Buenos dias amigos! Como estan - todos es bueno?

Estoy muy bien despues de Bariloche y todos el tiempo nada hacer! El proximo blog va a tener mas detalles de Bariloche pero antes eso:

Patagonia! Wow, wow, wow, wow...... Wow! What an amazing place. Torres Del Paine was spectacular but what else we saw in Patagonia was all very comparable and impressive. After heading back to El Calafate for another night we headed off to the very touristy but absolutely mind boggling and stunning Perito Moreno glacier. From the distant viewing point Jess and I were a little blase after all the glaciers in Torres Del Paine. However, on getting up close we were bowled over by the sheer scale of the thing. It's one of only a few advancing glaciers left in the world. This means that every day it moves forward 1.5m so you can constantly hear the creaking and groaning of 30KM, (length), by 6KM, (width), by 60M, (height above the water), plus 130M, (height below the water), of ice! It's so hard to appreciate just how big this thing is. Every few minutes you hear a crack like a gunshot followed by a crash - you've already missed the ice falling but might just be in time to see the waves and ripples in the water as another huge chunk of ice falls into the lake. This then becomes another bit of floating ice which dots the lake around the glacier. The snout is only a few metres from the land so we get an amazing view of both the north and south faces. A large chunk of ice is already on the tip of the land we stand on and up until a few years ago this was connected to the glacier by an ice archway. This collasped spectacularly a number of years ago and the photos of this are incredible. We were lucky enough to see one huge chunk of ice slide off the north face and into the lake causing a huge noise and impressive ripple effect as it hit the lake. It is incredibly touristy but was still very much worth the trip.

We headed off to El Chalten that evening, just a 4 hour drive across Patagonian nothingness - this didn't feel like any amount of time - maybe we were getting too used the bus journeys. There were lots of familiar faces on the bus and, after some hostel based confusion, we ended up in one place with a friend from our hostel in El Calafate, (Dutch girl called Sabine). We had to move the next day but found a pretty cool place, again, full of lovely people - alot of whom we recognise. It wasn't until we'd got settled that following morning, that we could finally appreciate how cool El Chalten is. It's a tiny little place just over 20 years old. Like El Calafate, it will most likely increase in size tenfold in the next few years, maybe more since it's nestled beautifully in the valley under the towering peaks of Cerros Fitz Roy, Torre and Solo. We decide to head off to Laguna Torre, the small lake at the bottom of the glacier formed on the sides of Cerro Torre and Solo. This brisk 7 hour trek slowly reveals the 3 peaks of the Torre, very similar to the Torres in Chile, as the clouds stuck to them disappear as the day goes on. Each tower looks like it's smoking as the clouds stubbornly refuse to completely leave! We also get a glimpse of Fitz Roy through the peaks of the next valley. Another stunning glacial lake, more ice, a Zorro, (fox) and beautiful valley later and Sabine, Matt, (young dude from San Diego), Jess and I are holed up in a cool drinking establishment sampling the local rubia, negra and blanco cerveza. The next day is a day of rest as a result! We head up to the Fitz Roy after that and it is simply incredible. Again, we were so amazingly lucky with the weather and my tiny little compact camera does me proud. I swear they are not postcards despite me thinking they look like it. The walk is very cool along the valley followed by a pretty steep climb to the mirador. It's on a par with the Torres in Chile. It's incredible, the peak rising nearly 2.5KM almost vertically up from the lake. It is supposed to be one of the hardest mountains to climb in the World and you can see why with what seems like hundreds of 'mini' peaks surrounding the main one. It looks like it would take a marathon effort just to reach the base of the actual peak which then looks like it has a sheer granite face of about 1KM to climb. How you would actually climb that is not clear! A couple of avalanches, a scramble up the terminal morraine and some silly photos later and we're headed back to El Chalten. We bump into Mike and Rachel who we met on the W in Torres Del Paine on the way down and together with Sabine head out for our last dinner before the 2 day bus trip to Bariloche along the infamous Ruta 40.

Sad to leave El Chalten, could of stayed longer. Was a very cool place in an amazing setting. Perhaps a bit isloated to stay there too long though. Just how islotaed became apparent when we set off on Ruta 40 the next day. The bus was full with so many familiar faces and together with our massive bag of food we were on our way, (we had heard so many horror stories about the trip - buses getting stuck in the mud and all the passengers having to get out and push, not stopping and the toilet being locked, nowhere to buy food, buses rolling into the ditches, not being able to sleep due to the incredibly bumpy roads etc). Thank god for our Company and the weather! Rather than do it all solidly in 36 hours, we get to have days on the bus with an overnight stop and regular stops at various very cool and remote outposts and Estancias, (one of which, La Leona, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid holed up in before heading off to Bolivia). We picked up hitchhikers in the middle of nowhere, whole Argentine families, and a random local just carrying a cardboard box. We saw thousands of llamas, rhias, (ostrich like birds) and horses. Plenty of dead animals too as most of the llamas thought it was a good idea to stand in the road, (or ominously on top of small hillocks silhoueted by the sun). We also travelled along endless straight dirt and pot holed roads with huge ditches either side, mile upon mile of sheer nothingness with distant mountains never getting any closer and the bus feeling like to was sliding around on the gravel like on ice! The bus drivers rarely slowed down though but successfully joked, sung, chatted and flirted their way to Perito Moreno town and our overnight stop. This was after an incredible sunset of endless sky and distant black line for miles upon miles of the outline of far far away mountains. The next day was more of the same but the combination of the complete wilderness and alien countryside, the characters of the drivers, the feeling of adventure, the incredible weather, (again), the many many crosswords and the constant eating, meant that the two 14 hour days were not anywhere near the nightmare we were expecting. We arrived in Bariloche early after a final 4 hours of driving through ever changing scenery - going from absolute nothingness to incrediblely dramatic mountains, lush forests and stunning lakes.

After the barren and bleak Patagonia it felt good to be back in civilisation and Bariloche immediately felt welcoming. We correctly thought, "we're gonna like it here" - reinforced when we found our hostel and it's very cool bar on the shore of the lake.......

For now chicos I will say ciao. Tales of Bariloche will be divulged in the next blog for those still following!

Hasta pronto!

Matt.