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A little blue tent, Rio Pipo Valley, Tierra del Fuego
National Park, Near Ushuaia, Bottom of the World, South America.
Monday 10th February 1997. Dear Mummy (& the rest of the family) Well, where to start. We've been here nearly two weeks now and it feels much longer. I'm sure you've heard from the two brief phone calls to that part of the world that we arrived and have headed down here. Anyway, we found Buenos Aires very hot and humid and pretty expensive as we couldn't camp near the city anywhere and even though we had the cheapest hotel we could find it was $25 a night per room. We looked around the city a bit but probably missed a lot of good bits - we phoned a few contacts and that was interesting and helpful but most people were away so we decided to head south for the Peninsular Valdez. By the way, we found the people in Buenos Aires very friendly and would put up with our terrible Spanish which is slightly improving but not much. After 4 days, on the Saturday, we left on a bus to Puerto Madryn - it took l8 hours to get there but the buses are incredibly comfortable compared to some we took in India and Nepal. It was very windy and quite cool there. It's by the sea and in all the sweaty heat of Buenos Aires I was dying to go swimming. We camped at a nice site, it was very dry and dusty and windy. We did swim. The next day, rather than booking a tour around the peninsular (to look at the wildlife) we decided we would take the local bus out to the village called Puerto Pyramides and see if we could organise something from there so we camped in a site there - much nicer beach but much dustier and windier, difficult to walk into it if it was gusting! We swam. There was a little tourist information hut and in there the lady told us where to go for a local tour, which we booked for the morning - 6 am! She also told us how we could walk to a Loberia - fur seal colony. Lobos de Marinos are fur seals - they look a bit like sea lions with gingery fawn brown fur. We walked for an hour in very hot sunshine and very dusty dry tracks along the coast to find this viewing point - it was on a low cliff above the colony, there were 2 groups of over 50 adults. Mostly female - the males were huge and some were in with the females and some bachelor males sat outside. There were lots of baby ones too. They seemed very used to people as they ignored us completely. We could smell them! After a while (the siesta over perhaps) the males all started squabbling - lots of rearing and flumping towards each other and usually one would back down, but occasionally they would bang their chests into each other and wobble and then make as if to bite each other. I think they don't really want to fight as even if they win, they'd get quite hurt so it's mostly all show. Sometimes the young ones get squashed this way. The males are darker brown and the babies almost black. It was a real treat to watch them - we could see some in the water an watched them trying to get in on to the cliff rock with the big waves helping them, but often it wouldn't quite be enough and they'd slide back in quite a rough sea. They must be very strong swimmers. The next day at 5.30 am we got up and had a quick cuppa on the stove. (we really enjoy being in the tent and using the stove) and then we ran to the place in town to meet the minibus by 6 am. Dino was our Guide - we were the only ones there, we went and picked up an older couple from their caravan and then drove through the campsite and stopped right next to our tent to pick up 2 boys in the tent opposite! We could have had a lie in! Anyway 6 of us in all (7 with the Guide) drove off across the peninsula - we saw Guanaco - like wild llamas, brown and also two Patagonian Hares - short ears. We reached Punta Norte where there is another seal colony. Beautiful in
the early morning sunshine, the seals were much closer here, we were
standing right at the edge of the narrow strip of sand that they were
lying on - wonderful! Our Guide was telling us how the babies are being
born now (oldest l0 days, some not yet born) and by three weeks they are
weaned and have to go out into the sea - which is when the killer whales
will get them. This is the famous beach at which the wildlife programme
was filmed with the killer whales beaching themselves, to grab the young
seals in the shallows - some tossing them about with their tails and
throwing them and catching them again - I remember watching it. Another 3
weeks - we should have come later to see it. A bit cruel perhaps, but to
see whales! Just then, Dino says 'Orcas' and there round the headland came
5 killer whales, fins of various sizes. One huge and one very small, then
3 more. All blowing and curving through the water - we could see their
faces, it was wonderful. They were literally a few yards from the sand-so
near. The water gets very deep, very quickly which is why they hunt in
such an unusual way here. They swam up and down for 20 minutes or so,
really fantastic to watch - we took some photos - hope they come out. Then on to an Elephant Seal Colony "Lobos Elephanta". They were enormous, females weigh 1000 kg (same as male fur seals) and males weigh 2800 kg! They were massive and had huge noses - the males inflate theirs - hence the name, and roar. They are more like our seals though and don't sit up on their front flippers and their back flippers face backwards and don't help them on land. We were even closer to this lot - they just lay and scratched themselves looking fat; They would flip sand and stones on to their backs and occasionally we saw one flump down to the sea on its tummy- most ungainly. Hello again. It's now the next evening and we are back at our campsite in Ushuaia; it's the Ushuaia Rugby Club that run this site and very good it is too - we can use the kitchen and big dining room with stove fires, where we are now; it is nice to sit on a chair at a table to write this. Anyway, where was I? After the Elephant Seals we went on and saw from the top of some lovely tall cliffs, a very long stretch of beach with a mix of elephant seals and fur seals lying on it. It was called the Costa Brava which made us smile, from up high they did look like a load of sunbathers stretched out! Blindingly bright in the sunshine and then driving back we saw some falcons not sure what name, very fast. We also saw some Nandu or Rhea a small ostrich they have here. It was a very exciting day and we enjoyed it so much. Really glad we came. We went back to the campsite; it's funny at home everyone wants to put their tent ("carpo" in Spanish) - out in the sun and at this site all tents are hidden under bushes to shelter from the sun for even though the wind was so strong and could be cold, the sun was brutal. We went for a swim - just around the corner from those killer whales! I did wonder if they might fancy a tender juicy white English girl after all those leathery seals and penguins. The beach was very gently sloping so a long way out it was still shallow so they'd never have got in -we'd certainly have seen their fins coming from a long way off!! Our Guide was telling us that the Orcas weren't bad and that people could swim with them and they'd be friendly, but we decided that if he wanted to, we'd watch but we'd give it a miss! The waves were big where we swam and we were the only ones - all the Argentineans were wearing anoraks! That night we took the bus back to Puerto Madryn - This is the place the Welsh landed - there is an old Welsh Community living further inland still using the Welsh language and going to Chapel. We didn't get to the town of Gaiman which is supposed to be the most Welsh, so we didn't see much sign of it. Gaiman was quite a way in the other direction; everyone in Brecon will be disappointed that we didn't get there - we should have. After l more night in Puerto Madryn, we left on another bus to Rio Gallegos - further south again. In Rio Gallegos we did a huge shop in a Supermarket and sat in the park and ate - we realised we hadn't been eating enough - one gets bored with soup and bread after a while! We had tried to get to Tierra del Fuego from here - there are buses to Punta Arenas in Chile but they were $20 and in the book from Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego to Ushuaia was $20 each and no one would tell us how much or when or how from Punta Arenas to Rio Grande (because it's Chilean) but as it looked as long as the other two sections and would have been complicated and taken ages and the flights from Rio Gallegos to Ushuaia were $6l and took 40 minutes, we opted for that. After booking it for the same afternoon) I read in the Guide Book that a short runway, steep approach due to surrounding mountains and strong winds at Ushuaia make this not a trip for timid flyers! I'm a timid flyer! Oh well, not long to worry about it; after stuffing our faces in the park and having a lovely chat with a l2 year old boy with the help of our dictionary. We headed off to the Airport and took off - it was a small plane and a bit wobbly to start with. We weren't allocated seats so didn't get to sit together, so myself and a nervous older lady from Buenos Aires patted each other during the flight! The landing turned out to be surprisingly smooth. Everyone looked relieved. We walked into town across the Causeway - it took 20-30 minutes but we are trying to save the pennies - better to spend it on food! We did eat one meal in Buenos Aires in a nice steak barbecue restaurant - we chose the cheapest steak with chips $8.50 and it was enormous - very good value and yummy, but went mad and when the waiter said did we want ice cream, we said yes without asking how much - it was $7.00 each! Wow. Since leaving the City we've cooked on our stove. Anyway, we got a local bus out to this campsite, it's in a lonely place - so green and beautiful after such dry scrub desert. Looking out of the bus all the way from Buenos Aires it was sometimes dead flat, sometimes a bit lumpy scrub desert. This place is really lush. We have the tent under trees in the wood with the river running by! We stayed l night and left a heavy bag of books and things we didn't need and set off on a trek the next day. It's from the book you gave us Adrian - "Trekking in the Patagonian Andes", bought in Bath, remember, thanks. It was supposed to be at least a 7 day circuit but with one thing and another we didn't make it. It was graded as the hardest trek in the book - great one to start with! The first problem being that the book is 5 years old, so some things have changed, also we'd walked for an hour or so when the track we were told to take was fenced off with large signs saying we weren't allowed in there. Reading the book we thought this didn't matter and that we could follow the river further down, so off we headed on a path - after a while this disappeared and we just had to bushcrash - there were animal tracks here and there, but it was the toughest walking, in a way, that we'd ever done. We've never done anything like this trek before. It was such an overgrown wooded valley. There were fallen trees every-where which you had to climb over or under or around so even though we weren't climbing it was exhausting. We were really enjoying ourselves though and although we didn't get very far in the first day, we camped on a stony beach by the river and made a wood fire to cook over and a bigger one to keep warm by -it was wonderful fun. There was a lot of wood around, so we had a really fun time. We had stopped really shattered but this got us going again and we played around like kids all evening and the supper tasted much better for it! It felt like one of the wildest places we've been. The reason for a lot of the wood is that there are Beavers everywhere. They have changed the landscape quite a lot. Earlier that day we found a skeleton and I pulled the two top incisors out for a souvenir - they were incredible, huge, long curved things. It's amazing to see what damage they have done; huge trunks of living trees chewed through and snapped off into the river. Lots of smaller ones also - we didn't see many big dams until the next day - well we thought these were big until the next day. We set off thinking it must get easier, but it didn't, in a way it got harder - we had to get across an open bit, hooray, no trees for a while we thought, but this was boggy, mossy stuff and was like walking on a big sponge and very difficult. Back into the trees and slogged on and on - really kept thinking after this it will be easier. I started longing to just be able to walk ahead, we kept having to back-track to get around bends in the river or banks or thickets of fallen trees. Phew! We found a sort of path then and were sitting having a drink when 3
horses and riders came long, one in Gaucho dress and two young tourists.
We couldn't believe they'd got through all this rough ground. They were
really going fast, the horses were puffing and blowing. They stopped and
chatted for a while (well another stilted mangled conversation with a lot
of 'ers' and pointing). We said we were on the right path for where we
were headed but looked impressed that we were going so far. They then
clattered off - if our Spanish had been better, we could have asked where
he was going. We followed the hoof prints anyway. If I hadn't see it, I
wouldn't have believed you could have taken horses through this valley. We
could see where they'd jumped fallen trees or gone up around, up and down
steep steps and through thickets. We found a nice sandy beach on the island between an oxbow lake and main river and decided to camp there. It was a lovely site; we made another fire and cooked supper - really wild stuff. We counted all our food and decided if we didn't make good time tomorrow then we'd better turn back as although we'd brought lots of extras, we didn't have enough if every day in the book was going to take 2! Also he says in the book that after the pass (coming next) it gets hard! Oh dear! Off to sleep, it had started raining but we were warm and snug and cosy - it rained all night but by morning had turned to snow! The oxbow lake that had been a brown still pond the night before was a raging torrent. The tent was covered in snow - and we thought things couldn't get worse! We stayed in bed for another hour until 7 - I went out for a wee- everything was wet around the tent, not us, but everything else - rucksacks - Poo!! Worst of all, I had put my Beaver's teeth in the water tied to a stick, to get rid of the maggots and they'd been washed away. I was really upset. We sat in the tent and wondered what to do. The water level dropped a bit; we decided to go on to see if we could find the proper crossing place. Packing up was miserable, very wet stuff and very windy; we managed in the end and headed off, the packs felt very heavy as they were sodden. We struggled on for a while but no shelter, the river seemed broader here and harder to cross - of course, now the river was much higher than yesterday so back we went and down towards where we crossed before, but on the way found some fallen trees and a beaver dam that looked crossable! So, off with boots and socks, up with trousers and either walked or sat and shuffled, both hard with a heavy rucksack) across 5 tree trunks. Boots hung around neck. Because of the rain, the camera was packed away, otherwise we'd have taken each other as we both thought the other looked hilarious. We were quite relieved to get to the other side! We then walked on down - the snow had made the pass out of the question and we'd had enough, although in a way we didn't fancy having to go back either! Through all that again, Oh No! After a while we passed where we'd waded across the day before and it would have been over our waists today! On and on back - all day it rained or sleeted or snowed or hailed - we were jolly wet. The bits that had been muddy the day before were now so wet and deep it was a hard day of wading through mud. We lost the path (again), back across the tributary and found ourselves getting stuck in a thicket among overgrown fallen trees. I got stuck bending to crawl on all fours and couldn't get up; when Pádraig tried to help by pushing, I fell over onto my back and lay there, stuck like a beetle, legs waving in the air and just couldn't get up or even turn over. Pádraig had to help and by pulling my rucksack, so I didn't have to lift that weight as well, I managed to stand - phew! We went back and found the path and luckily, well we were determined, we didn't lose it again. We stopped right by the path under the trees for shelter and camped that night - no fire tonight, but hot soup on the stove tasted pretty good. We'd just eaten it when we heard voices and looked out of the tent to find 3 soldiers standing there; we didn't understand what they were saying, but looked for our Park Entry receipt as the warden said we were to show it to the Military if we saw them as he stamped the back saying we were going to camp in the park. They didn't want that and then we realised they were saying "Jennifer" - we went cold - Jenny obviously was still lost - not in Ushuaia they said; we told them that we'd seen 3 friends of Jenny's yesterday and how far and where we'd gone, but that we'd seen no sign of her at all. They said they'd go on and we said goodbye. They were not well equipped, they had plastic capes on but only very small rucksacks; this was at 7:45 pm. We didn't sleep very well that night, thinking about her - her 4th night out alone - where was she, she surely should have just turned and followed the river back, we didn't think she could have made it further than we did. All sorts of terrible thoughts, her poor friends must have been worried sick. We decided in the morning to go back to Ushuaia and try to find them and offer to help search. We knew the valley a bit. We set off - a dry day - phew! After 2.1/2 hours of bog slog, stopped to dry the stuff and eat a bit. 2 men on horses came along with big packs also looking for Jenny; we said we'd seen the friends and that no sign of her. We were saying that we'd seen 3 soldiers last night going up the valley but had not heard them come back and saw no footprints going this way this morning. Just then the 3 soldiers came along; they all talked for a while and seemed to think she may have gone up to the left, up the tributary instead of across it, to Chile. The 3 soldiers had stayed out all night with no tent and looked rough. They were going back down and the horsemen went on. We went on after packing up our now dry stuff. We were high up from the river on a good path although very wet - this
is the path he meant in the book. After another hour we came to the signs
that said no entry - no one had told us we shouldn't be in there. It had
taken us 3.1/2 hours to do what had taken 8 on the way out by the river -
much easier. We camped down by the river last night - outside the gate to
the valley. It was flat and open and seemed strange to be back out. This
morning we walked out along the dirt road and at the Guarda Park Station
asked if there was any news and heard that Jenny had been found up the
side valley, yesterday afternoon, maybe by the horsemen! We were so
relieved to hear she was OK. Don't know anymore but that's enough. It was a wonderful walk; it was a smaller circuit than the last one and "much easier" - his words. I'm not sure I trust anything the author says anymore actually and am developing a bit of hatred for him. Pádraig says if it wasn't for the book telling us where to go then we wouldn't be in this wonderful place, still that's no excuse for writing inaccurate route descriptions and saying "You'll come to a path after a while". and then when you get there you don't know if this path is next to the river or in the seemingly impenetrable wood or above it about l00 metres different and hours of clambering around! Despite this, we really enjoyed the trek. It went up one valley across a pass and down the other valley. It was very wild and we met a few horses (their tracks helped) but no-one else. It was nice to get up high with some views as the last trek was all down in the valley and trees. The mountains were beautiful and glaciers around them shone in the sun. On the first day we saw what we think was a puma paw print, it was not a fox we saw lots of them, (prints that is) and was definitely cat like and was 10cm wide and long. We didn't see the real thing though, apparently they are quite shy and you don't see them very often. We camped near the top of the valley in an idyllic spot in the shelter of some small trees but with snowy jagged peaks around and waterfalls crashing down the steep sides of the valley. We even had a fallen tree for a bench next to the fire. The next morning we climbed up over the pass and dropped down the other side - fabulous views. We got down across the scree and reached the grassy slopes as the clouds parted and the sun shone through. Pádraig had noticed a big black bird and so down with the rucksacks and out with the binoculars; we got really excited when we realised they were Condors! They were flying around a cliff further down the valley and then landed on it. We were going to walk further down and see if we could get closer, when they all took off and came to see us! I don't think we have ever had such a magical experience. 8 Condors circled over our heads. (I think they knew what guide book we had and didn't rate our chances!!!) Often they were too close to use binoculars, it was amazing to watch them, they are huge and beautiful in a funny way. We stood and watched them for half an hour - they flew level with us in the valley as well, so we really got good views. One flew so close over our heads it must have been only l0-l5 feet above us. Really special. We thought it was a family at first as we assumed the really black and white ones were adults, some were off black and beige, although as big and we thought these were juveniles but maybe they don't have such big broods? Then later walking down the valley I counted at least l4 in the sky! We camped last night down in the valley Andorra, in a lovely green meadow and had a nice walk this morning, a bit fraught losing the path in the boggy wood. I'm beginning to hate beavers as well. They do make walking next to streams difficult - today's dam was hundreds of yards wide making an enormous pool - it's fantastic the amount of destruction they cause and we still haven't seen one. Haven't been able to replace the lost teeth either. We got onto dirt track which was 5 km to the road where we might catch a bus - the first farm, on the dirt road, we passed had a vehicle just going to town, so we got a lift all the way - very handy! We went straight to the Supermarket and filled a trolley! There's nothing like eating soup and pasta for a few days for whetting the appetite. We came back home (this campsite feels like home now) - they are a wonderful friendly family and welcome us warmly, the Mother (we've adopted her) says "are you hungry and tired - aah"! - our washing is now in her machine - we'll miss this place. We showered and then cooked 2 enormous steaks on the griddle in the kitchen with onion and sweet-corn and potatoes - it was gorgeous - mmmm! Steak is very good and very cheap here, these 2 cost $2 each and they were huge. Same again tomorrow. Now 4 hours later, I'm going to have pudding - banana and yoghurt and dulce de leche. The scenery, the wildlife are great BUT THE BEST thing about Argentina is Dulce de Leche - it's a sort of liquid spreadable fudge and is completely divine. I hope they have it in Chile. We plan to head there next, maybe day after tomorrow and trek in Torres del Paine then up to Puerto Montt and hope to get horses near there. Anyway, must go - pudding calls! I love and miss you all, Kate XX
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Copyright ©2001 Adrian M Wadley. All Rights Reserved. South America photographs, letters and text used with permission and copyright ©Kate and Padraig Queally 1997-1998. All Rights Reserved. |