Month: December 2017

December 10-11

So we arrived in Cusco and after a taxi/Uber mixup, we headed to our hostel. That’s right. Hostel. I have never stayed in a hostel in my life and for the record, last week while planning, Michael called it a hotel. Now, here’s the important caveat: we have our own room. So it’s like a hotel after all. Plus the place is clean and close to the center of town, so I’m happy. The altitude hit us pretty hard on our first day here. We took naps almost immediately and then only left for a short walk around town and dinner before going back to bed. But in that short amount of time, we already were pumped for the city. The architecture is incredible with several town centers where people were congregating even late into the evening.

These pictures don’t do the city justice. I’ll have to take more.

Other than the beautiful architecture, there is also a huge Christ the Redeemer statue in the mountains that you can see at night (I know! Prove it! No pictures at this time), and several statues of Pachacuti who is believed to be the Inca who is responsible for much of the Incan architecture including Machu Picchu. During his reign, Cusco grew into an empire.

On our second day in town, we took a long walk to the Brazilian consulate to work on our Brazilian visas. Upon arriving, it was determined that the consulate doesn’t exist and we’ll have to try to get these visas in Santiago the week of Christmas. Who else is concerned about getting that accomplished with a holiday in the middle of the “week long process”?

We have seen a lot of the stuff you’d expect to see in Cusco, including a lot of indigenous women selling stuff. We also saw these women selling a picture of themselves with baby llamas. It worked and now Michael and (by default) I have a picture of these women in traditional garb and baby llamas.

Slightly out of order, but we also finally got to see a real market after a month and a half on the road. It was mostly normal as far as non-USA markets go. Spices, meat, cheese, grains and other random goods were sold. Plus there was an area that had women cooking and selling lunch, which we indulged in. A meal for both of us for 10 soles. That’s less than 4 bucks for a meal that included soup, chicken, rice and salad. Super pumped. But the random thing that required a picture was the chopped off heads (snouts?). Michael thinks they’re cows. I thought they were llamas. Super ick either way. The kind of thing you can’t help but stare at… and then choose to eat at the other side of the market as far away from that as possible.

So mostly in two days here we’ve slept, a ton, and tried to breathe. I think Michael wanted to be running by now, but I’m excited to be able to be able to lay down again without gasping for a breath. I think the worst of it is over and mostly I’m grateful we scheduled extra time here before hiking. I could not imagine hiking while feeling like this.

December 8-9

We had a 20 hour layover in Córdoba, Argentina. A few facts about Córdoba: It is the second largest city in Argentina, even though I had never heard of it before, with 1.4 million people as of 2010. Another fact I know is that it has an incredible park in the center of the city. We stayed in an AirBNB just three blocks from the park and took full advantage of it during our very short stay in the city.

I went for a run in the park when we arrived and Michael went for a run along the river. I definitely won that decision. My run was spent exploring a super cool park. There was a zoo and a slightly creepy small amusement park. Also there were a handful of restaurants and beer gardens throughout the park. Also, they were setting up a stage for some sort of Friday night show. Most importantly, there were a ton of people around. As any female knows, lots of people around equals safety in a huge park when running by yourself. And any person knows that lots of people in a huge park make it tons of fun and encourages more people to show up and have more fun.

After our runs, we showered and then headed right back to the park to hang out with the locals. We popped into a beer garden to hangout, drink beers and play cards for a few hours. This is the only picture I have. It’s not that cool and doesn’t do the park justice, but it does show green space and more importantly people hanging out. Lots of families and young people playing around, lounging, eating, drinking, running, rollerblading… tons of rollerbladers.

We then walked through the park a bit. It was probably 10 or 10:30pm but the park was still filled with people. We wandered down to that stage I had mentioned and found a really horrible 90’s rock cover band. Proof that you can get bad cover bands in every part of the world.

Here is some art in the park. Córdoba is considered the cultural capital of the Americas. We didn’t get to see any museums, but they did display art around the park and through the city center.

After that we headed to the city center just to see what we could see and ended up in the Patagonia brewpub for a beer. This was when I was reminded how horrible the women’s shoes in Argentina are and that something needs to be said. The women are, in general, so cute every where we go, but their shoes are SO BAD. Now you can ask my sister who is the reason for any fashionable item in the wardrobe. Or you can ask my old roommate right out of college who use to mock me and refuse to let me leave the house on weekends until I changed out of corporate casual. I am not a terribly fashionable person. BUT something has to be said. The shoes. THE SHOES!!! Some of the women wore kicks, which were great. But mostly they wore these huge platform wedges that make me think of those platform flip flops that women work in the late 90s(?). Also a bunch of people wore crocs, out for the night, with otherwise trendy/fancy clothes. But I’m focusing on the platforms. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Sorry for my shallowness in this post. I just hate them. To try to make up for my shallowness, here is a picture of the super beautiful church in the center of town. We weren’t able to go inside the church, but I’m not sure it could be more beautiful than it looked all lit up at night.

The next morning, we had an 8am flight, so we were out of the apartment by 5:30. The streets were FILLED with people who hadn’t gone home yet. It was incredible. Some seemed drunk, but most of them were just hanging out, still enjoying their Friday night. It was amazing. Michael and I are not suited for this kind of “typical” Friday night. So, it’s off to Cusco!

December 6

Michael started day two of Patagonia wine country super optimistic. I was less so. But we packed up the car, checked out of our AirBNB and headed another hour out of the city to see what we could see. First stop was Bodega del Fin del Mundo – that translates to “end of the world winery”! We popped in, unannounced, and had a great, quick tasting. The wines were delicious and it was easy to communicate (albeit in Spanish). They also had an entire line of wines that were motorcycle themed a la Motorcycle Diaries. Plus they had one of the few Christmas trees we’ve seen so far this season:

After this winery, we headed a few miles down the road to Bodega Familia Schroeder for lunch. Here we found the dinosaurs!

Apparently when the Schroeder family started digging on their land to build the winery, they found dinosaur bones. The real bones have gone to a museum, but they put a small museum down in the basement showing the size of the bones and depicting where they were found. This is why they have an entire line of wines named “Saurus”.

After eating lunch with the dinos, we headed over to our last winery for the day, NQN. We struggled getting into this one all day. We actually went here first, and they were serving lunch (it was 12:30) but said they couldn’t do a tasting until 1pm. So we popped over to the other wineries first. We got back to NQN around 3:30 and they told us again they couldn’t do a tasting. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but they were still serving food, so we had dessert and a glass of wine – figuring that gets the job done for this winery. After we asked for the bill, the manager told us that we now could do a tasting. Too much language barrier to figure out what the situation was, but he passed us off to a woman who gave us a tour of the bodega and talked through the wines.

We had been a little confused about the entire winery all day. We had heard so many things about NQN, but that name was nowhere to be found in the winery. It turns out that a few years ago, Fin Del Mundo bought NQN and has been rebranding it as Malma. This explains two things: the name of the restaurant/wine and why Fin Del Mundo was pushing so aggressively for us to have lunch at Malma instead of Schroeder. I pressed the woman to see if the acquisition was welcome and it seems like it definitely was not. She stated there is still a strong competition between the two lines and there is no collaboration. She did still seem very proud of the NQN wine and also of the rebranded wine. The word Malta means “to be proud” in the Mapudungun language of the native Mapuche people. She also spent a lot of time explaining the symbolism on the wine labels.

After this, we drove the long trek back to Bariloche and had the good fortunate to see this along the route. Note the street light or the bushes to understand the size.

This ends our tour of Patagonia. Michael and I are on a 20 hour bus ride right now and after a layover in Santiago and a few flights, we’ll be in Cusco, Peru for the next adventure: Machu Picchu!

December 5

Ok – so no one has really heard of this. We hadn’t, at least, until we did a wine tasting in Buenos Aires. So since we’re here…. we might as well see what it’s all about. We drove 5 hours north of Bariloche (ok we weren’t as “here” as we originally thought we were) to Neuquen, Argentina which is home of the Patagonia Wine Trail. Michael had been trying to contact wineries via email for the past week as reservations are necessary without any luck. So as we headed out of town, I tried calling the wineries. I’m getting better at Spanish after our month here, but I’m still terrible and I’m especially bad on the phone. So I tried calling a few, finally got through to one and could not communicate a single thing with the person on the other line. In all fairness, I think it was a bad number, but still – no communication at all.

As we went in and out of service in middle of nowhere Argentina, I finally tried my next best option: Idania! I sent a note to Idania pleading with her to try to make reservations for us again (#2 – yes I’m keeping count). An hour or so later I had service again and got a response! She had trouble getting through too (whew – it’s not just me) but she was able to secure us a reservation at one place. So we headed off to La Falda. The winery was down an industrial gravel road and when we pulled up to the gate, someone opened it for us and we entered. No signage or people anywhere, so we drove around a bit and finally parked to investigate on foot. Finally a guy popped out of one of the huge wooden doors and welcomed us to the winery museum. Apparently La Falda was founded in 1910 by a German couple and continues to produce wine in some capacity today.

The entire tour was in Spanish and although I’m sure he dumbed it down for us – Michael and I totally nailed it! The place was cool – had a bunch of old stuff and George, the winemaker, was super nice (yes – he introduced himself as George even though his name was actually Jorge).

After seeing old winery stuff, George took us into their banquet room to do some tastings. At this point, his wife also came out to sit with us. She speaks Spanish and French, so no additional language help there for us, but we stumbled through it.

George was excited for us to taste both their normal wines (under the family name, Herzig) and some of his stuff that he makes just for his family and friends – something similar to grappa and something similar to a port. I took the brunt of this tasting since Michael was driving and George kept throwing new stuff at us.

Afterwards, we figured we’d just pop into another winery to see if they’d let us in without a reservation. The answer to that is no. One place just told us to go home and call. The other place told us we couldn’t do tastings, but we could but a bottle – so we did. Bodega Humberto.

After this, we went to our AirBNB feeling a little down that we were largely unsuccessful so far in tastings. Thankfully Idania got us in that one otherwise the day would have been a total bust. We relaxed for a bit before heading out to dinner. Our AirBNB host suggested a great restaurant, but when we got there – it was completely empty, so we kept walking down to one of the breweries she suggested. It ended up being a super long walk and we hadn’t eaten all day, so the hanger was in full force. But the wait was well worth it once we got there.

It was a great scene with a ton of young people hanging out. The food was good and the beers were really good. This picture and the brewery is very similar to the scene we found all over the town center. Neuquen was young with a lot of people sitting out in green space and exercising. It was a very modern town with a lot going on. The outskirts were pretty industrial, but everything in El Centro was very alive and young. Lots of 20 and 30 somethings hanging – and a lot of kids as well. It was a great little town and our walk/dinner was enough to make the day feel like a success.

There are two quick stories from the fly fishing trip that Juanito shared that have really resonated since leaving the river.

1. Juanito mentioned that the Argentinian government has been selling previously undeveloped land along the rivers to be developed and expressed a deep concern about it and how it has been affecting his community. I didn’t get a lot of details about this but I did get a true sense of how upset he was.

2. Juanito also told a story about when the gov wanted to put in a hydroelectric dam right where we were fishing. It obviously would have completely changed the river. Apparently, the people from Bariloche fought hard against it and won. Juanito stated a few times how proud he was of his community for banning together and actually winning in a fight against the gov.

We have heard some stories about possibly selling off portions of the National Parks in the US and we are really upset about it. I know visiting the National Parks out in Wyoming was some of my favorite travel memories from growing up. I hope we all try to protect our parks so just like my uncle took me out to visit when I was young, we can visit the National Parks with our nieces and nephews when Michael and I are back in the states. When the nieces and nephews saw pictures and videos of my big fish, I got four videos in return with all of the kids so excited about how big my fish was, but also hoping to see a bigger one. I want them to have the same access that I have had to do awesome outdoor stuff.

This is where I would post a picture of us horse back riding in the Tetons if I had access to my photos back home. Or me and Bill exploring the “stinky part” of Yellowstone while everyone else refused to get out of the car that was sitting on the sewage drain creating the smell. Instead you get this picture of me trying to do my part down here to not kill this little guy I had caught.

Special thanks to DeMars who called out my photo error earlier. Here’s a picture that is actually from our trip instead of his trip to the Sacred Valley.

December 4

Michael and I went fly fishing while in Bariloche with Trout Bariloche. You all know that this is not a legit travel blog – so I’m not being paid by anyone to tout any product. That said – here is a huge advertisement to the ten people that are going to read this: come to Bariloche and go fly fishing with Juanito from Trout Bariloche. Juanito is the tallest Argentinian we’ve seen over the past month. He’s possibly 6’5″, but out of the three of us we couldn’t quite figure out how to convert his height from meters to feet without the internet or a calculator. The point – his name translates to “little John” which I thought was hilarious. 

Juanito picked us up from our AirBNB at 8:15 in the morning and we drove out to Rio Limay for some fly fishing. Juanito had a boat, a few coolers and our rods with him. Juanito put our boat in the river and off we went – with him rowing us down the river. We stopped almost immediately to learn the basics. Ultimately, it is super technical what we should be doing. Michael is good at it and I am less good at it. But – it has nothing to do with strength, so it’s not that I’m a wimpy girl – I’m just bad at it. No problem. It was such a treat just being on the water, that I didn’t care that I was struggling with casting. This video does not do Michael’s cast justice. It was really beautiful. Juanito kept geeking all over how great Michael was doing and kept teaching him new techniques. 

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I’m a natural:

So we didn’t catch much – Michael caught a small rainbow trout, then I caught a small rainbow trout, then Michael caught a second small rainbow trout. 

Mike asked Juanito what they do with the fish. Juanito told him that “we kiss them and then we put them back in the water”

In addition to the fishing, we also got a river side meal – Juanito cooked us steak (true story) and we had a meat and cheese plate, Malbec, salad and some dessert. Pretty fancy for a fishing trip. Note: those are not whimp hot dogs. They are spicy sausages. 

That’s right – we ate on a table cloth. 

After lunch, we were super pumped about what we caught for the day, but Juanito wanted more for Michael (because Michael. was doing so well… he was thrilled that I picked up the one I did). So we moved into Juanito’s favorite spot on the river and spent some time there. I was finally starting to feel like my casting was getting a bit better. I wasn’t casting far, but it was solid. I had a bite and Juanito told me to cast the same way I previously cast. So I did. And I got her. 

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And if you can’t tell… I was excited. 

I may have mentioned this when I talked about the humpback whales that we saw in Antarctica from the ship, but one of the things I loved about that moment was that all of the crew got their cameras out as well. They were just as excited as we were and that didn’t happen for other sightings. To me, it meant that we were seeing something special. Similarly, Juanito was pumped about this fish and I loved that! He thought it was the biggest he’s seen this season so far. So that was cool. 

I’ll end this post by paraphrasing something Juanito said at the end of the trip – If you combine Michael’s casting with my fishing, we’d have the perfect fisherman. I think it’s probably more like mixing Michael’s casting with my good luck!

December 1-3

After driving back to Calafate and returning the rental car, all four of us flew to Bariloche. Patagonia is even incredible from the sky:

Here, Michael and I got off the plane and Mom and Dad B continued on their travels back Buenos Aires and then home. Thank you for coming and sharing this part of the adventure with us!

Michael and I now have six days in Bariloche, so we spent some time familiarizing ourselves with the city and grocery shopping! We got a nice AirBNB with a kitchen. So no more eating out three times a day! We bought some bread, butter, granola and milk. 

Milk:

That’s right. Bags of milk. It took us ten minutes to find this, with help from store employees. Bags. Who knew? The bigger issue was once I opened it, what to do with the rest until I’m ready to use. So… 

Bariloche also has a few breweries in addition to all that bagged milk. So we have checked out a few of those. Wesley, Manush and Berlina. Mad props to Berlina for having the best music to date on the trip. Really great 90’s rock and solid beers. Manush was pretty good and Wesley had great pizza. I’m sure Michael has more to say about the beer, but they were all fine for the most part. 

On Saturday, we ran a few errands and relaxed. For dinner, we took a taxi to the outskirts of town to have dinner at a place called Butterfly Patagonia. It had an incredible tasting menu paired with fantastic Argentinian wines. 

But the real show stopper for the night was the sunset. Note: I don’t adjust or filter any of my pictures. Ain’t nobody got time for that. This is legitimately what the sunset looked like. The one with us in it is less dramatic than real life because a dude also taking picture shone his flashlight on our faces to improve the picture. 

Today, Sunday, we have another low key day. Mass this morning and another grocery store stop. Michael is cooking braised beef ribs for dinner and I’m getting caught up on the blog (sorry for the massive overload of posting today). Bariloche has less English speaking movies, so that hasn’t been as successful as our Sunday in Bueños Aires, but a great day in general. 

Tomorrow we’re planning on fly fishing (wish us luck) and out to vineyards on Tuesday and Wednesday before heading off to Cusco. 

November 29-30

All through Torres del Paine you’ll see dead trees. In some places, new life is growing on or around the dead trees and in other places, it’s just dead trees. Online people call it the forest of dead trees. 

There is some information about fires from the last few years. 2005 attributed to a Czech backpacker and 2011 attributed to an Israeli backpacker. Apparently 18k hectares of forest was destroyed. I’m not sure which fire did the bulk of the damage, but cheers to it not being an American’s fault!

Another note on the animals we’ve seen. My apologies for any that I’ve mentioned below without pictures. I realize the rule “pic or it didn’t happen”, so take these sightings with a grain of salt. If I can get some proof from Dad B, I’ll update. 

Guanaco (the llama is its domestic counterpart) – interesting fact – guanacos live in herds composed of females, their young, and a dominant male. Bachelor males form separate herds. 

Rheas (which look like big ostriches) – no pics.

South Andean deer:

South American gray fox – no pictures, but we saw them. They didn’t say anything.

Condors – Dad B has a picture of the Condors we saw.

Beetles – the interweb won’t give me any information on these beetles, but there were a lot of them by Laguna Azul.

Note: I just found out that Paine means “blue” in the native Tehuelche language, which verifies my prior translation as completely inacurate, as originally believed. 

November 30

Day 2 of Torres del Paine – super cloudy, super windy, still beautiful. But this did make us realize how lucky we were the day before to have such clear weather. 

Once we got into the park this morning, we headed towards Grey Glacier. There is a three hour boat ride that will take you around Lago Grey and give an up close view of the glacier. We got to Hotel Grey (see the theme here?) and found out that the tickets are roughly $120 usd per person. Nopers. The four of us just got off a super expensive ship that took us to see a bunch of glaciers – we’re not doing it twice.  

So instead, we did the hike to see the glacier. 

If you look in the picture above, you have Mom and Dad B down in the bottom left and in the back, center of the picture you can see the glacier. It is between the mountains in the background and meets the lake. 

Did I mention how windy it was? 

November 29

Accurate translation? Probably not. 

We’re based in Puerto Natales for 3 days as we head into Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. This is home to the famous W and circuit hikes. TIming and lack of planning won’t allow for us to do these hikes which is a bit of a bummer, BUT we do have the chance to do a bunch of smaller hikes in the park that allow for some amazing views. 

Day 1 in the park:

Just driving down here and seeing some of the views was worth the hassle of getting here. We were able to see some incredible sights before even getting into the park. 
Laguna Azul

Right at Laguna Azul we had the opportunity to hike 1500 meters up to a vantage point. Super worth it.

After the hike we drove into the park and grabbed a few more great pictures. To corroborate some of the struggles we’ve had while traveling in Patagonia, we met an Australian couple who were hitch hiking back to the entrance of the park. They had been planning their trip to hike the W since last February. For each night in the park, they had reserved a place to sleep at a refugio which is like a hostel in the park. They give you clean sheets, a place to shower and food, so you don’t have to camp or hike with all of your food on your back. If Michael and I were going to hike, this is how we would have done it. Well, Jason and Olivia got into this park this morning and took a bus to the catamaran crossing at Nordernskjold Lake. They arrived at the crossing at 9:30am. The larger of the two catamarans was not working, so they had been shuttling 20 people across at a time. The remaining group of people had just been told that the winds were too strong and they weren’t going to be taking any more people across for the day. No buses would be coming to pick them up. They were just stuck. So in a panic, the large group of people all were trying to figure out where they were going to be sleeping for the night since they weren’t going to make it to their refugios. 

There was a five hour hike from the entrance of the park that Olivia and Jason were going to try to tackle and hope that the refugio would take them in despite their lack of reservations. They were incredibly grateful for the ride we gave them, even if it did mean that we had four people shoved in a tight backseat. Hopefully things turn around for them and their well planned, heavily anticipated vacation works out. 

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Besides blow your mind landscapes, we also saw some super cool animals. Like these:

We ended day 1 at Torres del Paine with an ambitious hike. We were pretty sure that this is “the hike” that creates some of the iconic Torres del Paine pictures. What we weren’t too sure of is what the hike entailed. The maps stated hours, but we weren’t sure exactly where it started and if those hours were round trip or one way. So Michael and I left Mom B and Dad B to explore on their own and we started hustling to the top. We didn’t start the hike until about 4:30, so we knew that we were going to have to hurry regardless of the length of the trip. The two of us were cranking uphill, at some times running, as everyone else was coming down the mountain. As we neared the end of the hike we talked with a few people who told us that we’d never make it to the end before dark. This was all the encouragement Michael needed to start running to the end. I waited at the first stopping point while Michael ran ahead. He ran half a mile to a camp site before deciding that we definitely were not going to make the end of the hike tonight. So he ran back and we hustled back down the mountain. 

Here is the view from where we ended our hike. It isn’t iconic, but it is very beautiful and it was a great, tough hike to crank through.