Author: Jane

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. 

November 27

The benefit of having to wander all over El Calafate looking for a rental car is that we got a feel for the town. As opposed to Ushuaia which wasn’t our favorite (poor city planning, and not the right “feel”), Calafate was a great little town. 

Our AirBNB was a cabin about a mile walk from the main stretch. Google maps made it look like we’d be walking on a highway or something, but it ended up being very walker friendly. Speaking of walker, Walker Texas Ranger, any city that loves Chuck Norris is sure to be a hit with us.

The town had a bunch of restaurants and a lot of people wandering around. We grabbed lunch from a pizza place called Lechuza – mostly because we love a winery by that name in Baja California. There also was a lot of green space worked into the main stretch including an outdoor ampitheater. Nothing playing on this random spring Monday, unfortunately. 

One of the things I loved about this town was the flowers were familiar! Lots of rose and lilac bushes. The flowers along with the style of house reminded me a lot of south St. Louis. 

Also, they had Mexican food!! What is more Mexican than shawarma?!

Besides wandering town and eating, we also spent a few hours playing bridge. Michael and I are getting pretty good! Scoring is still a complete mystery to me, but I’m getting better at bidding. 

Off to Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine tomorrow!

Now that I have my “complaints about Ushuaia/travel” post out of the way, I’ll let you know what we did for those three extra days in Ushuaia. Michael will disagree with my selection of this sunset picture because it isn’t doing justice to the mountains, but I love those two trees and the colors!

Mostly we relaxed and got caught up on sleep. We had some great food and I spent a lot of time getting those Antarctica posts out. We also got to check out Tierra del Fuego – our first Patagonia National Park. We split up a bit and Michael and I went off to do a hike and see what we could see. 

While on the hike, we started seeing the most beautiful vegetation! Fields of gorgeous yellow flowers, exotic orange bulbs and beautiful colors everywhere: weeds, fungus and moss, everywhere. 

It took me just a little bit to realize that these amazingly beautiful things were the exact things that back home we’d probably be trying to get rid of. It’s amazing how a change in location and a slight change in perspective can make the super ordinary and often annoying look so beautiful. 
2000 Paraguayan guarani to anyone who can identify, what I’m assuming is, fungi:

With so much travel time on the ship, we were going to plan the next leg while struggling through the Drake Passage. Since we didn’t end up having any internet, that became impossible. So upon docking back in Ushuaia, we set about finding a rental car that Michael and I could potentially drive from Ushuaia, throughout Chile and western Argentina, through Patagonia, into Santiago to pick up Phil and Krystal at the end of December before going to Valparaiso for New Years, Mendoza for wine tasting and then drop off the car. I had read online that we could do this, however, the interwebs didn’t give me a ton of information about HOW to do it. So we started pounding pavement. Very soon we found out a few things: 

1. Everyone either doesn’t want to rent us a car for this type of trip, or they don’t have cars. 

2. Our backup plans are going to be just as hard to execute. 

Backup plans: 

#1: rent a car to drive only to Punta Arenas where we can drop it off and get our schedule back on track. No. 

#2: take a bus to Punta Arenas and get our schedule back on track. No bus availability until Wednesday. No.

#3: fly to Punta Arenas and get our schedule back on track. No flights until early next week and they were expensive! No.

#4: fly to Puerto Natales – No

#5 fly to El Calafate, rent a car to drive down to Puerto Natales where we can then explore Torres del Paine. After that, figure next steps out again. OK – this one might work.

So we were at least able to get the four of us out of Ushuaia on Monday morning to El Calafate. We booked those tickets and looked into transportation once arriving in the new city. The issue I was running into was the fact that no rental companies online would commit to letting me drive the rental car from El Calafate, in Argentina, to Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine in Chile. I knew you could, once again, I just couldn’t figure out how. So I sent out a bunch of emails to try to get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, Michael booked a place to stay in Calafate and investigated taking buses from Calafate to Puerto Natales, and from Puerto Natales to the National Park. He got a handle on a few buses we could take and I couldn’t sort through the rental car, so Michael booked us some bus tickets. Thirty seconds later, I got confirmation from Hertz that there was a way to take the rental car into Argentina, for a small fee. 

New game: try to get the bus tickets canceled. 

Michael got to work on this, but we were trying to reach them on Sunday while their offices were closed. So we went back to waiting. Monday morning, we headed to the Ushuaia airport, for our flight out. FINALLY! Upon checking in, we were informed that although we had reserved our tickets, we hadn’t paid and we were not on the flight. We had definitely entered credit card info, so this was hard to believe, but nothing to do but work with them. We dealt with a few people who mostly just told us to wait. 5 minutes. Wait more. 25 minutes. And then, finally, with just thirty minutes to the take off of our flight (note, take off, not boarding), they let us go through. No additional payments necessary. Not sure how they fixed the glitch, but we got through. 

Michael also had received an email from the bus company that didn’t respond to his question about canceling the tickets, but instead informed him that there wasn’t any room on the bus for us. Problem solved! While waiting to board, I jumped on my phone and booked the Hertz rental car. Problems solved! We were finally cooking with gas. 

The flight was easy into El Calafate. While we waited for baggage, Michael went over to get the rental car settled. No surprise, the didn’t have a car for us. Haha. No one had extra cars in the entire airport. So we took a taxi to our AirBNB, dropped off our stuff and went back into town to try to solve this new problem. It was smack dab in the afternoon, when most stores in Argentina are closed, so we walked around, got a feel for the town and emailed/texted a few inquiries to car rental companies. Once we hit 3:30/4 and stores began opening again, we found two cars in town. Just two. And settled on the cheaper option. So we are back on track, again. 

This was definitely a warning that Patagonia requires much more advanced planning than the internet led us to believe. Online there are tons of romantic stories about people just arriving at hotels and being able to find a place to stay or being picked up by the perfect bus going right to their final destination by chance. Bully for those people. For us, travel in Patagonia is hard. 

I have zero appropriate pictures for this probably boring post… so here’s a street sign where our hotel shuttle dropped us in town. Does it add any value to this post? Probably not, but here it is anyway. It shows latitude and longitude so that’s interesting. It also reminds us that we were still in Ushuaia, trying to get out! 

 

Imagine how others see USA Thanksgiving. What do they think of? Turkey – check. Mashed potatoes – check. Pie – ok… they made pecan happen. Stuffing – sure… it was close at least. Donuts – absolutely. What is more American than donuts?! So we must enjoy them as part of our Thanksgiving meal as well!! 

In all seriousness, the crew went above and beyond to try to help us celebrate our traditions. It was very sweet of them. Please note, I wore my fancy shirt to celebrate.

Plus we got to celebrate Leigh’s first Thanksgiving! 

With just under 20 hours left on the ship (25ish after the high winds kept us waiting to dock the next morning), we relaxed, enjoyed our new friends, played cards and tried to ride out a rough few final hours on the Drake. 

Thank you to the amazing crew! It was truly incredible. I hope that Michael and I will be able to come back again some day!

November 22

Since we’re back to the Drake Passage, trying to enjoy two days at sea, this is a good chance to stop talking about Antarctica and spend a few minutes talking about the super awesome people we’ve met on ship. 

We became fast friends with Leigh, Dale and Zach either the first or second day onboard. It’s a little bit like summer camp where the first day or two everyone is testing the waters, trying to figure out where they fit on the ship. But as opposed to being kids, here we have access to 199 passengers plus another ~140 crew/staff on board who are from around the globe with different travel experiences, backgrounds and cultures. 

Note: getting through the language barrier with Leigh was half the battle! 

After another day or so, we picked up Keith and Jackie and now we have a few other rotating seats at dinner and the Euchre table for Chad and Lauren from Denver, some crew members, Tom and a few other randoms. 

We have really enjoyed getting to know everyone and are super pumped to stay close for years to come.