for Coreena to drive a car with the steering wheel on the left of the car.  Not as daunting as first thought.  Some of the roads are narrow and not sure if we fully understand the rules at every intersection – seems that it’s ‘give way to the left’ (logical and happens sometimes), ‘give way to the right’ (on odd occasions) or just a case of ‘first one at the intersection’ gets right of way; to be sure we just stop completely if any other cars are in sight – it all seems rather vague in the most.  There’s very few road signs and no lines or markings painted on roads to indicate what the expectation is.  As for the signs indicating roadwork ahead with 20km maximum speed – this is far too slow for the locals who’d speed past us at a rate of knots.  No speed indication signs in general – just a general rule of maximum 110km/hr for cars, 80kms/hr for trucks & 90 for buses.  All this left us wondering what the actual road rules are. 

The journey between Ushuaia to our first stop & overnight stay, Estancia Tepi, was a 3 hour drive with very scenic views, windy roads and snow-capped mountains all around.  The road was a little rough to begin with – likely due to the winter snow & ice situation and little chance to actual do repairs up to when we travelled.

We arrived at Estancia Tepi (an Argentinian cattle & sheep station ) for our overnight stay and were welcomed with a roast lamb and potato lunch.  Estancia Tepi is a working estancia but we didn’t see any of the action – with only one night here we managed to take a look around at the fantastic scenery of that area – we even had one of the puppies as a tour guide – he followed us everywhere.  The place was and the people were absolutely fantastic; we felt that the cost of the overnight stay was a little hefty for the quality of the accommodation… we expected rustic farmstay accommodation, but the toilet leaked, there was no hot water in the bathroom and the tap for the shower fell off the wall (while trying to get hot water) – as Roy says, "old world charm doesn’t allow for broken old world plumbing".  Not able to speak enough Spanish to communicate this information (they understandably didn’t speak a word of English), the best we could do was inform them that the toilet was not working properly by saying “problemo con toilette”.

The next part of our journey took us from the estancia to Rio Gallegos on the east coast of Argentina.  This trip is only 300 or so kilometres but took us 8 or 9 hours – due to gravel roads that at times only allowed for 50-60km/hr, a ferry crossing and 2 border crossings – the first from Argentina to Chile then again from Chile to Argentina (that’s 4 immigration checks & 4 customs checks so we could take the rental car across the borders).  The first border crossing was interesting, we got there and without appropriate conversational Spanish language and no experience yet of the process we had to follow, it took a few minutes of sign language discussion but we got there eventually.  There were also cross-winds for a good part of the way which made driving a little more interesting at times.  And there was also a large number of Guanacos that run wild throughout the area – they were everywhere and we had to keep watch on them running across the road in front of us.

Rio Gallegos was our next overnight stop, although we hadn’t booked any accommodation and it took us a moment or two to find a room for the night – fortunately no sleeping in the car.  We had only an overnight stay here – it took so long to travel the day before, our interest in seeing a nearby lighthouse had to be bypassed so we could arrive in El Calafate in good time.

Travelling from Rio Gallegos to El Calafate was an easy trip… all sealed roads that took around 3½ hours.  Reaching El Calafate we got amazing views of Lago Argentino and the surrounding mountains – a great introduction to what we would enjoy for the next few days.

El Calafate

We spent 3 nights here with 2 full days to take a look around.  Unfortunately, Roy came down with the cold that Coreena had in Ushuaia so a little time was spent taking time out and not doing too much – thankfully it only took a day to get over the worst of it and during this time we took a relaxing look around the town and walked the 2.5kms around Laguna Nimez – a reserve with lots of birdlife (including Chilean flamingos) and wildflowers to look at.

Our 3^rd day in the area, we drove out to Perito Moreno Glacier in the Los Glaciares National Park.  The glacier is 5kms wide, 60m high and up to 100m below the water level – a very large glacier but not the largest in the area – there are many more glaciers that branch off the Patagonian ice ice shelf that extends for quite a distance along the Andes.

To view the Perito Moreno glacier there is an amazing infrastructure of platform pathways and lookouts (miradors) that allowed us to see the glacier wall from many different angles and listen to & watch some of the ice calve off with a couple of amazing crashes.  We took a boat trip across to the glacier itself and a “mini-trek” of 1½ hours on the glacier that involved putting crampons on our boots.  This was a very enjoyable adventure allowing us to get on the ice and see inside the (small) crevasses we were walking around/over – no ropes necessary for any part of this trek – a reasonably simple trek on ice – good fun and great views.  No penguins on this ice though!!  It got to about 15˚C today – a heatwave after many days not over 10˚ and averaging 5˚.

Our first condor sighting was later in the day while back at the platforms to view the glacial wall later in the day – by the time the camera was taken out of the bag, the only photographic evidence we could get looks like a mosquito in the distance.  We hope to see more during a later part of our trip.

El Chalten

This village is located 250km (or so) north of El Calafate and another part of the Los Glaciares National Park is there to explore.  The drive was easy; all sealed, and took us about 3 hours, including short stops on the way.

About 20kms outside of El Chalten it was bucketing down with rain… we couldn’t see anything, no mountain views, nothing.  With only a short visit possible here we were wondering what it would be like for the whole duration of our visit, especially knowing that the main activity is trekking in the mountains.  So what to do while it rains?  Go see a waterfall – having the car was a fortunate thing as we could drive there and take a shorter walk to actually see the waterfall – it was a small waterfall but a huge quantity of water was gushing down the rock edge.

It rained for the rest of the day into the evening… but overnight the weather vastly improved and we woke to the sun shining and only a little cloud cover.  We’ve previously been told that if the sun is shining with very few clouds then the wind would be strong and gusty – not to mention that Patagonia is known to experience strong and gusty winds all the time, often strengthening late afternoon into the evening.  Well, that was an understatement for the day.  We stuck with our plan to do a day trek to Cerro Fitz Roy that took 4 hours each way preparing ourselves for any weather along with a packed lunch – making our packs (with camera gear) just that little heavier.  The wind throughout the day would have to have been at least 50 knots or around 95km/hr.

If it wasn’t the wind totally sweeping us off our feet, the views certainly did, but on this occasion it was mainly the wind especially while trying to take photographs at the lookouts.  We managed to enjoy the views that constantly changed significantly as the clouds shifted up and over the peaks eventually clearing to give us a full view of Cerro Fitz Roy and the surrounds.  By the end of the hike we were quite exhausted having not done a full day hike like this for quite some time.  In total this trek tallied up 18-20kms up and down hills throughout the entire day.

El Chalten is the trekking capital of Argentina and is definitely a place that we would like to have had more time in… not to worry, a good excuse to return (one day).

We returned to El Calafate for another 2 nights and to return the rental car.  Now without the car we chose to do a day tour to La Bosque Petrified forest - an amazing site that is not far from the Andes (on the eastern side and therefore a drier desert climate that the western side).  It was here that we got to see petrified trees and fossils of dinosaurs dating back to more than 60 million years old, during a time that the same site was a jungle with dinosaurs running around everywhere and before the Andes mountain range was formed.  It’s the Andes that separate the climates from the east to west in the current day.  This is known as the ‘hidden Patagonia’ and it still has many fossils that are yet to be properly identified.  More & more fossils and petrified trees are being discovered each year simply due to the soils around them washing away and revealing their presence.

Travel El Calafate, Argentina to Punta Arenas, Chile

What an interesting experience it was to get the bus ticket for this portion of our journey.  With prior research we thought we were reliably informed that we could take this trip in one day via Puerto Natales and book the ticket in advance from any location in Argentina.  While we were in Ushuaia we tried to book tickets but discovered that we could only book the ticket in El Calafate.  There are so many different bus companies running all the different routes and for this leg of our journey there are 2 companies with 1 departure each day.  While it was easy enough to book tickets from El Calafate to Puerto Natales, information was not as readily available about Puerto Natales to Punta Arenas.  Fortunately, and after asking many people, we found someone who could provide the information we needed about how to go about getting from Puerto Natales to Punta Arenas and although we couldn’t get tickets for that part we felt a little better knowing what we had to do.

We departed El Calafate at at 8.30am on Christmas Eve that would take us to Puerto Natales.  About 6 hours and a border crossing later (our 3^rd one across the Chile/Argentina border), we had to find a bus company to take us to Punta Arenas and hope that they had seats vacant for the same day.  Just to make things more interesting there is no central bus station… each bus company has its own depot.  With our minimal Spanish we understood the directions given to us to find a bus that would take us to Punta Arenas; we bought a ticket easily and after a 3 hour trip we arrived and caught a taxi to our hotel for the night – Hotel Diego del Almagro.  Ahhhh, relax!