Quick Photo Update from last 10 days at Cocharmo.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=331546&id=569675986&l=64e5e2582c

See this link for quick update on last 10 days. Will right up details when we have time and internet access.

Cheers.

Martin

BBQ Argentia Style

We hire MTB and ride around the lake.

Marese allways up for a swim. Sometimes too chilly for Martin.

I think this picture is off one off their excellent boxes of chocolates.

Various photos from around Bariloche, Argentia on our climing rest days.

Tacky Swiss Village, Marese loved it.

The ice cream is some of the best we have ever tasted.

Camptime slackline

On rest days we practice the slackline for a bit of fun. I hope to get quite good by the end of the trip, or at least be able to get to the other end without falling off..


See this link for a few photos of the fun.


http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=327008&id=569675986&l=b98c5bda78

Into the Fray

We trekked 4 hours into the mountains to the Refugio Frey in Argentina. Spent 5 days in the mountains on starvation rations (unless we ate cake in the Refugio). There was some excellent weather…and some Patagonia weather. The clean granite spires and cracks gave us the best climbing of the trip so far.

I won’t describe any more as you can see it all on the video.

 

Hot Rock Climbing Frey Argentina from Martin Roberts on Vimeo.

Nitty Gritty

The endless flat

Camping under the truck

Big tent pegs to hold back the wind.

Today I cleaned my fingernails with a baby wipe.  I can’t tell you how happy this has made me. 

We’ve been back to bush camping the last couple of nights as we drive the long multi-day trip north to La Buitrera.  Bush camping is a romantic term that conjures images of cosy tents scattered among shady trees, far away from the hubbub of urban living.  What bush camping actually means is pulling over to the side of the unrelentingly straight road through country of unrelenting harsh sameness.  The Patagonian steppes are flat, featureless plains, sparsely vegetated with low, scrubby clumps of tough, thorny belligerence, just itching for a bathroom stop encounter.  And then there’s the wind.

Wind is such a small word.  It is blindingly inadequate to describe what we have experienced in Patagonia.  The wind here bullies you constantly.  Always with the shoving and the jostling.  Always trying to tear off your hat, snatch things from your hand, steal your breath.  It’s like a physical weight that you don’t realise you’re carrying until you stop, sheltering in a shop, tent or truck, where you’re able to straighten up, pull your shoulders back and again experience verticality and breathe easy.  I wonder about the kind of hardiness that the people who live here must possess to just get on with life despite the conditions.  And this is the summer.

Last night we camped in a quarry by the side of the road. We opted to sleep under the truck after our tent surrendered to the wind at 4am the previous night. Our starlight view was replaced with a gearbox and transmission ceiling.  The wind ganged up with the rock-hard ground to make tent erection a near impossibility.  Tent pegs bent, tent flies escaped across stony ground, dust again wedged in every conceivable place.  Eyes are constantly gritty, fingernails constantly dirty and we’re constantly covered in a layer of dusty grime.  And yet….

Small things become sources of joy.  Hence the fingernail cleaning; the hilarity when Vicki heroically outran the gale to rescue Gareth’s tent bag, thereby proving that she is “faster than a Patagonian wind”; the bliss of actual butter; the lift you get from “dressing up” in a clean pair of khakis to go to the local cervezeria; the camaraderie as you eat sweetened rice cooked with vaguely lemony-detergent-flavoured water for breakfast for the upteenth time and reminisce good-naturedly about crumpets and fresh-roasted coffee.

Breakfast on the go.

Camping in quarry

Mmmm, Real Butter!

Guts and gusts

A couple of days driving and bush camping landed us at El Chalten, an odd town that seems to exist purely to sell hiking gear, souvenirs and an odd assortment of grocery items to tourists…usually at the same shop.  This is the first place that has offered plentiful climbing opportunities.  And it does a fine Patagonia wind.  There are lots of hikes through forests flanked by jagged peaks, many snow-capped with glaciers.  Glacier-fed rivers and lakes are dotted about fetchingly.  We spent several days here, climbing in the wind, hiking in the wind, camping in the wind… 

On the walk up to glacier

Marese does her first tyrolean!

Mountains finally come out of the clouds after days.

On excellent 4 pitch route near Fitz Roy

As close as we got to glacier due to weather moving in.

At a glacial pace

Headed out of Punta Arenas towards the Chile-Argentine border on our way to El Calafate, the town closest to the Perito Moreno glacier, a 60m high, 5 km wide, wonderland of ice.

We drove 4 hours to the border, only to be deemed unworthy to enter Argentina (tellingly, Chile was well-happy to be shot of us), so we retraced our steps and after a 600 km detour to a different border crossing, managed to trundle back into Argentina.  We spent some quality time on the roadside while Simon, the mechanic on the trip, fiddled with the truck when it failed to restart…twice.  Simon spotted a local locking up what looked like a truck yard, littered with truck trailers, demountables and shipping containers.  He and Roger, our fearless leader, managed to talk our way into camping there the night.  It was windy and tent peg hell so Martin scouted out a trailer and we camped like gypsies for the night.

Another several hour drive and we made El Calafate, a shiny tourist town that serves as the main base for people heading to Perito Moreno glacier.  We camped the night under the stars (when the sun eventually dropped) then, the next day, spend 3 hours marvelling at the glacier, which Andy, our driver, insisted on calling “the iceberg“.  It is massive, gorgeous and awesome…. and everyone spent their morning hoping for it’s destruction in a dramatic, crashing fall into the lake below.  We saw several episodes of ice falling, sending waves rolling out to the icebergs bobbing at the base of the glacier.  It was spectacular.