Who'd a thought it

As enjoyable as my week in Ushuaia has been for a wole variety of reasons, the one thing I haven't done yet, and which every other traveller in this part of the world is intent on, is a trek.

So this morning, I donned my trekking gear (yes, I have some!), packed my shoulder bag with chocolate bars, water and my iPod and set off for the Glaciar Martial. You can see the route from the hostel window I realised when I got back, and I think if I'd looked at it before I'd set off I wouldn't have gone. Basically, the glacier is over the top of the mountain you can see in the background of this pic.


Most of you know my attitude to walking - I don't like it. Aimless strolls are not my thing. I can and have walked for hours around cities, where you can stop for a snack, coffee or beer periodically, and don't mind being on my feet all day. But humping for hours through wilderness with no purpose just doesn't do it for me.


However, I felt having come all this way I should at least give it a go. And at least this walk had a purpose, there was an aim, an endpoint - the glacier. Though when the guy on reception at the hostel said he'd never done the walk and thought it was really tough I began to get a bit nervous. Still, in for a penny etc.

I got a taxi over to the base of the mountain where the skiing chairlift was running, and caught that up to the first base. I could have walked up the piste, but that just seemed masochistic.

The chairlift quietly lifted me up past the treeline and deposited me at the top of the piste. A quick 10 minute stroll through some woods and I was thinking this is a piece of piss. What's all the fuss about.

However, emerging from the trees I was greeted by the real path to the top. It was at this point that I realised the glacier was over the top of the mountain, not at the top of the chairlift. Bugger.

I'd promised I wasn't going to give up at the first sign of pain, as is my usual wont, so set off, head down, counting the steps. The first half an hour up the gentle shale slope was OK, but it suddenly gets VERY steep about half way up the picture above, and as I looked up at the path ahead and saw tiny figures on seemingly insanely steep slopes thought I had no chance.

A quick two minute break, a swig of water, a chunk of chocolate and I set off again. I had to do this about half a dozen times before I crested the steepest point and it flattened out and the shale was replaced by rock and snow. Damn, I never thought I'd manage that. I was still nowhere near the glacier, but I'd got off the shale and was on the mountain proper.
So I sat feeling smug and then thought Sod it, carry on as far as you can. I climbed for maybe another fifteen minutes and realised that the only way I was going to get to the glacier was by climbing up the snow slope, the rocks were running out and I'd already gone into the snow up to my hip at one point. A guy went past me wearing crampons and I thought it probably a good idea to stop.

I hadn't made it all the way up, but I was feeling pretty pleased with myself and just sat their grinning to myself.

And enjoying the view back down off the mountain out over the city and the Beagle Channel. At the bottom I never thought I'd get this high and I'm sure lots of people go higher, but I'd got further than most - there were quite a few who were turning around below me.

It seems silly, but I was thoroughly pleased with myself. Pleased with myself for doing something I'm sure loads of people would find really easy. It only took an hour and a half to get to a paltry 2,500 feet, but I've never done anything like this before, so it was pretty special. In my head anyway! And the view back down was stunning, especially if you compare it with the pic I took out of the hostel window up the mountain.

Maybe climbing is the way forward rather than this trekking malarky. It was certainly very rewarding. And as I walked down off the mountain and down the piste, I kept turning round looking at where I'd got to. It was a strange compulsion I had to keep turning round and look at the mountain. I think I just didn't want to get off it.

Sorry if this post sounds like one long self-congratulatory message over what was actually a pretty tame achievement. But it felt big to me at the time, so up yer bum.

Don't mention the war

Since arriving in Argentina, I've met quite a few locals and we've talked about everything from Lady Diana and the Beatles to Barack Obama and the imminent collapse of western civilisation. But the one thing none of them have ever brought up, and neither have I, is the Falklands War.

In Buenos Aires it was quite easy to forget it had ever happened as there are very few reminders in the city. But as you travel south more and more memorials appear, particularly in Rio Gallegos, Rio Grande and in Ushuaia, as it was from this part of Argentina that a lot of their naval and aerial operations were launched.

This is the Air Force memorial in Rio Gallegos - I was shocked at how many names they had on the plaque, I had no idea they'd lost so many pilots.

And this is a Belgrano memorial in Rio Gallegos as well.

The biggest memorial I've seen so far is in Ushuaia though. Every city has a Aveninda Malvinas or Islas Malvinas square, but none have such an impressive memorial as the one here.

I hadn't really taken it in, but it is obviously still a very big issue here. The plaque below was placed by the Argentinian president when he visited Ushuaia last year.

There's not only a lot of memorials, but alot of car stickers, stickers in shop windows and road signs all proclaiming that "Las Malivnas son Argentinos". Even there maps mark the islands as being Argentinian.

I did eventually have one conversation about the subject with a junior naval officer in a bar in Ushuaia and he was willing to talk to me about it.

He said that Argentina had been foolish to start the war and that Galtieri had never expected the British to respond. When I said that we had very nearly lost the war, he wasn't convinced and said it was stupid of the Argentinian conscripts to try and fight the professional British forces.

However, he seemed convinced that Britain would have used nuclear weapons against Argentina if the war had continued. I tried to say that I was pretty confident that the British government would never have done that, even if faced with defeat in the war. That they would rather hand the islands over than fire a nuclear missile at Buenos Aires. But he said the English never surrender, that we'd never surrendered to Napoleon, never surrendered to Hitler so it was unlikely we were going to surrender Las Malvinas to Argentina. He actually made me feel quite proud to be English, even if his nuclear threat comment threw me a bit.

He did say to me though at the end of the conversation. "Do not talk about this with other people. Some are not as realistic as me."

Obviously still a sore point for a lot of Argentinians.

A tale of two cities - Ushuaia

Fin del Mondo. The end of the world. You can go further south than this city, but you'd be in a boat or in Antarctica - which is only 1,000km away. Very cool, and my destination for now. I don't know why, but coming down here appealed more to me than rainforest or Machu Pichu.

Apart from the atmoshphere of Ushuaia, which is pretty special because of the large number of Antarctic explorers, travellers and adventure freaks, there is its location and surroundings that make it special. It sits sandwiched between the Beagle Channel (named after Darwin's boat don't you know) and the Andes and is quite simply beautiful.

For most of my first and second days here I didn't do anything much other than wonder around the city in awe of the place. The buildings are not the most attractive, but in this situation they are lifted far above their individual mundane looks.

Where Rio Gallegos was the ugliest city I've ever seen, I think this is possibly the most beautiful. Where places like Bath and Paris have beautiful buildings you never get a sense of their location in the world. But here you know exactly where you are and exactly where you sit in relation to the landscape.

I had only planned to stay here for a couple of days, but I've now been here for a week and am not due to leave until Wednesday next week.

When I'd finally got over the shock and awe of my arrival here I took in a few of the sites. The most notable in the city is the old prison. At the turn of the 20th century, the Argentinians picked here to build their Alcatraz. And if I thought Alcatraz was a bleak place, it has nothing on Ushuaia prison. It must have been absolutely dreadful here, particularly in the winter.

I didn't scratch those letters on the door by the way, they were already there. As fascinating as the museum was, I was glad to get out. Horrible place.

The Maritime Museum wasn't quite as interesting, but it did have the remains of a boat built in Cowes outside it. Which was weird.

And a chart plotting all the shipwrecks in this part of the world - there's almost not enough room on the map to fit all the red crosses on around Cape Horn.

I hooked up with an Aussie guy and a Dutch girl for dinner one evening and we went to Kaupe, Ushuaia's premier dining destination. It looks like an old corrugated iron shack, like most of the buildings here, from the outside but inside it was gorgeous. Cold Antarctic scallops, King crab bisque, Patagonian sea bass. Delicious and all served up with a view out over the channel. Must be up there with the best I've ever eaten.

I've also had a go at a 4x4 adventure up by the lakes.

They drove us down to one lake (which is 150km long) along a river which has been destroyed by beavers. Beavers were imported to Tierra del Fuego 100 years ago and the damage they do to riverbanks has to be seen to be believed. I was shocked.

As we were bouncing down the track the driver screeched to a halt and jumped out shouting "Condor". And sure enough circling above us was an Andean condor. It's a shame it was right overhead as there are no trees in the picture to give a sense of scale to how big it was, but its wing spand must have been close to 10 feet. It's claws hang down from underneath its body and looked more like a dog's front legs than a bird's feet.

Then seemingly for some more jollies the driver jumped out of the Land Rover as we were slowly climbing a hill...

...and ran round to the back to take a picture. All the time while we were still moving. Funny guy. I kill you last.

We parked up on the shores of the lake and the drivers built a wood fire and cooked a storm of an assado. They bought great hunks of beef, chorizo and red wine. There's something about cooking and eating your food outdoors, it just tastes better, particularly if that outdoors is a lakeside in Tierra del Fuego!

Yesterday I went with an Irish guy down to the local rugby club where one of the guys who works in the hostel plays. It wasn't a great game by any means, but we were chatting to the coach and he said that while the standard isn't great when they play, they play with everything they've got because often the bad weather and pitch means they can't play. It was great to get off the tourist trail and see some real Argentinian life.

And I can't think of many rugby pitches in the world which have a backdrop like URC though!

A tale of two cities - Rio Gallegos

After all the excitement of whales and penguins and crazy Welsh tea-houses, it was time to face the trek down to Ushuaia - another 18-hour special to Rio Gallegos, a night there and then a 12-hour journey to Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia.

But before I left I was able to photograph a moon rise off the coast of Puerto Madryn.

One of the last things you want to see before you set off on a marathon journey across thousands of miles of uninhabited and featureless Patagonian plain though is a shrine outside the bus station. I thought buses were safer than planes!

The Holy Mother's influence kept me and my travelling companion, a thoroughly nice insurance salesman from Barcelona called Ricard, safe and the next morning we arrived in Rio Gallegos.

Rio Gallegos is the last major Argentinian city before crossing the Straits of Magellan onto Tierra del Fuego, and is a major transport hub. Most people get straight on to their next bus though and as we wandered around looking for a hostel for the night I could see why. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that Rio Gallegos is the ugliest city I've seen. It really was a hole.

And the grey weather didn't help. All in all we were glad to escape the next day.

The next day dawned a bit brighter and we headed off to leave Argentina, enter Chile, leave Chile, enter Argentina and cross the Straits of Magellan.

I think it would have taken only about 40 minutes to get to Ushuaia if we hadn't had to go through the ridiculous immigration, emigration, baggage scanning, bus changing procedure every 10 miles.

Why Argentina and Chile are arguing about where the lines are drawn on such a barren and empty place I have no idea.

About two hours out of Ushuaia though, the scenery began to change. A few trees appeared, there was the odd lump in the ground to break up the terrain, then a hill, and then between two hills was this...

Finally, some interesting landscape. As unique as Patagonia's steppe was, it would never be called interesting to look at. The road slowly climbed as we entered the bottom of the Andes and arrived in Ushuaia.