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Andean autumn

A South American travelogue 
(c) Robert Alcock 2003

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Sunday 6 April 2003  

No sense in saying that in 36 hours we'll be in Tierra del Fuego. Right now we're in Zorrozaurre and the room is awash with instant noodles, crushable travel hats, compasses, penkinves, tealights, sleeping bags, film reels, lighters, oranges, rucksacks, binoculars, pencils, sunglasses, journals, masking tape, walking poles, granola bars, changes of clothing, sponge bags... Can you get there from here?  

before a journey 
all the silent things
we aren't taking

Monday 7 April  

Landing at dawn in Buenos Aires with city lights twinkling through a rose-brown toxic sunrise and lightning flickering on the horizon. Pampas grass in implausible quantities. Off again straightaway on Argentine Airlines. I am expecting to see a young heifer hauled complaining up the steps to be slaughtered for our in flight meal. In fact all the passengers are human, most seem to be young couples like us, off to that most romantic of destinations, the End of the World. Flying over Patagonia is slow... it is a huge place even from 5000m... deserted coast, no sign of whales or Welsh people from up here. Just a lot of ocean and brown desert with tiny straight roads creeping across it and clouds. Stopping off in El Calafate, an airstrip next to a big lake with the Andes looming in the distance. A blue river weaving across country stripped naked by the wind and the dryness.  

Then Ushuaia. Coming in over the Beagle Channel with jagged snowy mountains, forests turning red and a Beagle Channel that seems to have been mislaid from Scotland. The town owes more to California, a rectangular grid with San Francisco type gradients and building styles limited only by the imagination and the low rent aesthetic of the place. The supermarket accepts dollars and pesos and things cost the same as in Bilbao.  

The taxi-driver who took us from the airport has lived here 17 years and considers himself a Fuegino but there are lots of newer arrivals from other part sof South America, as we found out from the girl in the travel agency later (a porteña, a native of Buenos Aires), most young people who come for the jobs and the freer spirit. She has a young son and seemed surprised that we were married - her impression was all Europeans lived in sin. Her attitudes to children were a little ambivalent, she resents the loss of freedom but thinks it would be nice to have another. "Maybe I need to see the psychologist" she admits freely like a true porteña. 

Strolling along the sea front we see a matched pair of 18-year-old Mormons appear from the port wearing identical gray slickers and "Elder Smith" name-badges. They look as if they have just disembarked from some Antarctic of the soul.

Tuesday 8 April 

Today we got a minibus from Ushuaia to the Tierra Del Fuego National Park just west of town. Ushuaia is a big sprawling place, as we could see on the way, with new developments springing up on the outskirts. A lot of houses are just wooden shacks, and many have strange looking stoves made of oil drums out in the back yard. One of the other passengers on the bus, a Fuegino, told us that these are wood burning stoves and that firewood is extremely cheap here, about $80 for a truckload.

We spent the day hiking around the peat bogs, rocky shores and beech woods of the park. Everything was extremely beautiful and wild, and strange. Lichens, mosses and strange epiphytic plants like mistletoe (but different) hung from every tree. The beech trees, resplendent in their autumn colours, were just like European beech trees but... weren't. In fact they belong to a different genus called Nothofagus. There were cormorants that weren't quite like cormorants and ducks that looked like pigeons pretending to be ducks. We glimpsed a sea lion, at least Robert claims he did. There were giant kelp floating like curtains just offshore. We also saw a pair of red foxes (at least Almudena swears she saw two) and lots of beaver dams but no beavers. Beavers aren't natives to the area and they are causing a lot of damage. We wondered whether they were introduced accidentally or intentionally and under what strange set of circumstances. 

The park was quite empty in the morning; it really felt like the end of the world. The mountains were wreathed in mist scattered with occasional rainbows. In the afternoon we saw several other hikers including a retired couple from Pasadena, California. The husband worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where Robert's Uncle Bob also works. Small hemisphere. 

At the end of the trail we came upon a pier with little wooden shack where a father and son operate boat trips to the nearby bird reserve, Isla Redonda. They had a nice woodstove with a pot of eucatypus nuts on top that made the whole hut sweet with the odour. They passed around a cup of mate and told us about the Torres del Paine national park in Chile, which sounded so fantastic that we are planning to go there for a couple of days. 

In the evening we were talking to the other guests at the hostel, some of whom have already been to areas we’re planning to visit. David, an Australian who yesterday tried out his stumbling Spanish on us, told the assembled party the gory details of his recent ascent of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Andes at 6970m. The last living thing he saw on his climb was a dog that followed the party to Camp 2. Apart from that just rock, snow, ice and 100km winds. The party consisted of three guides who suffered from "summit fever" and sixteen clients. Of the whole party only three clients made it to the summit (along with all three guides) while three clients were helicoptered out with busted knees and one went back by mule after losing half a finger to frostbite. We’ve postponed Aconcagua to our next trip. 

Speaking of dogs, we were in the local supermarket ("El Anonimo") when a large white dog evaded security and started trotting along the aisles. There are a lot of stray and semi-stray hounds around town. Robert dreamed about a dog that did the Torres del Paine circuit in record time; and about the southern stars, which we have yet to see due to near-continuous cloud.

Wednesday 9 April

We got a minibus up a winding road behind town that ended at the World’s Southernmost Ski Resort. (This is becoming a familiar theme in the World’s Southernmost City. You name it, it’s got a latitude record attached to it.) From the bottom of the chairlift we hiked up through more magnificent autumnal Nothofagus (southern beech) woods. As we climbed the woods diminished in height from 20-metre giants to mazy, gnarled bonsai. The woods gave way to baroque gardens of alien-looking alpine plants in a mountain bowl surrounded by snow-capped mountains of the Martial Range. One of them has a rather small glacier but we decided instead to hike up to a col (saddle) which was tough going over rock and ice, but led to stunning views north into the uninhabited Valle de Andorra and south over the Beagle Channel to Isla Navarino on the other side (part of Chile) and beyond, other islands towards Cape Horn, the ultimate in South America. 

After lunch in the microforest we headed down to a pretty wooden teashop at the bottom for cocoa and chocolate cake, then got the three o’clock bus back home. In the afternoon we went for a walk along the harbour, where numerous memorials pay tribute to those who "watered with their blood the roots of our sovereignty over the Malvinas" (alias the Falkland Islands). 

Thursday 10 April 

This morning we took off in glorious sunshine (a first) from the Malvinas Argentinas International Airport on a little 19-seater propellor plane. Leaving Ushuaia, the boom own of the far south. A few things we learnt about Ushuaia which we forgot to mention until now: The recent economic and population boom was largely created by government subsidies (or as a local put it, "They assemble 100 TVs here, send them to Buenos Aires, sell two, disassemble the other 98 and ship them back here.") According to a taxi driver, the local government also accepts bribes from Japanese fishing boats to look the other way while they strip the ocean of its natural resources. Anyway, it looked lovely from the air. Magnificent views over the Beagle Sound, Ushuaia and the glaciated mountains of southern Tierra del Fuego with their Nothofagus forests with sharply delineated tree-lines, fog banks hanging in U-shaped glaciated valleys.

The mountains gave way to flatter, drier country with straight roads, scattered sheep stations and vast mud-flats on the coast. We crossed the Magellanes Strait and landed on our shadow in Rio Gallegos, which was about as dull as Ushuaia was pretty. There we caught a bus from a place that looked like a set for a film, possibly by Wim Wenders or a Mexican art house director. This was deepest Patagonia with real gauchos, cracked windscreens and dust. The bus took us west into the heart of the arid plains, monotonous as the sea. Frequent stretches of dirt road made progress slow and uncomfortable. We saw ñandu (the local name for ostrich-like rheas) and flocks of geese, as well as the occasional hawk. No trees for the first 4 hours of the journey, though. Eventually black-and-white mountains reared up above the yellow-and-brown rolling plains. The Andes. As welcome to us as land after a sea voyage. We passed the time on the journey reading – Almudena, Antes Que Anochezca by Reinaldo Arenas and Robert, Shackleton’s accoount of the Endeavor expedition. 

We changed buses on the edge of nowhere (having already passed through the middle), crossed the border into Chile and wound up in Puerto Natales. This town looks a bit as if it had an earthquake last month and is expecting another one soon. Our hostel was "built" to the cheapest possible standard. The whole economy seems to revolve around the backpacker trade; it is the end-point of the Southern Fjords boat trip and the jump-off point for the Torres del Paine National Park. Travel agencies and hostels, internet cafes and cheap restaurants are everywhere in town, all apparently offering exactly the same services.

Friday 11 April 

Bus at 7 this morning for Torres del Paine, 120km along dirt roads in a cloud of dust from the tour bus in front. Our bus had a windscreen crack that could have been displayed in the Windscreen Cracks of Patagonia Hall of Fame. The area is mainly sheep and cattle stations, with flocks (or herds?) of the flightless rhea, locally known as the ñandu (Pterocnemia pennata). Much more common are guanaco (Lama guanicoe), a relative of the llama. Very attractive, and their population is booming in the less mountainous areas of the park and its surroundings, apparently because their main predator, the puma, has been hunted mercilessly. 

The bus took us as far as Lago Pehoe, more or less in the center of the park. We went for a walk to a mirador (lookout point) overlooking another lake, Lago Nordenskjold. The trail led through an area dominated by vicious spiny shrubs, which seem to have taken over as a result of overgrazing by the guanaco. There were a few areas where Nothofagus and other trees had managed to survive the herbivores. 

The view from the mirador was simply awesome. A grey-blue glacial lake with two huge mountain massifs on the other side. On the left, a broad mountain with a huge glacier pouring down the side (literally: as we ate lunch, we saw two great big chunks of ice fall off the glacier and rumbled down the mountainside with a noise that we could hear clearly some 5km away.) The front side of this mountain was covered in Nothofagus woods with a perfect gradation of colour from green at the bottom, through yellow and orange, to red at the top, the leaves turning progressively at different altitudes. On the right, the spectacular Cuernos del Paine, two sharp spikes of black on top of orange-grey rock. In between, the Valle del Frances, with another mountain shaped like a shark’s fin right in the middle. On the way back from the walk, we sat for a while beside the Salto Grande or Great Falls, which divide the two lakes. The dynamism and power of nature made visible once more. Robert was reminded of the Chinese parable in which a traveler sees an old man leap into a churning waterfall and emerge unscathed. When asked, the old man explains that he simply allows he water to take him wherever it wishes, without resisting its power, and thus is able to survive the incredible forces. Compare the classic Western approach of riding inside a wooden barrel. 

We only planned to spend one night in the park and had decided to try and see its most famous natural light show: sunrise on the Torres del Paine, the great volcanic mountains that are the best known landmark in the Park, probably of the whole of Chile. This mean spending the night in a campsite near the base of the towers and climbing up to the viewing-point in time to see the dawn. We got the bus again to the park entrance, where we saw some more guanacos (two family groups of five and seven adults, plus juveniles) at close range while waiting for the minibus to take us to the start of the trail we planned to take. This meant another ride along a bumpy dirt road, including a old suspension bridge that was not designed for minibuses – clearance was about two inches on each side of the bus. We were the only passengers on this minibus apart from the driver’s two nephews (aged about ten) who live at the park’s exclusive hotel and were on their way back from school. The seemed to know the whole park and were happy to offer advice on the route! We hiked up the gorge of the River Ascencio, through scrubby grassland (with lots of cows – in a national park!) and then more autumnal Nothofagus woods, each tiny, delicate leaf a work of art. There were recent landslips in several places, another reminder of the dynamic, unstable nature of these young mountains. We had hoped to reach the campsite by dusk, but ended up camping in a likely spot along the way because night was falling, also Robert couldn’t walk another step. Southern stars by the thousand. 

Saturday 12 April 

Set off for the Torres del Paine lookout point at first light (more or less), but were only halfway up when we saw the tips of the towers turn a brilliant orange – so you could say we saw half of the show. Carried on uphill anyway (very hard climb) and it was worth it; we saw the three giant grey monoliths tinted with orange, rising vertically for more than a kilometer above another glacial lake. Down by the same route, but more slowly, admiring the infinite colours of the forest, the river and the rocks. We got down to the exclusive Hosteleria about lunchtime, where we ate our meagre sandwiches outside the restaurant where a cup of coffee cost 4US$. Back to civilization (well, Puerto Natales anyway), we found our hostel in the process of deconstruction and decided to eat out to celebrate. 

Sunday 13 April 

Another day, another 5-hour bus journey on dirt roads, this time from Puerto Natales to El Calafate in Argentina, a town with one important attraction: the Perito Moreno glacier. The bus driver, tour guide and company director was Juan Carlos, who told us a lot of facts (?) about the history of Patagonia (which he claims used to belong entirely to Chile), its indigenous people, wildlife and geology. Many birds including aguila (eagle) and caracara, a bird with an orange face often seen sitting on fenceposts waiting for roadkill.

The glacier didn't disappoint. A vast tongue of blue-white ice (up to 70 metres high, 4 kilometres wide and 30 long) emerging from a broad valley between mountains into Lago Argentino, the country’s biggest lake. Its surface is not flat but rather a chaotic badlands of crests (serracs) and crevasses. Terms like nunatak (a rocky island within a glacier), moraine (the soil and rocks washed out at the front and sides of a glacier) and glacial milk (the grey-blue lake water coloured by suspended sediment) became meaningful for the first time. Although we could see the whole glacier, impressive enough, what was more amazing was to realise that it is only one small arm of the Great Southern Ice Field which covers most of the Patagonian Andes. The glacier can be viewed from a series of galleries on a wooded slope, which is on the opposite side of the lake but at a very narrow point, which means you can see the ice from only a couple of hundred metres away. In the past the glacier has grown and closed this gap altogether, dividing the lake into two so that the level of the upper lake rose some 20 metres before forcing its way through the gap with incredible force. This last happened in 1988 and you can still see the old water level, marked by the absence of trees as in a drawn-down reservoir. Nobody knows whether this will happen again or, if it does, how high the lake will rise and when it will break through. 

Big and little chunks of ice are constantly dropping off the glacier as the ice melts, with explosive cracking noises. Everyone was waiting to see when a big chunk would come off. The glacier is a master of suspense. 

There are viewing galleries at different levels; at the bottom of the slope, nearer the glacier, the air is noticeably colder and the lenga trees were already in their full red autumnal colouring, while at the top they were mostly still green – the inverse of the red-above-green layering that we could see on the surrounding mountainsides. After a couple of hours of saying "wow" and "amazing", we got the bus back to El Calafate, a small town named after a small bush with not very appetizing berries (we picked some at the glacier). The same could be said of El Calafate. Its main street is lined with tourist agencies offering more or less the same options. After determining that no, we weren’t going to spend a stack of money on another tour of the glacier, a boat trip to see another glacier, trekking on the glacier or horseback riding in the desert (glaciers optional), we were at a loss for how to pass the time. We tried to go to a movie but found the cinema was actually the town hall, where a strange man denied the knowlege of any such thing as a cinema. After that we went to bed. 

Monday 14 April 

Rain in El Calafate does little to add to its already limited attractions. Went for a walk and found out just how small the place is. The main street is all faux-natural "Old West" style wooden shop fronts. One block back are restaurants, hotels and grocery stores. The next block is down-at-heel boarding and private houses with gardens. The concrete road surfacing (no asphalt) ends at the third block out and from there it’s dirt roads with many half-built houses. Actually El Calafate is something of a boom town, like Ushuaia – building work seems to be going on intensively on the outskirts. Judging by this and by the number of down parkas and North American accents on the main street, for a town whose whole economy is based on one tourist attraction, it seems to be going well. But as the Bible might have said, "He who builds his town on ice had better watch out for global warming." But not in a big hurry. The amount of ice in the Perito Moreno glacier, Robert calculates, would be enough to cool a thousand million million martinis.

Tuesday 15 April 

Left El Calafate today to fly to San Carlos de Bariloche, ten degrees north along the Andean chain. The weather was glorious and we had left-side window seats: fantastic views of more giant glaciers, the Fitz Roy range, occasional lakes and more, much more, Patagonian steppe. Towards Bariloche the mountains spread out, the glaciers disappeared and the lakes became more numerous. Then in the midst of green forests, one peak stood out brilliant white in the sunshine, covered in ice and snow: El Tronador (The Thunderer), head and shoulders above the rest at 3500m, centrepiece of Nahuel Huapi national park.

On the shores of a gorgeous lake (Lago Nahuel Huapi), Bariloche is much bigger (100,000 people) and more opulent than the towns in the far south. Its style is a blend of Switzerland and the Brothers Grimm – a sort of Heidi meets the Gnomes of Zurich approach. If anything can be made rustic (say by slapping rough-cut pine trim on it), it is. The number of carved gnomes and other artisanal wooden objects on offer defies the imagination. We booked into a hostel on a street called Elflein and then went out to try and sort out a rental car to tour the area - as soon as possible, because half of Argentina descends on the town during Easter week, we’re told.

Wednesday 16 April - Passover 

We know that today is Passover because an Israeli fellow in our dorm (no double rooms available, for once) told us that he and all the other Jews in town were invited to Passover dinner at an expensive Jewish-owned hotel in town. Obviously he was keen not to miss it because his alarm clock woke us up at 7am and again at 7.15. Between that and the smell of the socks that the other occupant of the dorm (a Spaniard) had hanging in the shower, we didn’t get much rest and we were pretty dozy when we staggered down for breakfast at 9am. The owner of the alarm clock was still sleeping like a Paschal lamb, of course. 

As a remedy Almudena recommended we sample the town’s famous chocolate. It didn’t wake us up, but who cares? 

We went to a photography exhibition in the main square and found ourselves at a property auction instead – being careful not to scratch our heads in case we ended up with 1000 square metres of prime lakefront with road access. Ate lunch in the park and decided to catch a bus out of town along the lake shore. The rural route took us past yet more gnomish houses set amid coniferous forests with a scattering of Arucaria (monkey-puzzle) trees, native to the Andes. We got off at the end of the bus route, at a little peninsula where tour boats embark for trips around the lake. A friendly park ranger gave us directions instead to a hidden lake (Lago Escondido). We didn’t find that lake but a less hidden one instead, with a landing stage that was a great place to relax in the sun, read Mario Benedetti’s "Random Questions" (Preguntas Al Azar) and discover that the answer to "Donde esta mi pais" is that we each carry it in our knapsack of dreams. 

The ranger’s other recommended route was to climb up to a lookout point (Cerro Campanario – the Bell Tower Peak). There is a cable car to the top of the mountain but we earned the view instead, climbing for half an hour through dusty pine woods. From the top, lakes and mountains into the distance of a perfect afternoon, plus a cafeteria with tiny cups of coffee and good apple strudel. There was a well-fed cat at the top which Robert immediately christened the Black Forest gato. Dust skiing downhill again, then the bus back to Bariloche for a dinner of lamp chops and mashed potatoes. The main problem we had at the supermarket was trying to find a portion of meat small enough for two.

Thursday 17 April

Another beautiful day. Got the bus from the center of Bariloche up to Villa Catedral, a ski area in the mountains above town. No snow at this time of year, of course, but we got the cable car and a chair-lift up to the top of the slopes to a barren rocky ridge with fine views of the city and Lago Nahuel Huapi. Bare rocky peaks surrounded us, their lower sides covered in Nothofagus woods, with rivers meandering in hanging valleys far below. Above the rest of the mountains loomed El Tronador, clouds hanging round its peak like wet groupies around a prominent pop star. 

The open-ended circuit we planned to follow took us first along the steep north flank of Cerro Catedral, steep scrambling across dusty, rocky terrain with occasional alpine plants. Our first sighting of the regal Andean condor, patrolling his cold domain on motionless wings, steering with just a twitch of his finger-feathers. Little else lives up here on the dry side of the Andean chain, though the mountains are no giants: El Tronador is lower than the highest peaks in the Pyrenees, and we never climbed above 2100m today. After crossing a ridge we climb down through more rocks and dust to a high lake and then a jewel of a hanging valley, with another lake, slopes covered in bonsai Nothofagus and peat bogs with small pools. The valley could have been designed by a team of 120-year-old enlightened Zen monks. At the end of the valley, the Frey Refuge, with tired climbers and dogs lazing in the sun outside and the cook making pizza in a lean-to greenhouse. Time for a couple of cold drinks. 

Sadly, we weren’t able to stay long in this beautiful place; we carried on down a steep trail through more autumnal woods and arrived at another refugio, this one a log shack built (probably by gnomes) under the shelter of an overhanging boulder in a forest of giant trees. More Hansel and Gretel territory. On through the forest, through an area of smaller trees burnt by a major fire, just beginning to sprout new growth, down to a campsite among grandfather cohiue trees (another species of Nothofagus, this one’s an evergreen) and bamboo-like cohiue canes. Another 3km along a dirt road by the shore of Lago Guiterrez and we got to the bus stop, completely worn out. A good walk. 

Good Friday 18 April 

This morning we checked out of the Aire Sur hostel in Bariloche where we’ve been staying for two nights (nice place, friendly staff), did some washing and shopping, then picked up the rental car we booked a couple of days ago – a maroon Renault Kangoo minivan that will take us, all being well, over the Andes into Chile for a couple of days, then back over to Argentina. We were offered a smaller car (Ford Ka or VW Golf) for less but with limited distance – we decided on the Kangoo with unlimited kilometres. Also with the back seats removed it’s possible (albeit not very comfortable) to sleep in the back. 

Drove out of town to the east and around the end of Lago Nahuel Huapi then took the paved road along the lakeshore to Villa la Angustora, a pretty touristy little place at the base of a peninsula that sticks out into the lake. The peninsula includes extensive stands of arrayanes (an unusual tree with cinnamon-coloured bark) but it’s a 3-hour walk from the town so we gave it a miss, having seen plenty of arrayanes on our walk to the non-hidden lake two days ago. Starting to realise that everything here is further apart than you think, especially on dirt roads, which we found began just beyond Villa la Angustora.

We passed the Argentinian border control post with no problems, then up over the pass and the border itself. As we crossed over the weather changed, from white cumulus with blue sky to dense grey clouds and scattered showers. The Andes block most of the rain coming in from the Pacific. Everything on the Chilean side is greener, lusher, more verdant. Nothofagus with green leafy lichens (old man’s beard) hanging off the branches. Creepers covering trees, signposts, houses and the occasional slow-moving dog. By the time we got to the Chilean border post it was cold and getting dark. Having forgotten that you can’t take any food or agricultural products into Chile, Robert had stocked up on fruit, salami and cheese in Bariloche. We had to hide it under the seat and lie with a straight face. 

We hoped to find a good place to park before nightfall, but no luck. Trying to find one, we ended up driving along a dirt road towards a place called El Encanto (The Enchantment). In the dark everything looked strange, poor, spooky. People walking along the road in the dark and rain. We stopped to ask a lady for directions – she was walking from her father’s house to her house in the nearby town of Entre Lagos, 15 km away! We gave her a lift and she told us a "good" place to park for the night by the shore of a lake. Went to sleep relatively happy, but at midnight we were woken up – by the Chilean police (carabineros). The carabinero told us that this was a very dangerous place to park, people could come and break our windows, and told us to follow him to the station where we could stay unmolested till morning. We feared the worst (extortion) but everything turned out as he said.

Saturday 19 April 

Pouring with rain. Not much sleep (floor of car not very comfortable). Need coffee. Drove to nearest town, Osorno, but no luck – everything closed until 9.30. Depressing, poor town, with an interesting (if ugly) concrete cathedral. Decided not to wait around. Our plan was to drive around the Leaks, sorry, Lakes of southern Chile for a day or two before going back over to Argentina – but with the weather against us we decided to head back over fairly directly. (Actually this isn’t really southern Chile at all, it’s the southern end of central Chile. Chile is the world’s longest thinnest country, but the northern part is mostly desert and the southern part all islands and mountains that can’t be reached from the rest of the country by road, except by crossing into Argentina or taking a ferry. We were exploring the southern end of the central part that you can drive to directly form the capital.) 

Decided to try and drive around the eastern side of one of the bigger lakes and head up through the mountains to Puerto Fuy, from where there would be two options – get a car ferry along a lake to a low pass leading directly to Argentina, or keep driving north and reach a higher pass. The road round the lake was bad dirt road, mostly washboard (a surface like corrugated iron). As we knew from watching "The Wages of Fear" this road has to be taken at speed in order to skim over the top of the bumps and have a smoother ride, which is importand even if you haven’t got a truckload of nitroglycerine (like in the film). The countryside was a mixture of tidy-looking farms with cows, sheep and horses (looking very like England on a rainy day) and poor tin-and-wooden houses. The trees, plants, and birds, however, were mostly unfamiliar to us. Saw lots of people walking, cycling, riding horses and driving pigs along the roadside in the rain. Rushing mountain streams with waterfalls amd precipitous mountains. Felt bad for not offering anybody a lift. The area looked really beautiful although we couldn’t see much of it because of the pouring rain – views of the lake were mostly cloud. Asked directions and found that the road north to Puerto Fuy was impassable – a bridge had been washed out. We had to head back to the main north-south highway (Hwy 5) and then cross back to the mountains further north, and take the higher pass over the mountains. 

Stopped for lunch in another lakeside town, Futrona, where we’d been recommended a restaurant which turned out to be closed. But we happend on place that seemed to be a combination of hotel and botanic garden – turned out to be a "Countryside Centre" belonging to a savings bank, where members of the bank could stay on holiday. A lovely place on the lakeshore with what we imagined to be excellent views over the water, swimming pools, sauna and pool tables. More importantly the (independently run) restaurant was open serving a rather mediocre, but very welcome, lunch menu. We were taken with the place and decided to stay the night in one of the cabins. We took advantage of the sauna, pool tables and cable TV as well as managing to cook a rather decent meal in our room using only an electric kettle – a feat of culinary improvisation, we agreed, smugly. (We boycotted the restaurant after the manager tried to gyp us on the dollar-Chilean Peso exchange rate.) The weather cleared a bit in the evening and we took a stroll around the botanic gardens, saw the view (it was in fact excellent), the strange trees and two species of bird – a wader with a narrow, curved beak and an iritating hawk that called loudly every time it saw people. Made plans to open a similar centre for relaxation and ecological education when we get back to Spain.

Easter Sunday 20 April

Weather a bit better. Set off west again and reached Hwy 5 at Los Lagos, a small agricultural town with fine, if run-down, clapperboard houses and interesting signs (the best by far was "Se Compran Liebres" – "Hares Bought"). From here we decided that, what the heck, we might as well go the whole hog and drive to the Pacific. As usual it turned out to take longer than we thought; we had to go north, then southwest to the large town of Valdivia, where traffic was insane; the worst were the taxis, black with yellow roofs, buzzing around like wasps with no apparent knowledge of traffic regulations. We managed to find the road to the coast, which we reached at a place called Nieblas ("Fog"). Actually the sun came out as we looked over the lush green vegetation of the clifftops and the breakers crashing on a beach of black sand overlooked by an old Spanish fort. It looked remarkably like the north coast of Spain, except for the shanties and stray dogs everywhere. Met a girl on the beach collecting kelp stalks which the locals cook and eat in salad or soup. Another local speciality, she told us, was faivas, a sort of crab. It was lunchtime so we found a decent-looking restaurant by the fishing port. A pile of steaming mussels and clams with sausage, ham and coriander (Robert) and a slab of fresh grilled fish with chips (Almudena) plus beer, paid for with a crisp fresh $10 bill. 

We set off optimistically thinking we would be back in Argentina for dinner. "Chile is such a narrow country, after all". As we got into the mountains, however, the weather turned rainy again and the road classification (according to our subjective measurement system) went from third gear to second gear with frequent first-gear sections. The bridges are especially worthy of mention, consisting mostly of double tracks of wooden planks laid lengthwise along a bed of crosswise planks, sometimes with handrails. It was fun driving but tiring and slow – we were certainly glad not to be behind the wheel of any of the overloaded buses, trucks or minivans that we passed. As for the Ford Ka – forget it! 

Got to the Chilean exit border post about half past five. Paperwork took a while. The carabineros were confused when the found out that the last vehicle to leave Chile by that pass (the previous week) seemed to have the same license number as our car. Turned out it was our car  - the last people to rent it had taken the same route as us! This was comforting as we knew, at least, that the road was passable... last week. Also that it wasn’t what you could call the beaten track. We saw several cars with Chilean license plates coming the other way, having presumably come from Argentina (although as we later found out, we presumed wrong) and the border guards assured us that the Argentinean border wasn’t far (18km to the border itself, 55 to the Argentinean checkpoint) and that we would make it there by nightfall. "No problem". 

Famous last words. Not 10km up the increasingly-dodgy road darkness found us, once again, with no particular place to stay. A sign for "Thermal Baths, Cabins, Camping". Following the stink of sulphur we got to a muddy little complex next to a river, with an old traction engine parked in the front yard, a black-and-white cat and flowerpots. The owner was away in town but came back after half and hour and said we could park the car for the night, sure, but the cabins were all in disarray after the weekend when there had been 400 Chileans staying, slathering themselves and everything else with healthy sulphrous mud. A great relief for us (for them too, I guess).

Monday 21 April

An epic day. Set off at breakfast (declining the owner’s offer of a mud-and-hot-spring treatment) and found the road steep, rocky, twisty, narrow and increasingly hairy. Rain turned to hail or snow on the highest parts of the trail (1180m at its summit). We thought we’d seen the worst after we only just made it up a steep uphill of loose stones. But after passing the Chilean-Argentinian border, it seemed our road had come to an end: a 10m-wide river with a bridge that was very definitely down and not going to be rebuilt in a hurry. However, there was a decent-looking wide, flat ford alongside, and the river wasn’t flowing very high. Problem was, on the other side was a steep slope that looked like it would be very hard to get up. No idea where we might find the nearest vehicle capable of towing us up the slope (or out of the river if it came to that), but we decided to give it a go, as the alternative was a hike. 

First attempt, we got across the ford no problem and halfway up the slope... before grinding to a halt. Stones and bits of wood under the front wheels seemed to make no difference except to dig us deeper in the mud, even though we unloaded everything from the car (Robert being the heaviest load) and Almudena tried a hill start. In the end Robert had to go back down the slope and reverse across the ford. This manoeuvre was touch and go especially when he almost missed the road on the other side. Almudena filled in the holes in the road made by the last attempt and Robert tried again, this time taking the ford at speed (second gear) to get maximum momentum on the slope. No go – with the time lost changing gear, the car didn’t even get halfway up. One more try. Backing across the ford was worse still than before, the car seemed to have a mind of its own and Almudena’s look of horror as she thought it was being carried away by the current... (Robert maintains that there was no danger because he had taken the upstream side of the ford so the current would push the car into the safest part of the ford. However, it is clear that he is lying and didn't have the foggiest what he was getting himself into). Anyway, the car made it back across. Robert took a good run-up and put his cowboy hat on for luck. First gear all the way and hit the slope at high revs, taking a diagonal attack and swerving the wheel back and forth for extra traction... and she made it to the top! We gave each other a big hug and let the long-suffering Kangoo cool off. Thank heaven it was a rental vehicle, we wouldn’t do that to our car. 

A couple of kilometres further on we came to a campsite and more hot springs in the Lanin National Park. The people there could have towed us out, though we didn’t know it. We bought two chocolate bars in relief. 

The road through the National Park wasn’t much better that before, in places worse (although there was nowhere as bad as the ford at the fallen bridge). Lots of mud, fantastic views of lakes and snow-capped mountains. Stopped to take a short walk through a stand of Arucaria (monkey-puzzle) trees – huge trunks and those wierd, alien-looking branches curving upwards like pagoda roofs. All downhill now and the road went back to third- and even fourth-gear dirt road. Never thought we’d be glad to see a stretch of washboard. The young guard at the Argentinian border post seemed very surprised to see us; he appeared to be a bit out of practice with the paperwork. In the afternoon we arrived, finally, at San Martin de los Andes, another smart lakeside tourist town in the Bariloche mode, although quite a bit smaller. Had lunch in a cafe with cool jazz on the stereo, just glad to be back in civilization after our Andean adventure. Beaten track, we missed you. 

Tuesday 22 April

Still dark and raining at 8am when we drove out of San Martin with an 11am deadline to return the car in Bariloche. Decided against following the scenic (read long and winding) Route of the Seven Lakes and took a short-cut over the Cordoba Pass, with 60 more km of good dirt road (we laugh at dirt road). Passed estancias and woods, then reached an area of bizarre rock formations in the shapes of pillars, melted cathedrals, a fairytale castle, a giant lizard... Snow at the top of the pass made for slow going but we made good time otherwise, helping the time to roll along singing "The Wheels on the Bus". On the road we met a truck going the other way, over the windscreen the name: "Vespasiani Transportes". Wondered if the driver knew his family had come full circle from muleteers to Roman emperors and back to truckers. Returned the car, got bus tickets for Mendoza, a 19-hour drive north through the night over the steppe. The drivers liked American action movies, we didn’t. 

Wednesday 23 April 

Woke up as the bus was approaching Mendoza. Brown sierras looming on our left, all around us a semi-desert plain with irrigated vineyards. On the outskirts of town housing developments, concrete-block houses, each with its own miniature water tower on the roof. An hour in Mendoza bus station, then we got a minibus up into the mountains, destination: Aconcagua Provincial Park. Climbing up red-rock canyons, cactus and shrubs along the roadsides. Intense sunlight pummelling through the thin mountain air. 

In the afternoon we arrived at Puente del Inca (2720m altitude). Cloudy now and very windy. The bus dropped us off in a dusty layby surrounnded by souvenir shacks. We looked for the town and realised we were in it. A military base across the road (mountain division, here just in case the Chileans decided to invade.) The hostel in the old railway station (not many trains these days) looked as if it had just sort of been blown there by the wind. A chandelier made of skis hung in the main room, but with no light bulbs. A free-standing woodstove. Iron bedspreads with sad mattresses. Homemade plumbing and wiring.

In a town this small you’re bound to meet up with someone you might know, and we did: the retired Californian couple we met hiking in Tierra del Fuego National Park at the start of our trip. They, like us, had come to see (not climb) Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Southern and Western Hemispheres. We had supper together – delicious empanadas (meat-filled pastries) and spinach pie with a bottle of rough red wine – at the Bar Aconcagua, a roadside shack with fluttering prayer flags hinting at Himalayan links: the film Seven Years in Tibet was shot in this area. The owner, Mario, was an experienced andinist (something like an alpinist, but higher) and gave us the low-down on day hikes in the park. The park entrance being some 4km from town, we tried to sort out a lift for the next morning about 7.30. Problems arose: Mario himself was going home to a nearby village and wouldn’t be back until 9am. Daniel, the hostel owner, was away in Mendoza; and the owner of the hosteria, Puente del Inca’s other non-ruined establishment (crappy and overpriced, by all accounts), told us his truck was in for repairs. We even tried the military base across the road; the sergeant wasn’t averse to a little private enterprise but his price was too steep for us. All options having failed, we resolved to walk. 

The main attractions in the town of Puente del Inca, we found out, are its hot springs and natural bridge, but the spa buildings were gutted in the early 20^th century by either an earthquake or a flood (accounts vary). The hot springs keep working, however, and someone has diverted them so that they now pour across the bridge and through and over the ruined buildings, and everything is covered in a patina of technicolour mineral deposits and festooned with wierd-shaped stalagmites and stalactites. The strange effect of it all was compounded by a stunning sunset. In the evening we met three other guests at the hostel, a young French couple and a strange Walloon kid with a picture of Jesus on his backpack. All, it turned out, were planning to do the same hike as us the next morning. There really isn’t much else to do in Puente del Inca (except bathe in the ruined spa.)

It turned out that the hostel provided electric mattresses, but not the heated sort: these had synthetic covers that generated static when rubbed against one's sleeping bag, clothes or hair, leading to nasty shocks when you touched the metal bed frames. Ouch.

Thursday 24 April

We found out this morning how quickly you can get dehydrated in these high, dry altitudes - both woke up with dry mouths and headaches. (Robert denies that this has anything to do with the cheap vino tinto consumed at dinner mostly by him.) Set off early for the entrance of Aconcagua provincial park, with a day sack, walking sticks and two 1.5l bottles of water. Hiking through dusty semi-desert: dry grasses, sagebrushy shrubs and some plants with wickedly sharp burrs that stuck to our trousers. Beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in sight. As we approached the park entrance we rounded a bend and saw the great snow-capped mountain framed between sere brown hills, the morning light brilliant on its south wall.

At the park ranger station they asked us where we were planning to hike, charged us 5 pesos each and issued a leaflet with scary warnings about altitude sickness and a numbered plastic bag to be used for all (ALL) solid waste and returned on leaving the park.

The trail (the only trail, in fact) leads to the two main base camps, Plaza de Mulas (4500m above sea level) and Plaza Francia (4200m), both located right up against the base of the mountain. Mario had told us that a good day hike takes the trail for Plaza de Francia as far as the base of the glacier, giving a good view of the mountain's south face. Those intending to attempt the summit have to acclimatize for about 4 days at one of the base camps before going any higher. There were no climbers now, though: the climbing season lasts only from November to March, and we saw few other people on the trail.

Just after the ranger station we stopped at a small laguna fed by one of the many mineral-rich springs in the area; white salts encrusted the soil around the laguna. A few ducks, disturbed by our presence, launched themselves onto the pool, rippling the reflection of the mountain.

Climbing a dusty path along a river valley between desert hills streaked with colours from a mineral palette. Strange shapes of twisted rocks, folded strata, pinnacles. Feeling exhausted, very hard going. Lack of air. The path levels out some 350m above the river. Aconcagua has disappeared now behind another mountain, brown Cerro Mirador. Around eleven o'clock the brilliant blue sky suddenly goes completely overcast and a cold wind springs up. We're surprised to arrive suddenly at the confluence of the two paths for Plaza Francia and Plaza de Mulas; it only took us 2.5 hours from the ranger station instead of the 4 hours indicated on the map. We decide the time must have been exaggerated to discourage people from climbing up to the base camps in a single day, risking altitude sickness. We have been drinking water constantly, but still feeling the effects in headaches and tiredeness.

The path continues up now to the right, following another mineral-rich stream with patches of ice here and there sculpted into bizarre shapes. The vegetation is getting sparser now as we approach 4000m in altitude but there are still several kinds of spiny, withered or succulent flora, although the leaflet claims that plants hardly extend above 3500m. More exaggeration. Possibly there is an element of machismo here as well. The leaflet describes Aconcagua as a "small 8000m" peak, despite being in reality less than 7000m. It actually is a very dangerous mountain to climb, mainly because of its suddenly changing weather. Ask the residents of the Climbers' Cemetary located just outside Puente del Inca.

The white summit peeked above the brow of the mountain in front, the glacier still nowhere to be seen. Robert could climb no further. We stopped for lunch in the shelter of a boulder and contemplated a scene of incredible silence, desolation and emptiness. The rock formations glared back at us from the surrounding dry hills. It was too cold to stay long, so we took a photo and headed back down. We didn't reach the glacier but we probably got to 4000m, a personal top for Almudena.

On the way back we detoured down to the campsite at the confluence of the streams to fill the water bottles, and from there decided to see whether the path continued along the river. There were numberous footprints and mule droppings heading in that direction, although a single path was lacking. As we continued downriver the valley became very steep in places with mud slopes, loose earth and stones to be traversed. The footprints and mule traces never abandoned us, but we decided that they must have some very agile mules round these parts. We made it out of the canyon and picked up the real path again, to our relief. The vegetation that had seemed so dry and barren on the way up now looked positively lush on the way down. Got back to the ranger station completely knackered. Luckily a young Argentinian couple were there looking at the laguna, and gave us a lift back to Puente del Inca. 

In the evening Jorge (the local mover and shaker who was looking after the hostel for Daniel) brought firewood and fired up the stove. He gave us tips on the best place to bathe in the thermal springs and his predictions for Sunday's presidential elections (he thought Menem "The Turk", two-times past president, would win and continue stealing happily. Actually Menem's father was from Syria but Argentinians call all Middle Eastern immigrants "Turks".) Jorge also complained about the Bolivian immigrants who didn't speak Spanish properly and came to Argentina to take the natives' jobs and get false papers. Hmm, sounds familiar. 

Friday 25 April

After breakfast, following Jorge's instructions we went down to the bath house on the second level, where there was a deep, hot indoor pool with a powerful bubbling vent. We soaked in the hot pool and admired the wierd melted shapes and psychedelic colours of the mineral deposits on the walls.

Took some photos of the baths and the town. The stalls by the road sell what look like pottery figurines but in fact turn out to be ordinary objects (shoes, mugs) that have been left in the mineral springs for a month and acquire a brilliant orange coating. They then sell for inflated prices, mainly to Argenitinian tourists who apparently have an inexhaustible appetite for tat.

Slow bus back to Mendoza. Very good steak for lunch in a restaurant, El Florentino. The waiter (grey hair and teeth) yakked on incessantly about football every time he came to the table, leaning close to you in a sleazy, creepy manner. Seemed to find it impossible to believe that Robert doesn't have an opinion about the 1966 World Cup final or even the Real Madrid-Barca rivalry. 

Wandered around Mendoza for a few hours. For a desert town it's very leafy and green, with bowers of pink-flowering creepers in the parks and pedestrianised streets. Too many cars, though. 

Another bus at 9.30pm for Buenos Aires, a 16-hour trip. Unlike the bus from Barlioche which was modern and clean, this is an old banger: lights that don't work, seats that don't recline properly and a petty dictator of an attendant whose only function seems to be to stop you from changing to a better seat. Everything a bit strange: unexplained stops and starts, at one point the bus actually reversed along the motorway. Why? We don't know.

Argentina, Night, Interior/Exterior. Not much sleep. About 3am gazing out at the telephone lines gliding ghostlike past the window in a sea of black nothing, nothing. (This scene only appears in the director's cut of Robert's life). 

Saturday 26 April

Dawn on the humid Pampas, where fields are ponds with fences. No gauchos to be seen; they can't be fenced in, I suppose. Plenty of kilometres still to travel. We may have seen a flock of flamingoes but can't be sure.

Arriving in Buenos Aires we're met at the bus station by Pablo, a friend from Bilbao who's back in his home town visiting family. He and and Maida (his Cuban lady) are just back from a trip to the surreal salt flats of Bolivia, one of the few places on earth where you can take photos that look evactly like they were shot in a white-walled studio... outdoors! 

We're invited to stay with his parents in the barrio of Quilmes. (Robert already feels at home when he finds out that every drop of beer he has consumed in Argentina came from the Quilmes brewery.) Pablo and Maida take us for a walk around the centre of BA in the afternoon. It's renowned for being the most European of Latin American cities and this seems to be true. The avenues are wide and the parks beautiful, the icecream very tasty and we are very tired. A taxi-driver gets into an argument with Robert about the Malvinas (Falklands) - in this case it only takes one to argue, Robert refuses to be drawn on the subject and even claims to be Irish to avoid trouble. However it is definitely established that the taxi driver in question didn't fight in the war he's going on about: he was too old (most of the Argentinian soldiers were teenage conscripts). A new twist on the "I would have fought but I was too young" line.

Back in Quilmes it's Pablo's dad's birthday party. Pizza and champagne flow freely (OK, melted cheese and champagne.) Hot topics of conversation are psychoanalysis (a friend of Pablo's named Juan has been in analysis for 11 years, which is not unusual in BA), football (the two main teams being Boca Juniors, represented by Juan who seems to copy the flamboyant style of Diego Maradona, and River Plate, supported by Carlos (?) who favours a crew cut); European passports (a hot item to have in Argentina now) and, of course, tomorrow's presidential election. Voting is obligatory in Argentina for those between 18 and 70; but nobody seems to be able to explain what the main candidates actually stand for, except that almost all of them are Peronists. If you don't like that lot you can write in your own candidate: "nobody" seems to be a popular choice (but unfortunately has no chance of winning); in the past a lot of people have voted for a puppet with no arms (who therefore can't steal). Pablo's mum, on the other hand, says she wanted a candidate who was loyal and honest, so she voted for her dog last time. The best idea of all, however, was perhaps Carlos': he intends to slip a slice of salami into the voting envelope.

Sunday 27 April, Election Day

The party went on until the small hours. We woke up about 9 and had breakfast, then went with the family to the airport to see Pablo and Maida off on their flight back to Bilbao. From there Pablo’s mum kindly took us on a tour of some of the parts of Buenos Aires that we didn’t see yesterday. We saw the shore of the river Plate (brown, smelly and 50km wide), where locals fish and vendors sell “choripan” (grilled sausage in bread rolls) from the sidewalk next to the busy traffic. We also took a stroll around La Boca, birthplace of the tango. In the late nineteenth century this was a brawling stew of tenements and brothels; now it’s a sanitized artists’ quarter with houses painted in bright colours and tango demonstrations on street corners. On the way home we stopped off at the polling station and accompanied Pablo’s mum as she cast her vote. We also stopped to pick up a former presidential candidate – Andi, her white Pekinese.

Although you wouldn’t know it from this travelogue, we’ve been very aware of the election ever since arriving in Ushuaia – posters and banners are everywhere. In the south we thought there was only one candidate because the vast majority of posters were for Kirchner, present governer of Santa Cruz province (where Rio Gallegos and El Calafate are located). He’s the protégé of sitting president Duhalde and backed by the latter’s political machine. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, was covered with propaganda for dozens of candidates, most money having been spent by former president Menem. As the results came through in the evening it turned out that, surprise surprise, these two “establishment” candidates got almost 50% of the votes between them (third was Lopez Murphy with 17%) and therefore will end up in the second round, a two-way race that takes place in three weeks’ time.

In the evening we had a delicious dinner with Pablo’s parents. Andi wasn’t left out: he got a slice of steak considerably better than we have been served in many a Bilbao restaurant. The porteños are similar to North Americans in many ways, not least the way they pamper their pets: dog psychologists are also popular (although with the current economic crises many luxuries have gone by the board, including the dogs themselves in some cases, which goes some way to explain the population of strays.) Talked till late over a couple of bottles of Mendoza wine.

Monday 28 April

This morning Pablo’s parents and sisters were off to La Plata, just down the coast. We saw them off at 9am (making the third late night / early morning in a row for us). Then we got a bus into town and caught the Subte (underground) out to the north-west of the Capital Federal (the central district of BA, where some 3 million people live; the other 10 million live in the outskirts, in the province of Buenos Aires.) We were headed for the house of Almudena’s cousin Sylvia, who moved to Argentina 8 years ago (the last time they saw each other was in about 1985).

We found the house and were let in by Gabriela, the housekeeper, and met Sylvia’s three charming daughters, Laura and Mariela (3 years old) and Camila (2), who had just been to kindergarten. Got the Subte again into town and met Sylvia for lunch in a “tenedor libre” (all-you-can-eat) restaurant near the bank where she works. After lunch Sylvia kindly helped us sort out reservations to go to the waterfalls of Iguazu in north-east Argentina, which everyone says are unmissable. Unfortunately there were no flights left so we’re looking at another 16-hour bus ride. It’s a big country.

Had dinner with Sylvia and Gerardo, her husband. After a few games of pool (at about 2am) Gerardo proposed we should see some BA nightlife, so we hopped in the car and cruised around some of the city’s nightspots. Most places were closed or closing but we found an Art Deco bar called Barbaro (in the local slang barbaro means something like “excellent”) where there was live music with a small but enthusiastic audience. By 4am we were well in with the locals and Robert was even invited to sing “As Time Goes By”. However he forgot the words and an encore was not requested.  

Tuesday 29 April

Got up at 10am (still short on sleep) and hurried to the bus station. Another long bus trip and we were a bit annoyed especially when they decided to stop in the middle of nowhere for an hour and half for no apparent reason. Other than that we spent the time reading and sleeping.

Wednesday 30 April

Arrived this morning at Puerto Iguazu in the sub-tropical forest of northeastern Argentina. It smelled and felt like being inside the tropical house at Kew Gardens except you can’t go outside to cool off. We checked into our hotel and foolishly decided to go out in the midday sun to get some lunch. Went to the supermarket and then strolled down to the port. Puerto Iguazu is on the Argentinian side of the triple border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay marked by the junction of the Iguazu and Parana rivers. We could see all three countries from the port (looking very similar: rainforest and customs buildings). Had sandwiches and cold beer in the shade until driven away by tiny mosquitoes. There was a lovely old river cruiser moored at the port: now converted into a hotel. Also a few small river taxis busy ferrying onions to Paraguay. Got back to the hotel squashed by the heat and had a siesta.

Thursday 1 May

Had planned to leave early in the morning to the Iguazu National Park, but it was pouring with rain when we woke up, so we didn’t leave until about 9am, when we caught the tour bus. To explain – officially we are supposed to be on a guided package tour of sights in the area of Iguazu. But our idea of hell is being on a guided tour (“To your left you can see the Lake of Everlasting Fire, where the souls of the damned burn in eternal torment... We apologise, the air conditioning is out of order... The next bathroom stop will be never.”) Our tour guide, Rosa, certainly seemed to have missed her vocation as a kindergarten teacher, managing to simultaneously patronise, misinform and annoy. We separated gladly from the group at the park entrance and spent a blissful day in the rain exploring the park.

The Iguazu Falls are wondrous. Little waterfalls tumbling artistically down 80-metre cliffs, medium-sized waterfalls, big waterfalls that make you go “ooh”, huge waterfalls that soak you to the skin if you get too close, and absolutely-ginormous-unbelievably-awesomely-humungous waterfalls that make you go “....” All crashing through stunning subtropical forest replete with multicoloured butterflies, toucans, parrots, monkeys and Tarzan-style lianas. In the spray from the biggest falls, swallows (or their neotropical counterparts) wheeled and dived tirelessly, scooping up insects and for all we know small fish that had gone too close to the edge. Above them soared flocks of jotes, birds that do the same job as vultures – picking up carrion and dropped sandwiches. Walkways go everywhere (and you can see the ruins of the old walkways destroyed by flooding.) The park was a bit pricey to get into, in Argentinian terms (30 pesos, or 8 euros, each) and the optional “ecological” excursions were also overpriced: in most cases these were more of the Disneyland variety, the main attraction being swooping into the spary of the waterfalls aboard a speedboat. A leisurely cruise along the upper river in a rowboat was more our speed, we got a boat to ourselves with a guide, Esteban, who explained the local Indians' medicinal and culinary uses of some of the plants. We saw a toucan and Robert tried to explain the cultural significance of the Guinness ads.  

Friday 2 May

Everyone said the rain would last for days, but no: to our joy, today was real Garden of Eden weather: cool breezes, blue skies, fluffy white clouds. Also red welts on our legs from mosquito bites acquired during breaks in the rain yesterday.

More guided tour annoyance this morning when Rosa decided that instead of going straight to the Brazilian side of the Iguazu waterfalls (as planned) we would first take in the area’s man-made wonder, the Itaipu Dam on the neighbouring Parana river between Brazil and Paraguay (completed in 1984). We got a video first about how absolutely marvellous the dam is in every possible respect, leaving out inconveniences like the CO2 emissions from 11 million cubic metres of concrete, losses of biodiversity, siltation gradually rendering the dam useless, or the project’s cost overruns of 20 billion US$ that have helped bankrupt Brazil. Then we went to see the dam. It’s big.

The rest of the group were going shopping in Foz de Iguazu, the city on the Brazilian side. We decided we’d rather see the park so we got a local bus (they have very interesting public transport in Foz, with metro-style bus terminals where you pay to get into the terminal, thus saving time when you get on the bus. Equally the buses have a compartment at the front where passengers can stand after they get on while waiting to pay for their fare. This didn’t seem to make much difference to our journey but it must speed things up at rush hours.)

The views of the waterfalls were incredible, with the sun and double rainbows. We stopped for lunch at an overview of the waterfalls and were assaulted by a pair of coatis. These cute bandits with stripey tails and prehensile noses don’t think twice about viciously attacking tourists if begging doesn’t work. One with very sharp claws started climbing Robert’s bare leg to get at his chicken sandwich. Almudena stopped laughing long enough to take a picture. The notices saying “do not feed the coatis” didn’t seem to stop some people, however, and we suspected the park doesn’t do anything about the menace because, well, hey, they’re so cute. We managed to escape and later saw a wonderful lizard in the same spot (he wasn’t begging, except perhaps in a Zen way).

After we walked the length of the catwalks along the cliffs and descended into the very maw of the Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), we went back up to the main road and tried to find out what other trails and activities there were in the rest of the park’s 1800 square kilometers. Answer: none. Not a single one. We weren’t even allowed to walk along the main road, but had to take the bus. The only “trail” in the park was one that is part of the “Macuco Safari Experience” (where you pay US$33 for a boat ride and a 15-minute stroll through the forest. No thanks.) Other than this access to the rest of the park is completely prohibited. We were scandalised by this cynical commercialisation of what is, after all, supposed to be the patrimony of humanity.

Speaking of cynical commercialisation, on the way back to our hotel the tour bus made two more shops at "artesanal" gift shops, one on each side of the border. Both were incredibly overpriced - especially the Brazilian one. 100% markups were common. Clearly the tour company gets some kind of a rake-off from the gift shops. Another reason to avoid guided tours.

Saturday 3 May

Back in guided tour land this morning. Rosa told us yesterday to be ready to be picked up from our hotel at 7.30 for the bus back to Buenos Aires, via a couple of other tourist attractions in the Misiones province. We rushed breakfast and then, predictably, ended up waiting for over an hour before the bus eventually showed up.

Our first stop was at Wanda, an semi-open-cast mine where quartz, amethyst and beautiful geodes are dug out of iron-rich sedimentary rock. We paid two pesos for a guided tour which was little more than an hour-long sales pitch composed of 5% science (the hardness scale for precious stones got a mention, as did the miners' techniques of finding geodes by banging on the rock and listening for hollow sounds) and 95% pseudoscience, for which read bullshit (amusingly, the tour guide got half the group "re-energizing" themselves by holding one hand on a crystal and the other up to the sun). He out-talked himself, however, and left us only five minutes in the overpriced gift shop. Ha ha.

Far more interesting was the other stop, the ruined Jesuit mission of San Ignacio Mini, which was "rediscovered" in 1903 after being abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle for almost 100 years. This is the best-preserved of over 60 missions that once ruled, nore by influence than force, half a million square kilometers of (what is now) Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. The number of actual Jesuit monks was very small: at San Ignacio Mini, there were about 5 Jesuits to a mission population of 4500 Guarani Indians at the mission's zenith in the 1730s. The missions were Guarani-speaking and ran to a strict calendar and timetable that covered secular as well as religious matters. The Jesuits survived attacks by the Portuguese slavers of Sao Paolo but were kicked out of America by the Bourbon kings of Spain in 1767, apparently for their success which threatened the secular rulers' exploitation of the Indians. They were replaced by Franciscans and Dominicans who didn't speak Guarani, and the structure collapsed; soon the missions were disbanded and Guarani was replaced by Spanish in most areas, although it is still widely spoken in Paraguay.

The ruins of the mission are amazing: their richly-carved red stones (designed by Italian architects and carved by Guarani workmen, their artistry is a mixture of European and native American) set in what used to be dense jungle, with many trees still left growing amid the walls: orange trees descended from those brought by the Jesuits, stragulating figs (which start as vines and end up choking their host tree) and 15-metre-high cactus. We bought some semi-precious-stone pendants and model animals from the stalls outside the mission, made presumably by the descendents of the stonemasons who executed the angels and ornate capitals of the church and cloister. No tour bus markup here.

We had to listen to the more loud-mouthed members of the tour group braying at each other non-stop on the bus on the way back to Buenos Aires. The parallels with primary school were once again very apt, in fact, you could say that guided tours are for people who have never grown out of short trousers. "He who has the loudest voice, is always right." Remind us never to go on one again.

Sunday 4 May

Arriving in Buenos Aires at dawn we saw the sunrise on the glass skyscrapers and the Tower of the English  (Torre de los Ingleses). Magnificent and peaceful. Felt like we had come to the big city to make our fortune. The Tower of the English is a monument to the English influence on the country which were very important in the 19th century. Facing it across the park is the Malvinas memorial with its eternal flame for the young Argentinians who died in the war.

We got the A line, the oldest line of the BA metro, completed in 1913, out to Sylvia and Gerardo's house again. It was like riding an Edwardian roller-coaster with the wooden carriages leaning and flexing as we raced round the bends. Very exciting. Together with Sylvia, Gerardo and the three little girls, we drove out to the dirstrict of El Tigre on the north side of the city and took a river bus through some of the many channels of the River Parana delta. Leafy, reed-fringed islands with houses in every architectural style, mainly on stilts, most with boat docks but no road access. Idyllic. We had lunch at a restaurant, Paso del Toro, with a white bull outside, and built sand castles on the little beach. The parents and chiildren wore each other out and while they took a siesta Almudena and Robert went for a walk along the path that followed the river's edge through several houses' gardens, passing within feet of where the occupants were eating lunch in some cases. Nobody seemed bothered. Security not much of an issue here, it seems.

In the evening, despite profound yawning from all four of us (the girls were in bed), went to hear tango in a fine Art Deco cafe in the centre of the city. 

Monday 5 May

The end of our mini-epic trip. We decided we need at least another six months to see the places we missed: Salta and the north-west of Argentina, central and norhtern Chile, the Altiplano of Bolivia, Macchu Picchu in Peru, Brazil (itself twice the size of Argentina), the other missions of Paraguay... 

Talking on the plane to a young porteño guitarrist going to seek his fortune in Milan. For him the streets of Europe may seem paved with gold; but for those who've got it, South America seems to offer a very high standard of living compared with Spain: the cost of houses, food, petrol, almost everything is lower, except in the most touristy areas and the far south. But most people haven't got it, of course.

We're flying back to Bilbao, work, rain and jet-lag. If this is spring in Spain, autumn in the Andes looks pretty good to us.

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