Santiago and Easter Island (Rapa Nui)

The coach journey from Mendoza in Argentina to Santiago in Chile took a while. First they stopped us at the border and checked everybody´s bags, which took hours. I assume this must have been an unlucky ¨spot check¨ rather than the norm, as it put us a couple of hours behind schedule. Then the coach broke down. We grabbed our bags and hitched a lift with another coach, making it to Santiago only to discover there was a presidential ceremony of some description and the main roads were blocked (so no Taxis). We eventually made it to our pleasant hotel via Santiago´s streamlined underground system and met up with my friend Markus for some attempted waterskiing and successful drinking. I liked Santiago, a ¨proper¨ European/American style city without the third-world look of places like Rio, and it was great to see Markus and just chill for a few days.

I´ve always wanted to go to Easter Island, but when we were planning this trip Sonia told me it was too expensive. Checking the prices again in Chile, and probably with the price of the Navimag ferry in mind, it seemed more reasonable so we took the plunge.



To be honest I wasn´t expecting Easter Island to me much more than a large field with extraordinary stone heads (Moai) dotted around it. We spent a week there, as the flights would be ridiculously costly otherwise, and I was worried it would be too long. It wasn´t. The island has many of the attractions of places like the Cook Islands as well as the unique selling point of the Moai. They have awesome traditional dancing, great beaches, beautiful volcanoes with crater lakes and spectacular volcanic coastline.



It rained a lot, but it was also sunny a lot, and it was lucky we were there for a relatively long time as the rain would have completely spoiled a 3 day trip. Although we visited on the footing that a trip to Easter Island is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, the Moai still beckon and I hope to return someday.

Lake District and Mendoza

Arriving in the pouring rain in Puerto Montt after a super-expenive but drizzly 3 day Navimag trip from the somewhat depressing Puerto Natales was a bit of a low morale moment. Puerto Montt is a thoroughly nasty town, the only place we´ve visited so far where we gave up looking for a restaurant and went to MacDonalds in desperation. The top tourist attraction is a "graffiti stonehenge". The beer is good, though, but I was disappointed to discover that the consistently inaccurate Lonely Planet "South America on a Shoestring" had made another mistake and the local brew was not really called "Kuntsmann" (It´s Kunstmann).

Arriving in Puerto Varas, everything changed (except the beer). It is a lovely little town next to a lake with views of the Osorno volcano.



We took a very scenic 3 boat, 4 bus tourist day-trip to Bariloche in Argentina, and drove around a bit in a hire car taking in the wonderful scenery.



After a couple of days in the sunshine of the Argentinian lake district, we took a coach to Mendoza. Mendoza is the main wine-producing region of Argentina and a day trip to a couple of wineries with magnificent Argentinian beef and chorizo for lunch was a highlight. The next day in the hot springs was another highlight, reaffirming our love for Argentina.

Chilling in Chile

Puerto Natales is the support-town for trips to the Torres del Paine national park. As we were both suffering with flu at the time, Sonia and I decided to forego the traditional hiking and camping in favour of wilderness travel American Style. So we hired the biggest, fattest, most lumbering and fuel-inefficient SUV we could find (Jeep Grand Cherokee) and pummelled it over the dirt road to the Torres.

Our first day in the national park was a bit drizzly which, combined with our flu, meant we were not experiencing the place at its best. Our acommodation was a basic ´refugio´ where we shared a room with six unfortunates who had to listen to our coughing and spluttering. The refugio was next door to Hosteria Las Torres, near the base of the famous towers themselves - three granite pillars which rise steeply over the park. This area was quite seriously damaged a couple of years ago when some Czech numptie lit a fire and burned down half of the park. The locals seemed quite annoyed about this but I thought the charred remnants of trees looked spectacular surrounded by the fresh growth of daisies. The parts of the park which hadn´t burned looked pretty ordinary in comparison.



Once the sun came out, the park was spectacular and we enjoyed cruising around it in our environmentally-unfriendly American behemoth. Sadly our third night, which was supposed to be a luxury respite from the basic refugio at the astronomically expensive Hosteria Las Torres, turned into another night in Puerto Natales as the Hosteria was double-booked. At first they admitted their mistake but effectively told us it was our problem. Eventually, after someone woke up the extremely professional and courteous (English speaking) manager, we were showered with apologies and given a free breakfast and a room in Natales. Nevertheless this was one of the biggest disappointments of our trip. There are so few hotels in the Park (about 4), and they are so far apart (half a day´s travel over bumpy dirt tracks), that double-booking is a complete nightmare.

From Puerto Natales we took the unfeasibly overpriced Navimag ferry to Puerto Montt. The journey has the potential to be spectacular, and we were lucky to be upgraded from our US$350 standard cabin, which we were going to be sharing with 20 other backpackers, to a private cabin for just Sonia and I, which would normally have cost US$750. The ship we were supposed to be on (the Magallanes) had broken down, or sunk, so we had a different one (the Puerto Eden) instead. The Navimag is a small ferry for sheep, cows and lorries, with some cabins for tourists tacked on to pay for the journey. It is nothing like a cruise ship and not even anywhere near the luxury of a cross-channel ferry. You don´t get the opportunity to disembark anywhere on the 3 day trip through the fjords and the points of interest along the way are reached whenever they´re reached, rather than at a convenient time for tourists (such as during daylight hours!) Sadly the weather was awful so the promised spectacular scenery was largely a view of grey drizzle, and the destination, Puerto Montt, turned out to be considerably less pleasant than Puerto Natales.

Entering Argentina

First, an apology for the lack of new material. I am writing this from an internet cafe in Aguas Calientes in Peru. When the Incas built Machu Picchu a mere 500 years ago they were still in the Bronze age, and things haven´t come along much since then in Aguas Calientes. Despite the name of the town meaning "hot water", our US$80 hotel´s bronze-age plumbing was unable to deliver any. The computers are still in the electronic equivalent of the bronze-age too; the Windows 95 age. Interfacing a 2005 high resolution digital camera with faded beige computers ten years older is a recipe for frustration, and I´ve had plenty of that in internet cafes throughout South America. For anybody reading this and contemplating extended travel with a big digital camera in South America, my advice would be to bring a laptop!

Backtracking a bit from Puerto Natales, my narrative left us in beautiful Iguassu. We only really dipped into Argentina a few times, spending more time in Brazil and Chile, but we were glad each time we did. Crossing from the Brazilian side of the Iguassu falls at Foz do Iguacu to the Argentinian side (Puerto Iguazu) was like Dorothy´s journey from black-and-white Kansas to technicolour Oz. Miserable grey grids of streets gave way to rustic cobbled roads lined with trees which seemed luminous green growing from Australia-red earth. Suddenly, as if by magic, the air was clearer, the women more beautiful, the food and wine delicious and credit cards started working again. Even the cars, which are the most boring in the world in Brazil, became interesting in the "shabby chique" style of rural France and Italy. What was surprising was how instantly this happened on crossing the border. Surely it´s the same road, so some of these cars should have made it to the "dark" side in Brazil? I can only assume it is illegal to cross into Brazil in an Alfa Romeo, classic American or 40 year old Peugeot 504, or in fact anything which isn´t a nondescript two-year-old Fiat or VW saloon.



From Puerto Iguazu we flew to Buenos Aires, where the technicolour continued. The deep primary colours of El Caminito de la Boca glowed under a clear blue sky. The beers were cold and cheap, the steaks were succulent and lots of dark latin beauties were dressed as prostitutes, pretending they could dance Tango in front of tourists who definitely couldn´t. Faded colonial elegance mixed it with glitzy modern shopping malls. I got the impression of a city with much beauty and history, but at the same time thriving and modern.



We flew from Buenos Aires to El Califate, a tourist town for visits to the nearby Moreno Glacier. As was normal for Argentina, the food and wine was wonderful, plentiful and cheap and the people were friendly. Unusually for our Argentina experience, the weather was rubbish and the Moreno Glacier was less impressive in the drizzle than it would otherwise have been. From El Califate we took a bus to Puerto Natales. On crossing the border, Argentina´s magical colours of Oz quickly faded to the near-monochrome Kansas of Puerto Natales.