Picking up where I left off from my last entry, we took a bus from Puerto Iguazú to Concordia, the border of Argentina and Uruguay. The bus company said we'd be dropped off at the access road to the town with a gas station and taxi stand, but the reality was that we were dropped off in the middle of nowhere. We had to walk for close to an hour with all of our luggage until we found a city bus stop to ride into town. Luckily there was a break in the rain while we were walking. This picture of Mark was taken at around 6:30am before we started walking.
After a quick brunch in Concordia, we took a bus to Salto, Uruguay where we spent a night and then stayed at the Daymán hot springs outside of town. We treated ourselves to a nice hotel room down the street from the "termas" and visited it each day. The pools were hot, especially after I got sunburned the first day, but it was nice to take in some sun and soak in the warm, clear water.
Mark and I noticed immediately upon arrival in Uruguay the ubiquity of the yierba mate drinking. Everyone carries around their gourd, specialized filtering straw and thermos of hot water, which could be refilled in most public places for free. Mark got used to drinking it hot, but I preferred to drink my mate with cool water, especially since the weather was pleasantly warm.
We wanted to go to the beach, and had heard about an alternative to the expensive, touristy Punta del Este. Punta del Diablo, situated on the northeast coast of Uruguay near the Brazilian border, was said to be a calm little fishing village with very few foreigners (besides the Argentinians). So we took a bus from Salto to Montevideo, stayed in a pretty crappy room at the "Hotel Ideal" and got out of there as soon as we woke up the next morning. The bus ride to Punta del Diablo went along the coast of Uruguay on paved roads so it was pretty easy compared to some of our other bus experiences. When we arrived, we searched out the hostel there, named El Diablo Tranquilo, which is certainly was not. They only had two twin beds available in a 10-person dorm room with shared bathrooms and was loud and English-speaking. We were looking for a place with a little more privacy, so we left our big bags and went to see what else was available in town. Only a few blocks away we ran into a place advertising Cabanas for rent and inquired about it. The man told us he was doing maintenance on his, but that a friend down the road had vacancies. He took us down to meet Fernando and we booked a two story cottage for less than the cost of the hostel's two twin beds.
I snapped this photo on the bus ride from Punta del Diablo back to Montevideo. Our last stop would be in Colonia del Sacramento before we took the ferry back to Buenos Aires.
Another ridiculous sunset, this one in particular from the roof of a restaurant in Colonia del Sacramento.
We had to get up super early to catch the ferry to Buenos Aires. It was a huge ship with breakfast service and televisions installed. The trip took around 2 hours and we arrived in Buenos Aires just after dawn.
The hostel scene got old pretty quick since we ended up having the same conversation over and over again with different people. I got tired of overhearing people say, "So, where have you been traveling? Well, I`ve been here and there and I just HATED Bolivia... ugh, what an ugly place. I was there for like 4 days and I just couldn't STAND it!" All I could think was that if they´d given it more than 4 days they might have come to at least respect Bolivia, if not love it. Most of the people staying there were happy with hanging out in the hostel bar for most of the day or going on trips organized through the hostel. Such as "Museum Tour and Happy Hour, every Wednesday from 4pm pm to 2am. I guess it`s set up for college aged singles, so I didn`t take it too personally that we didn`t fit in.We had dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Barrio Chino, just a short train ride from the city center. Here's some graffiti I'd seen from the train and persuaded Mark to let me sneak onto the tracks to snap a shot.
One of our last days in Buenos Aires, we realized that we hadn`t done many touristy things, so we set out to visit the Recoleta cemetery, partially known for the fact that it is where the Peròn family vault is maintained, including the grave of Argentina´s beloved Evita. The scale of this place was incredible. A spooky place where the family vaults were kept within a wide range of maintenance and care. While we were wandering around and visiting the resident cats who seemed to be holding vigil over their previous masters' tombs, we met an Argentinian who spoke impeccable English. Charles the crypt-keeper,I thought of him as. He explained how he was there that day to make sure he still had a valid key for the vault because a distant cousin had recently passed away and had wished to be included in the family`s plot. Most of the vaults had newer coffins on display at the ground level and then had a narrow set of stairs descending into the darkness where decaying boxes and dusty urns were stored. Charles was a little annoyed that the cousin wished to be stored there since she was a protestant and the vault was supposed to only be for the Catholic members of the family. We followed him as he wandered around trying to find the vault and eventually he came to it. Mark and I both had thought that maybe he'd let us in to see it, but he just checked the lock and closed it up again. The doorjam seemed to be broken but none of us could fix it so I`m not sure he really locked it up securely
This was an eerie sculpture we passed on the corner of one of the many aisles leading to more vaults.
This is the Argentinian equivalent of the white house. The place where Eva Peròn made some famous speeches to the crowds below. It is called the Casa Rosada (pink house) but I thought it came across more like rust or mauve.
When we finally determined that it would be too complicated and expensive to have our passports DHL-ed from Lima to Buenos Aires, we requested that the Embassy in Lima send our passports via diplomatic pouch to the Embassy in Buenos Aires. We were told that it usually takes 3 weeks to arrive. We still had 5 weeks in Argentina until we needed to head up to Costa Rica to meet up with my parents, so we planned to travel in Southern Argentina until the passports arrived. That afternoon we booked flights to the southernmost city in Argentina and in the world, Ushuaia.
We happened upon this sticker affixed to a post while we were walking around town. "If he comes, I strike"
In Ushuaia we began what would become the ¨great camping adventure¨ segment of our trip. We camped for two weeks at the base of a ski run. Strangely enough, the animals to a liking to us right away. There was a dog who looked spookily similar to a young Luna named Suya (more like soozcha with the Argentinian "y"), a calico cat whose name we never learned, and an old white wolf named Sally. Sally and the cat sleep together at night in this sweet house.
Here are Mark and Suya in our campsite. We tried really hard not to feed her or get her used to hanging out with us, but she liked us anyways.
On Christmas Eve, we were invited to join other campers for an Argentinian style barbecue. They basically cut down a tree and burned it until it became coals, then lined up a couple grills that could have been double mattress sized box springs. Then they cut up a bunch of chicken and lamb and grilled it. It was also pot luck style so we ate piroshki, teriyaki chicken, and toasted bread with butter. I brought out my guitar and played and passed it around. A French dude made up an international song about Ushuaia that got stuck in all of our heads for days afterwards. The lyrics go:
Ush-u-ai-a
¿Donde está?
Ush-u-ai-a
tu est tan bas (combined french/spanish for 'you are very low/south')
Followed by way too much wine and vodka tang. Ouch. Mark and I vowed to never spend another Christmas Eve drinking that much because it lead to us sleeping through most of Christmas Day. Still, it had been fun to be a part of the group that night.
Here`s how sheep meat is displayed at the supermarket. Ugh. I guess I`ll never get used to this.
Initially we came to Ushuaia to investigate the possibility of going to Antarctica. But it didn`t take much investigation to discover that it was way beyond our budget for now. Instead, we will save $50 each month until our children graduate from college and then we`ll treat ourselves to an Antarctic cruise expedition. Once we knew Antarctica was out of the question I started feeling like the end of our travels got much closer. Ridiculous, considering that we still had months left at that point. The weather was pretty nasty in Ushuaia, cold and either raining or snowing most of the time. We had a couple days of sun and I took the opportunity to make a campfire in our site, which made it a lot more cozy. I had done some incorrect math and purchased a zero-degree sleeping bag in Buenos Aires. Didn't make the connection that the bag was so compressible and that zero degrees celsius is 32 degrees Fahrenheit. So I ended up having to wear most of my fleece clothing inside my bag and any time Mark was out of the tent I`d get inside both of our bags. Meanwhile, Mark was sweating away in just his boxers (mind you, he's a warm sleeper just about anywhere and he`s got the right type of zero degree bag).
With the hiking areas we wanted to visit being shrouded in clouds every day, we waited for a break in the weather to do some backcountry camping. Since we were so far south and it was summer, the sun came up around 4:30am and didn´t set until around 10:30pm. Even then it never seemed fully nighttime because the sun was hovering just below the horizon. With all that daylight, it still didn't ever work out to go camping because of the rain and snow. We did take a day hike to the Martial Glacier, which loomed up behind our campsite at the ski lodge. During that hike we had to take a bunch of imaginary pictures because we had the camera with us but had left the battery in the charger plugged in at the lodge. I think we were a little over-prepared for the hike, since most people making the ascent were doing so on the ski lift. Many women were dressed up in skirts and leggings tucked into inappropriate stiletto boots, and there were kids in shorts and jeans. It was cold and I wore my rain gear and snowboarding gloves and was cold when we stopped. On our way up, a mother with three grown boys asked if she could borrow Mark`s trekking poles so that she could look hard core in a picture they took together. We were way out of their league, not to be too snobby. We hiked up and wandered around in the snow and headed down once we started getting cold again. On the way back down, we had an amazing view of the entire town of Ushuaia surrounded by the Beagle Channel, named after Darwin´s ship.
After 14 nights in our tent, we finally decided we'd had enough of Ushuaia's weather. We headed out, following the advice of a Kiwi (New Zealander) couple that hitchhiking was legal, safe, quick, and cheap. So we took a taxi to the edge of town where the one road heads north and within about 5 minutes I had thumbbed our first ride. Don't I make this look good?
The term for hitchhiking in Spanish is to "hacer dedo" or make finger. We got a ride from Ushuaia to Rio Grande with a couple of airline employees in a warm, clean sedan. As the older man in the passenger seat micromanaged the young driver's technique, he asked us questions and told us that the airport in Ushuaia was closed due to a radar problem. All air traffic was being diverted to Rio Grande and the passengers were put on buses for the remainder of their trip south. These guys were headed to pick up a co-worker in Rio Grande so that she wouldn't have to take the bus. We stopped at a gas station for snacks and the man bought us a Pepsi to share and each our own Alfajor. This is a treat we've only seen in Argentina. Essentially it's a giant fancy sandwich cookie. There are many different brands and flavors and after being introduced to them I thoroughly enjoyed sampling the entire range.
Above are the two Marcoses the next day, crossing back into Argentina from Chile.We entertained the idea of hitchhiking from Rio Gallegos to El Calafate, but decided that enough was enough. We took the bus for 45 pesos each, roughly 15 dollars. Money well spent.
We were pretty worn out when we reached El Calafate and were hit with a little bit of culture shock. Although we were able to find a decent place to camp by a little creek, we were shocked at how touristy this area was. We spent most of our time in the campsite- cooking, doing laundry, and reading- and otherwise only went in to the main part of town if we really had to. The storefronts on the main tourist street were all embellished to be made to look like they were log cabins, which created a surreal disneyland feel. We found a couple places to eat that were cost effective, but everything else was so overpriced compared to what we were used to. Here´s a little treat we found on the main street:
Note that we were 12,182 kilometers from San Francisco at this point.
The main reason why people come to El Calafate is because it´s a jumping off point to visit the Glacier Perito Moreno. It's named after the man who basically started the national park movement in Patagonia. The views of the glacier made it all worthwhile to deal with the somewhat corrupted little tourist town. Of course, it cost a lot to take the 1-hour bus ride out to the glacier, but here´s what we got to see:
We paid a little extra to take a short boat tour that got us right up next to the glacier- not so close that you could touch it or have it calve onto our boat, but close enough to hear the crackling sounds. After that, the bus took us to the visitor´s center, from where we walked down on a series of metal catwalks to get close to another part of the glacier. It was mesmorizing to just stand there, listen, and watch for pieces of ice to fall into the lake. Even though this glacier was ¨calving¨ or falling apart, it is one of the few glaciers in the world that is actually growing over time.
After visiting the glacier perito moreno, we made dinner at camp and went to bed early so that we could catch an early bus to El Chalten. We arrived in El Chalten later in the morning and spent the early afternoon getting ready for our first trek into the Fitz Roy wilderness. The weather was clear and warm, which is rare according to the park rangers. Now I've known for a while that my sense of humor is not for everyone, but it has become even more clear that my sense of humor does not translate into Spanish. No hay sarcasm aqui. When we were cooking lunch and repacking for our trip at the free campsite in El Chalten, a burly ranger came through to make sure everyone was registered. We told him that we weren't planning to camp there, that we'd be heading out shortly. He said ok and was on his way to check other campers when I thoughtlessly made as though I was talking in his voice and said "so get out of here" in Spanish. I'd meant to imply that that's what he was thinking about us, that we needed to get moving if we weren't going to camp there. But he thought that I was literally telling him to leave (not a big stretch, is it?). He turned rather violently to face me a practically roared "¡¿Que?!" and I had to meagerly explain that I was just trying to make a joke. He frowned and looked at me sideways as he went on his way. I don't think I've ever been more scared of someone in my life. I'm not sure that I totally learned my lesson about keeping a lid on trying to be funny, but it certainly brought it to my attention.
So after planning our meals, lightening our backpacks by setting aside things to be left at the luggage storage of a hostal, and walking about 5 miles around town to get that all done, we headed out for Laguna Capri, our first campsite. Along the way, there were signs to help teach people about the Leave No Trace approach with which they're trying to run the park. Pack it out!
Mark meditated by the lake while I tried to capture the view with my pencils and paper, then we headed out for our next campsite at Poincerot. On the way there, Mark snapped this shot of me which still looks unreal to me even though I was there... no photoshopping, I swear!
The next day, we took a day hike out to the Glacier Piedras Blancas, where it was warm enough to work on our tans, even though the water was freezing.
I was a little obsessed about the various icebergs floating on the lake and was even able to wrangle on of them for a short ride. It certainly helped that the lake wasn't very deep- the iceberg bottomed out when I finally got the courage to stand on it.
We saw many "lady’s slippers" along the path during these days and I now know that these flowers are not orchids and that they also grow in England. I thought that they were pretty tough to be living in such a rugged place.
We hiked back to Laguna Capri for our 3rd night and I was able to do a little more drawing the next morning before we headed back to El Chalten. 
We were both looking forward to showering and we needed to buy more food for our next trek in a different part of the park. One of the reasons we had been doing so much camping is that it was a good way to save money. We were having fun giving ourselves "credit" for each night in a tent... the amount of money we saved by not paying for a room. We found other ways to save money, too. For example, we realized that we could shower for free at the hostel where we were storing our extra luggage instead of paying $5 at another place. During our night in El Chalten, we stayed at the free campsite and were able to see a local fox the next morning before we set out. The weather was starting to turn, the clouds rolling in to obscure Mt. Fitzroy, but we were on a schedule. We also hoped that the weather would return to it's more pleasant state shortly after a small storm.On our last afternoon of this trek, we hiked up to the Mirador de Laguna Torre. I took off my sweaty rain pants to dry them and ended up using them to summon a clear view of the three towers (torres).
On our way back to camp I got a little over-zealous about drinking water directly from a small pond. We had been drinking water directly from the lakes and rivers for a week already so I didn´t think I was taking much of a risk. Little did I know I was setting myself up for one of the most horrible intestinal experiences I´ve ever had. We hiked out of the park and planned to leave the next morning for the east coast of Argentina. On our last morning in Patagonia, we woke around 4:30, packed up our tent and waited by the side of the road for our minibus shuttle. As we waited, we got colder and colder and all of a sudden a weird shift occurred in my insides and I had to rush to the campsite´s only latrine, a hole in the ground sheltered by the plastic walls of a port-a-potty. After an hour or so still waiting for the shuttle, Mark walked in to town to inquire about it. When he returned, I already had to hit the latrine again. It turned out that the guy who had sold us our tickets was misinformed about the shuttle´s actual schedule and that we´d have to wait a day to get to Piedra Buena. We were annoyed at first, but as the frequency of my latrine visits increased, so did my gratitude for the delay. I don´t want to get into the graffic details about the rest of my day in the latrine, but I will say that I´ve never dealt with incontinence before and I don´t plan to drink pond water ever again. Mark took me to the local clinic that afternoon and a nurse gave me two giant charcoal pills to ¨dry me out.¨ He also cooked me some plain noodles as per the nurse´s ordThe next day, we awoke at 4:30 again (with my self-confidence restored but my body weakened), packed up camp again, and were successfully shuttled to the east coast.
Once in Piedra Buena, we had to kill some time until our 34-hour bus ride up the Atlantic Coast to get to Buenos Aires. We hoped to pick up our renewed passports that had been forwarded from Lima, Peru, but they didn't arrive in Buenos Aires in time for our previously scheduled flight to Panama. The US Embassy in Buenos Aires issued us emergency passports, good for one year, that would serve as back-ups in case our Peace Corps passports got full or ceased to function during our trip home by land from Panama. As we were flying to Panama we realized that it was two years to the day after we first arrived in South America to begin our Peace Corps service. Spooky. Our final tally of nights-in-a-row-without-proper-bed-or-roof came out to 29, with two of those nights spent on the bus from Piedra Buena to Buenos Aires, and the one, unforgettable night in the cab of the semi-truck. The other 26 nights were spent in our tent all over Argentina. Thus ended our ¨great camping adventure,¨ a nice way to wrap up our travel in South America.
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