Two Beers and a Pretzel

Leaving El Chalten on Monday, I boarded an overcrowded bus and sat next to Enzo – a very personable Italian guy.  The bus was so packed that we became friends with pretty much everyone.  Then a few hours outside of El Chalten, the bus stopped for 2 hours to help fix the A-Team van…

B.A and Murdoch were arguing while Faceman and Hannibal plotted their path along route 40.  And for anyone who’s heard the adventurous tales from legendary Route 40, here’s what is looks like for about 1000 miles…

Yep.  Gravel.  You’d expect to see Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner.  Endless miles of gravel road.  So mundane that during our repair stop with the A-Team, one guy unloaded his pack and just started walking out into the nothingness…

That was about 3 hours into the 14 hour bus trip that day…  I’m guessing he didn’t get his money’s worth on that ticket, but he probably didn’t care…

Around 11PM we pulled into Perito Moreno city and everyone crashed at the same hotel.  I ended up rooming with Enzo because one person renting a room was 120 pesos, while 2 sharing was 50 pesos each.

The next day, another crappy bus ride, but we did see lots of Llama and Emu.

Hard to photograph from a moving bus, but you get the idea…

Enzo was all excited about stopping in El Bolson and having a very likable personality, he talked a mess of us into staying there for a few days.  El Bolson is a former Hippie commune that is hyped as a utopia in most guidebooks.  My impression was that it was a very odd town.  The locals and gringos did not look each other in the eye, much less say ‘Hola’.  Aside from the people you met on the bus, the friendliest people in town will talk to you for 5 minutes, then ask if you want some acid, coke, extacy, or weed.  At least they are friendly drug dealers.  It’s got a hippie reputation, but is much more commercial than you’d expect.

Luckilly, we stayed about 3 km outside of town on an organic farm.

We arrived pretty late, so Enzo, Francesca (Swiss), Adell (Egyptian) and I went to the nearest place we could find for dinner.

Then we ran into Drew (American) and Heather (Aussie) from the farm – on their way to a Reggae bar.  So we tagged along and drank a bit too much.

I woke up around 6 PM on Wednesday.  OK, I woke up at 7 AM with a massive hangover and went back to bed until 6 PM.  Everyone was planning an Asado (communal dinner), so I went to the store to buy my share and ran into almost everyone from the bus.  I also hit an internet cafe and got an e-mail from Erin about Bariloche… We also had a monster jam session on 2 guitars that lasted until 2 AM.

Oddly, that also goes along with another e-mail I got from an old roommate saying “We’re getting the band back together!”

Seeing as how Bolson was so strange to me, I elected to get to Bariloche ASAP, So on Thursday I got to the bus station at 11:30 and got a ticket for the 11:45 bus to Bariloche.  This is a much larger, touristy town, but at least it doesn;t maintain a false pretense of maintaining a hippie utopia.  I like it here.  Tomorrow, the girls and I are probably renting bikes for a 60 km loop thru the lake district.  Enzo, Adell and a bunch of the others will probably show up in the next few days.

I’m also looking into some river rafting and kayaking.

Never take a day bus when you have the option of a night bus.

The bus from Ushuia back to Rio Gallegos left at 5 am.  I barely slept the night before.  Some drunk guy stumbled into the dorm at 1 am, made a huge racket getting into the bunk below my bunk, and somehow kept kicking my bunk.  I’m just glad he didn’t puke, because my shoes were really close to his bed and my bag was leaning against the wall nearby.

So, at 4:30 I packed up and walked down to the bus stop.  Ushuia doesn’t really have a bus station, just a parking lot where the buses all pull in.  We took a cramped bus back to Rio Grande, then a slighly larger bus back to Riio Gallegos – revisiting the Argentina – Chile – Straits of Magellin via ferry – Chile – Argentina border crossings.  This time I noticed an interresting sign on the Southern side of the straights near the ferry dock:

I assume the landmines were there because this is a perfect landing spot to smuggle things into Chile.  I would have rather walked thru that minefield than watched the videos they played on the bus.  “Disaster Movie” made me believe that I should be able to walk into Hollywood and get a movie deal in 5 minutes.  It was the stupidest movie I’ve seen in a decade.  Then we watched music videos from 80′s bands that weren’t quite hits.  It was painful.  I tried to read a book I traded with a Canadian guy in Puerto Madryn – I gave him my copy of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy book for a biography of Horatio Nelson – which fits nicely into the post-US revolutionary books I’ve been dabbling in for the last year or so…  I’m still trying to trade the Harry Potter book for something a little more substantial.

Other than bad movies and border crossings, there’s not much to see on Route 3.  Sheep, Brown land and grey skies.

We made it to Rio Gallegos around 5 PM.  I watched Soccer and traded stories with a Czech couple, an Irish couple, 2 more Irishmen, and 2 Americans.  We had a 3 hour layover until the double decker bus came for he relatively short trip to El Calafate.  This bus had 4 seats per row, and only semi-reclining, so not as luxurious as other buses I’ve taken, but not bad for a 4 hour trip – except for the old guy next to me who smelled like ham.

We pulled into El Calafate around 1:30 AM.  The Irish couple and I ventured off and found a hostel with dorm beds available in decent rooms for 30 Argentine Pesos (about $9) per person. I woke up around 10:30, took a shower, paid for the room, and walked out to the town.  I found a really nice hostel for AR$42 per night with 4 bed dorms, heated floors, in-room bathrooms, and offering tours of the glacier and surrounding areas.  I booked a tour for tomorrow that gives you a private guide around the glacier, 2 hour hike near and on the glacier, lunch, and a boat trip on the lake – right up to the edge of the glacier.  It should be pretty fun.  Then I went out and walked around town for a while – running into pretty much everyone I met on the bus last night.  It’s pretty touristy, like Gatlinburg, but smaller and not as crowded.

…and everyone is really friendly…

Oddly, his mom wasn’t there…

I made it to Ushuia last night.  If you look on a map of South America, go all the way to the bottom – it’s the last real city on the Beagle channel before Antarctica.

Two buses for a total of 36 glorious hours as a passenger.  I booked a bus from Puerto Madryn to Rio Gallegos (about 1/2 way), but could not get a ticket all the way to Ushuia.  The bus from Puerto Madryn was comfy, but someone kept using some nasty hairspray that just hung around and gave me a headache. The bus provided blankets – which I used to filter the air.  When we stopped at Comodoro Rivadavia, I was lucky enough to find one ticket agent with one ticket left from Rio Gallegos to Ushuia.  Whew!  Because they say getting tickets in and out of Ushuia can be difficult, and the only thing to do in Rio Gallegos is to sit and watch the fishing boats unload their catch.

Taking pictures out bus windows produces some really bad images, but I did manage to catch a great picture of the sunrise the other day…

In Rio Gallegos I boarded a different bus and met a few German friends who had stayed in the same hostel in Puerto Madryn.  Down here, you cross paths with a lot of other travellers.  We crossed into Chile with the usual delays at the border, the bus took a ferry across the Straits of Magellan, then we crossed back into Argentina.  A quick stop in Rio Grande, then on to Ushuia.

For anyone thinking about Ushuia, you should try to fly to Rio Grande and take the bus to Ushuia – the scenery is stunning, and would be lost if you fly the whole way.

After the disappointing news about the solar charger, I had to get to the bus station.  I did just gen an e-mail reply from Solio support offering to take it back, or a 40% discount on a new charger.  …Better than nothing, but neither option helps this trip much.  I’ll probably ship the old one back so they can fix it and I’ll have it again someday waaaay in the future.

Back to the travel report…  Buenos Aires has a big bus station, which was nice since it started raining..

Almost all of the buses here a luxury double-deckers.  I got in and thought “holy crap, this is like 1st class on an airplane”.  It was actually slighly smaller than 1st class, but I had booked the “exectivo class” bus.  A normal bus has 4 seats per row, similar to the buses I took around Brazil with Rafa.  Executivo buses have 3 seats per row  and recline a bit farther back.  This bus also gave you pillows, a blanket, and included all meals – so we never had to stop.  There’s actually one higher tier of bus where the seats lay completely flat for just a little more money, but those buses don’t run as frequently.

My bus was a little late to the station, so we departed around 3:30pm.  I kicked back as they put the “Jumper” DVD on.  It was a predictable and pretty stupid movie, but it passes 90 minutes of time.  Then I put on the iPod and started reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  I’d never read a Harry Potter book before.  It’s not bad, but I’ve seen the movie already, and you should always read the book before seeing the movie whenever possible.  I reclined and streached out, enjoying the legroom.

There was a really cool sunset that was impossible to photograph from the rain-stained window of a moving bus.  Dramatic clouds in front of us with the sun popping out from gaps oin the clouds to seemingly light everything on fire, drizzle over us, and dark clouds behind with a huge double rainbow.  The bus was travelling on a slowly winding road, so my view would alternate between a fiery sunset, gray and brown landscape, and a fading rainbow against charcoal gray clouds.  Very cool.

I fell asleep around 2:30 am and was startled awake at 8:30 by the steward (young guy with a multi-colored mullet) poking at me and placing a breakfast tray in my face.  I guess they don’t train them as well as the airlines do – or he gets paid per tray that he hands out…

I looked out the window to see a barren plain.  Then we crested a low hill and there was the Atlantic Ocean.

About 15 minutes later we arrived in Puerto Madryn, where I caught a cab to my hostel.  It’s about 11:30 here now and rougly 45-50 degrees farenheight.  It’s actually a nice change of weather.

I have tours booked for tomorrow, but nothing today.  The hostel owner offered to rent me a pretty nice mountain bike and point me toward the Elephant Seal preserve 17 kilometers South of here.  Sounds like a plan…