Uruguay and I´m a Girl

Hee hee. I thought that our entries have been so serious as of late, hence my jokey title. And in a similar vein, here is a conversation Kevin and I just had this afternoon.

Kevin: So what are you going to do during the last 40 days before your 30th birthday.

Karen: Watch E! (the Entertainment News channel) and sleep a lot.

Kevin: And how is that different to your usual activities?

Ah...don´t you just love the travelling life? This leads me to the kind of accomodation we´ve had in South America. In general, we´ve been really impressed with that we can get for about $40 a night. In most places, this has allowed us to get cable TV (hence my E! overload) and usually even aircon. In some places, we´ve gotten the same thing for about $35 but we haven´t had to pay more than $50 a night in total so we´ve been able to avoid hostelling.

As for where we are, well, we´re in Uruguay of course. After Antarctica we made our way up Patagonia, viewing the Andes from different perspectives. On gloriously sunny days, the Andes are absolutely amazing but we´ve also had a lot of rain (like today where it was torrential) and can´t see a thing! We´ve spent more of our time on the Argentinian side and can recommend El Calafate and Bariloche to all those trekkers out there. We ended up in Mendoza, Argentina´s wine district where we did a bikes and wine tour. Yes, I did manage to drink my fair share and stay on my bike! We also discovered a fantastic restaurant there called Valle del Tulum where the owner (and chef) won an award for the best empanadas in the country. Man, those were good empanadas. Then we took a bus ride across the border into Santiago, passing Aconcagua along the way. Santiago was great...more about that later with some pictures (we met a Chilean friend there who showed us such a great time). Thanks Lola!

And now we are in Colonia, Uruguay, a cute little town 1 hr on a ferry across from Buenos Aires. We are spending a week in Buenos Aires over Easter weekend, but we thought it would be such a shame to miss the Montevidean cafe culture...so that´s where we head tomorrow. I also heard there is a Sunday market there that rivals Portobello Market in London, so I´m pretty excited about that.

More border crossings

Since our last posts from Bariloche we have been traveling a lot. From Bariloche we took a 17 hour overnight bus ride to Mendoza, the heart of the Argentinean wine region. In Mendoza we rented bikes for the day and visited a few of the wineries, indulging in some tastings. At the local restaurants you can get an excellent bottle of red wine for 3 or 4 dollars. Very nice.

From Mendoza we took a 6 hour minibus ride through the Andes and over the border to Santiago, Chile. The drive through the Andes was amazing and included seeing Mount Aconcagua, which is a trivia buff´s dream. Why? Because it´s the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere, the highest in the western hemisphere and the highest outside the Himalayan mountain range. The border crossing was the usual waste of time and they didn´t even find 2 carrots this time on the bus. Two hours wasted just getting a few more stamps and them opening up my suitcase and backpack.

Santiago is a very modern city but is very crowded as 40% (6 million people) of Chile´s population lives here. The big story here is the transportation system which went through a re-organization over a month ago and is still causing chaos. The national government is in charge of the transportation and is getting into big trouble. The president (a woman, by the way) had to fire four of her ministers over the fiasco. It is even making the international headlines on CNN and BBC.

In Santiago we have met up with a friend from London, Lorena. She has been an excellent host and has shown us around the city. We even went to her family´s weekly barbecue out in the suburbs for some excellent food. It´s always great to have a local to show you around.

We spent the past two days in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar on the coast. Valpo is a lovely city built up on the hills along the ocean. The houses are painted vivid colors as well to liven things up.

On Thursday we´ll be heading back over to the east coast to Buenos Aires as we didn´t have time to see that area properly in our rush to get from Carnaval in Rio down to Antarctica.

One final thing about Chile is the national motto which features on their national seal as well as on the sides of their coins. The motto is "Por la razón o la fuerza" which translates as either "By right or might" or "By reason or by force". Now if that doesn´t sound like a motto that good ol´ Dubya would love to adopt for the US of A I don´t know what does.



If you´re wondering what the two animals on the seal are, they are the huemul, which is a very rare Chilean deer, and a condor, an impressive bird found in the Andes.

Speaking of Dubya and his "right or might" policies, do you think it´s just a massive coincidence that the flag of Chile



and the flag of Texas



bear more than a passing resemblance to each other? Let the conspiracy theories begin to flow...

Antarctica part 2

I´ve been trying to get around to adding some more pics of Antarctica but I´ve been having my usual bad luck with bad internet connections, outdated software, etc. I would like to add more pics to the blog but it´s a bit slow. I have two albums of pics on Kodak Gallery to share if you want to see more.

Hopefully these two links work. Let me know if they don´t.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingReg.jsp?Uc=bayzrz26.3qoqyi5y&Uy=-m80sxj&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&UV=906320491955_497741131110

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=bayzrz26.5ze5h0wm&Uy=-yrd0cw&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0

I want to show a few of my very favorite pics here, though.

Two landscape pictures I love.





A third landscape that also shows the penguins frolicking on the slope.



Here´s a picture of elephant seals. These aren´t even adults yet so they haven´t reached their full ugliness. We came across about a dozen lying on the beach. They have got to be one of the smelliest animals, as all they do is burp and fart and pee all over each other. Lying together, though, has its advantages as the rubbing of bodies helps them to shed their skins (you can see some of their skin coming off in the picture).



Here´s a good pic of a penguin reflected in the water.



Although I really like this picture, I´m also a bit annoyed by it too. Why? Because while I was taking pictures like this, a leopard seal was attacking a penguin and eating it for lunch 100 meters offshore. Our boat happened to be the first to land on this island and we were onshore while all the other landing boats were still in the water watching the 10-15 minute attack. Some people got some excellent pics, including one brilliant one with the penguin´s head coming off as the seal whips it about. Hopefully that one will be on our wrap up DVD that we get in about 3 months from the expedition company.

And this has to be my absolute favorite penguin pic of the ones I took.



On board the ship we had a photo competition and this was one of the finalists (although I didn´t win).

I´m also very keen to upload some of the videos that I took of penguins, but uploading videos is a very slow process and it very rarely works. I have managed, though, to upload two penguin vids. Some day I´ll hopefully manage to upload my favorite videos of penguins chasing after each other (the penguins are absolutely hilarious to watch, especially when they fall over). Until then, here are the two vids I have managed to upload. The quality is not the absolute best, but it´s not too bad.

The first video I took while lying on the ground and the curious penguins approached me. This video doesn´t have much action, but it´s a video of a penguin that was standing less than half a meter away from me. You can watch his head movements as he checks me out and also looks around for some backup from other penguins. If you have audio, you should also be able to hear the sounds of other penguins in the background (unseen).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8553585125078065459

The second video shows how penguins feed. We went very late in the Antarctic season so the chicks were all grown up so for the most part it was difficult to tell the chicks and the adults apart. However, if you go earlier in the season, you will see the parent penguins feeding their chicks. How do they do that? By regurgitating food (mostly krill) that they went out to sea to get. In this video, I don´t think any food is actually being passed but it shows the technique they use. At this point in the season, the parents have no food to give the somewhat grown up chicks and get annoyed when the chicks keep bothering them (hence the chase scenes I´m trying to show you as the parents run away from the chicks).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-998398083871940358

El Calafate

I think this is small world part 4 or 5. We were just in El Calafate in Argentina. We were at the Aerolineas Argentinas office which had all of 6 people in there. And then sure enough, sitting next to us we heard a familiar French accent, belonging to this man, Patrice.



Patrice was the lone French person on our trip to Antarctica (he was very sad to be the lone French person). We knew he was travelling in Patagonia after Antarctica but we weren´t sure how we were going to meet up or where, as neither he nor we knew our schedules. Not to worry, though, as it´s a small world so we were bound to run into each other. Patrice was kind enough to take us to dinner after meeting up.

So, if you´re looking to buy a holiday home in the French Pyrenees, Patrice is the man you want to talk to, as he engineers and builds them. Here´s the link to his website. Wouldn´t you like to buy a holiday home from a man with such joie de vivre? I´m not sure what the French call "joie de vivre". ;)



On a completely unrelated note - in Calafate we saw one of the funniest window displays we´ve ever seen. There was a sporting goods store with a window display for Swiss Army knives. The knife on display had moving parts and everything, a nice display. What made it funny, though, was the naked male mannequin situated perfectly behind the Swiss Army knife. Here´s a pic of it. Now just imagine the knife swinging up and down. Oh, and the scissors opened and closed. Lovely image.



And while I´m sharing funny pics, I might as well share this pic of a place we saw in Buenos Aires. If you´re in BA and looking for hot drinks, ladies and affairs, here´s the place for you.

Patagonian rainbows

Karen had an earlier post titled "Patagonian blues" but I´ll title this one "Patagonian rainbows". In Patagonia, our weather has been a bit hit and miss. In Chile, we hiked 4 hours uphill to get a view of Torres del Paine only to get a nice view of fog. In Argentina, I hiked almost 2 hours uphill to get a view of Mt Fitzroy (or El Chalten) only to get a nice view of ... fog. These mountains are the tallest things around, so the clouds coming from the Pacific just sit on top of them, even if the surrounding lowlands are bathed in sunshine. This rain/sun duality is a common feature of the Patagonian weather.

One of the main advantages of this weather, though, is the sheer abundance of rainbows that one sees. You are almost guaranteed to see at least one a day, often several different ones. And these aren´t the fleeting types you see when the sun comes out after a rainstorm. These things last for 30-60 minutes or more. And once one disappears, you can usually find another. Plus you usually get to see the full arc of the rainbow with such wide vistas. You can see where the rainbow ends (although I didn´t find any pots of gold or leprechauns, even though I was hiking on St Patrick´s Day).

Some pictures of rainbows. If you want to read about how rainbows form etc. then read this explanation.





Frankly, these pictures still don´t do justice to the intensity of the rainbows I saw. In this next picture, you might just be able to make out the second inverted rainbow (VIBGYOR rather than ROYGBIV) to the left of the main rainbow. It doesn´t come out so well in the picture but seeing a second inverted rainbow is an extremely rare occurrence.







Now you might be tired of rainbows by now, but let me share just one more thing. On the way back from our hike, the sun started to clear away a lot more of the clouds but there were still some left. I looked back at one of the clouds and saw this:





It might not look like much, but if you look back you´ll see that the bottom of the cloud is lined by a ... rainbow. Although it´s not called a rainbow since it´s not formed by rain and is not bow shaped. Instead it´s called a circumhorizontal arc and according to the article linked, "it is often thought of as the RAREST NATURAL OCCURRENCE in the world". I didn´t know that at the time but I was still pretty psyched to see it. I pointed it out to a few others but I think they were rainbowed out by then. If only I knew how rare this was, I would have insisted more. So, I still don´t know if every cloud has a silver lining, but I do know that seeing a cloud lined by a spectrum is a pretty awesome sight. My picture of the phenomenon is only so-so. The link above has some tremendous pictures of this thing. I still have never seen either the aurora borealis or australis so I´m still looking forward to seeing that one day.

I got these pictures during a 12 hour hike in El Chalten (one of the windiest towns you´ll ever find). Karen decided to take it easy and chill out in town (she even found a good masseuse in a town of 500 or so people!). The hike was from 7 am to 7 pm. It consisted of about 4 hours hard hike uphill to get to a glacier to climb on. I highly recommend doing at least one glacier hike in your life. The colors are amazing and the water pools on the ice are awesome to see. The water tastes great, right from the source - 10,000 year old water is very refreshing.

To get to the glacier we had to do a small zipline over the glacial meltwater river. It was extremely windy on the way back. (That´s not me in the pic)



Once on the glacier, we had great scenery, even though it was thick clouds on one side (where the mountains were) and brilliant sunshine towards the lowlands.







One of the activities we tried on the glacier was an ice climb up a 10 meter or so ice wall. The angle was about 80-85 degrees or so at the bottom. The first two guys in my group to go did it quite well and I thought that it looked like fun and overall not too difficult. This is how it looks when done correctly.





But then after the first two guys did it, the two girls in our group tried and were unsuccessful. And then 2 other guys did it and failed as well. And then I was last to go. And, well, let´s just say that I was terrible and made it absolutely NOWHERE up the wall. It´s much more difficult than it looked. I knew getting the crampons on my feet stuck in properly was going to be a problem after watching the others, but I thought at least the ice picks in my hands would hold me for a bit. But I didn´t even get the hang of that. It was disappointing not to make any progress but I´m glad I tried it.







We are now heading north through Argentina. We´re currently in Bariloche which is a very nice town. Has a very Alpine feel to it. Today is a beautiful day with pleasant temps and nice sunshine. And here is a picture of a beautiful and pleasant Karen enjoying the nice day down by the lake in Bariloche.

Polar Plunge and Other Cool Things

So...we skydived in Australia, bungeed and sky swung in New Zealand so why not take the polar plunge in Antarctica??? We were actually filmed jumping in but by other people on our boat so we hope they get back to us with the videos but here are some pix in the meantime. Only 4 men out of our boat of 72passengers jumped...and one of the men was our chef! As it was a particularly chilly day, no one was really inclined to make the polar plunge. But that didn´t deter Kevin!





As I went down to the gangway to congratulate Kevin (I was up on top deck trying to photograph him), I was cheered by the crowd to jump in. I declined but when someone said ¨But no woman has done it¨, I just had to go! So off I went to change and a minute later I leapt off the gangway and into the icy waters! Brrrrrr! But really not as bad as I expected.





And Antarctica has loads of other adventure activities as well. Since most our landings consisted of hill climbs, we took shortcuts down by creating our own icy slides.



You can never really tire of penguins. I don´t know how many times Kevin and I said to each other ¨This is better than TV¨! They certainly are funny little creatures and watching the playful little chicks play with each other and their mothers was like watchest the cutest, funniest carton ever! Kevin was particularly keen on getting up close and personal with these little guys..even to the point that on most of our 10 landings on Antarctica, he could be found in this ¨Cleopatra¨pose waiting for the penguins to come to him.



On one of his slides, Kevin tore his waterproof pants! So here he is reclining with his ductaped pants!


This was such a funny shot. The three penguins behind Kevin were chasing each other all over the place and were just skidding behind Kevin when I took this shot of him. Eventually they all fell into a puddle and lost their momentum






And here we are, our last glimpse of Antarctica, and just before we faced the dreaded Drake Passage...otherwise called the Drake Wake!



I´ve loaded some more pictures on to this Kodak site since I can´t get them all on the blog. These are more landscape scenes...and of course, more penguins!

View my Antarctica photo album on Kodak Gallery

Patagonia Blues

After experiencing the vast wonders of Antarctica, we are now facing the Patagonia Blues. We left the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia in Argentina at 5 am and arrived into Puerto Natales at 11 pm the same day. We had a 16 hour long bus ride which was made even worse by the 3 hour immigration we had to deal on the Argentine/Chilean border! It was bureaucracy gone mad! Just to get a little stamp in our passport, we had to wait over 2 hrs on the Chilean side to see an immigration official. This was after being told to wait on the bus for the customs check. Three guards enter our bus, search through everyone´s belongings, and leave with 2 offending sticks of carrots! It would have been very funny except we were just very exhausted and knew we still had more than 8 hrs of our bus ride to go. In fact, this land border crossing made the Nepal/India crossing look high tech! We´re just recovering here in Puerto Natales for the day before we move on to Torres del Paine national park. We have loads more of Antarctica photos to upload but Banda Acha (Broadband) has not yet arrived into this little town. Oh, and for anyone who thinks the bus ride would be full of interesting things to see...Patagonia is bleak and flat...it´s the peaks and lakes of the Andes that provide the beauty here but the roads (of course) don´t really go through the Andes.

Antarctica

We have just returned from Antarctica and it was amazing. If you go, we highly recommend the company we went with, Quark Expeditions. We also recommend taking the boat we took, the Sarpik Ittuk. The boat was fairly modern and better than the converted Russian ships, which make up most of the Antartic boats. The food on board was excellent and it seems like we never stopped eating. Plus there were only 72 passengers on board. Having less than 100 passengers is important as that allows more shore landings and more time on shore. There are some ships that go to Antarctica carrying 300 or more passengers. That is simply impractical.

Coincidentally, thanks to a trip home to Boston at the end of March 2006 and a trip to Morocco in April 2006, we have now managed to hit all 7 continents in the past 12 months. Three of the continents were new for me (Australia, South America, Antarctica) on this trip (Karen had been to Australia previously).

Needless to say, we took tons of pics in Antarctica. We won´t even attempt to show them all. But we´ll show a few here to give you a taste and then load some more up on Kodak. Enjoy!

At the pier in Ushuaia, Argentina, there was some tight security. I was worried they wouldn´t let us board but they deemed my luggage to only contain ¨stuff radiation¨ rather than ¨sttuf¨. Lucky me.



Over 90% of the visitors to Antarctica leave from Ushuaia. There are a few trips leaving from Tasmania or New Zealand and even a few from South Africa. The main advantage of sailing from Ushuaia is that you usually have less than 48 hours on the dreaded Drake Passage to cross the Southern Ocean. From the other places, you´re on there for 5 days or more. The Drake is the longest 2 days of your life - and you have to do it twice, down and back. It´s like you´re riding every ride at Disney World non-stop for 2 days - and you can´t get off. Sleeping is tricky indeed in that you are being crunched into the fetal position and then stretched out like on a rack, all night. Fun times. But once you get to the Peninsula, it´s all worth it.

And who said Antarctica was too cold to grow anything? Some lichen on a rock:



Amazing icy landscapes:





(and you people in Boston thought you had a lot of snow to shovel!)

Here´s a landscape picture with our boat, the Sarpik Ittuk, in the middle and a Zodiac landing craft in front of the boat. The Zodiacs are inflatable motorized rafts carrying up to 15 people that we used to go ashore.



Beautiful wildlife:





Oh, yeah, you can say we saw a ¨few¨ penguins on the trip - like a few hundred to a few thousand everywhere we went. We saw two main types, chinstraps and gentoos. The chinstraps literally have a small black strap around the chin of their white faces. The gentoos have a white area around both eyes and over the top of their head. Finally we saw adelies, but most had already left the area. The adelies have all black heads with blue around their eyes. We did not see any king or emperor penguins, which are the bigger ones and the ¨stars¨ of ¨March of the Penguins¨. They are located elsewhere in Antarctica.







And when you come to Antarctica you´ll see a type of penguin that you´ve never seen at the zoo before - dead penguins! I won´t gross you out with all the pictures of dead penguins I took, but I will share this one of a skua eating the entrails of one.



One of the stops we made was to a small station run by the British. It is now a museum. After six years in the UK, I don´t remember ever seeing a British flag surrounded by penguins before.



At the base, Karen even managed to find the kitchen. I think she´s desperate for a home cooked meal.



And, ahem, it will come as no surprise to most that Karen managed to find one of the few stores to go shopping! A trip to the icy continent won´t deter a dedicated shopper like Karen. Actually, the base/museum was closing down for the season so Karen even managed to bargain them down - almost 40% of the sticker price. Way to go, K! Here´s Karen modeling the latest in Antartic fashion - a fleece from Port Lockroy.



The Kodak upload is going a bit too slowly right now, so I´ll add the link to that later.