What We've Learned

We're now home after travelling more miles than I want to think about and having spent more money than I care to admit.

We've learned a few things on this journey:

• We've learned that you can never, ever pre-judge people based on what country they are from. Nope. Not ever. Especially not Germans.

• We've learned that playing Jenga on the Drake Passage is an exercise in futility.

• Most importantly, we've learned that "The Suicidal Penguins" would be an awesome name for a band.

(Written on Jan 4, with a tip o' the hat to Dave Barry.)

Puerto Montt and the Lake District

In my mind I've organized this trip as a book: a few days in Santiago as the prologue; Antarctica was chapter 1; Torres del Paine was chapter 2; Tierra del Fuego was chapter 3; this leaves us with a two-day layover in Puerto Montt as the epilogue.

We weren't expecting much here. Really we're only here because the logistics of flight connections in Santiago meant we had to wait two days for the flight to Toronto and I figured we may as well explore somewhere new rather than kill another few nights in the big city. Furthermore, we're pretty weary after a while on the road. Finally, I hadn't heard anything from our Puerto Montt tour operator since I booked it early last year (without paying any deposit) so we thought they might have forgotten about it. It turns out we were wrong and our layover in Puerto Montt was a pleasant conclusion to the trip.

Off the start we encountered a personal first: a female taxi driver. Jessica and I have traveled around the world, for business and for pleasure, separately and together, and neither of us can recall ever having a female taxi driver. (Must resist the urge to make sexist joke about female drivers...) Next, lovely hotel with spacious room with an ocean view and good internet access. Best of all: tour operator hadn't forgotten us and had scheduled a late 10AM start. (We've had a few 5AM starts on this trip and another would not have been welcome.)

Our guide Liliana showed up the next day in a large SUV and gave us a relaxing driving tour of Puerto Montt, Puerto Vera (which, owing to its roots with German settlers, is a Bavarian town in the middle of Chile - unexpected), then onward into the Lake District. The weather held up yet again as we had a hot day with beautiful views of Osorno Volcano.

A few stops at waterfalls and lakes later, we headed up the volcano and rode the world's slowest chairlift to near the summit. (Our bad luck with both weather and mountains seems to have changed this trip. Go figure.)

When Liliana dropped us off back in Puerto Montt, she said bade farewell to Jessica saying "Next time you come here, you must come with a baby!" Ummmm, yeah...

Tomorrow we start the two day journey back to Calgary. Having only slept in my own bed maybe ten times in the last two months, I'm ready for home.

(Written on Jan 3.)

Glaciered Out

A new year; another glacier. I can't even remember the name of this one.

To be honest, after three weeks on the road and with the excitement of Antarctica & Cape Horn behind us, we've kinda run out of gas. Too bad we're on the wrong end of the planet and it's going to take us four days to get home. (First world problems...)

(Written on Jan 1.)

Pia Glacier

While we've seen a lot of glaciers on this trip, whenever we've been up close to them we've been in a Zodiac or other boat with a noisy motor running. Pia Glacier offered the chance to spend a peaceful hour watching it calve and listening to it creak and crack.

There were two options for this afternoon's activity, though it sounded like even the crew didn't want anyone to take part in the "active" option. It consisted of a climb to a waterfall, though the guide warned the climb was difficult, wet, & muddy; you would have to wade across a knee-high stream of glacial run-off; and if you took part in the payoff of standing in the waterfall (fully clothed) there would be no towels or anything else to dry you off until you got back to the boat. "We promise by the time you return to the boat you will be cold, tired, wet, muddy, sore, and possibly injured." We opted for a different option: Jessica had a nap and I had a scotch in the lounge.

New Year's Eve celebrations: ugh. The Chileans have a tradition of eating lentils at midnight to welcome the new year. I clearly ate too many lentils because I woke up headache and nauseated. (I'm pretty sure it was the lentils.)

(Written on Dec 31.)

Cape Horn

On this trip we've had an ongoing run of uncharacteristically good weather: Antarctica was sunny with no wind; Torres del Paine was warm and clear. The real test of our luck was at Cape Horn, infamous for ferocious storms & unsettled seas and site of over 200 wrecks. We've met a few people on our travels who had just completed the same cruise that we're scheduled on and they reported that they were not able to land on the Horn due to high winds and massive sea swells. We were curious about what would happen when the unstoppable force of our recent good luck with weather met the immovable object of the Cape Horn climate...

I'll confess that the light rain when we made landfall stopped it from being a landslide victory:

However by the time we returned to the ship to get a view of the Cape from the sea, it was t-shirt weather:

If you have an important holiday coming up and would like to take us along so the weather is nice, our rate is $1000/day plus expenses. (Disclaimer: Results not typical; for entertainment purposes only; offer void in Ecuador & Germany.)

(Written on Dec 30.)

Bookends

January 1, 2012 at Cape of Good Hope, South Africa:

December 30, 2012 at Cape Horn, Chile:

Not a bad way to bookend a year.

(Written on Dec 30.)

Tierra del Fuego

After leaving Torres del Paine we have a couple travel days working our way back south again. (Another side-effect of our scrambled travel plans is that instead of just working our way all the way down to Antarctica and back, we've gone south, then a ways north, then south again before heading home.)

A brutally early start gets us to the border to Argentina before it was open, though to be honest I think I could probably defeat the security if I put my mind to it:

We had a 24-our stopover in El Calafate but mostly used it as a chance to catch up on internet and laundry. The city mostly serves as a launching pad for trips into the mountains and glaciers to the north, and we had too little time and much too little energy to squeeze something in.

The next day we've flown to Ushuaia, the southernmost city it the world in the heart of Tierra del Fuego ("The Land of Fire"), also known as "La Fin del la Mondo" ("End of the World"). This is the main port for large cruise ships rounding the Horn and the streets our clogged with tourists. The crowds of people make us long for our crowds of Antarctic penguins, guano and all. Thoroughly disgusted, we hit the local grocery store and got some supplies to spend the evening in the common room of our B&B. Jessica is cheating on Gibson with Löm, the inn's dog:

Tomorrow we board another cruise (yes, two cruises in one trip; that's how we roll) with the goal of being at Cape Horn before the end of the year. Fellow travellers we've encountered on this trip have been on the same cruise and reported rough seas with ten-meter swells. It's time to see if our incredible string of good weather holds up...

(Written on Dec 28.)

The French Valley

I have a confession to make: I don't "get" hiking.

Hiking is up there with parades and office Christmas parties in my list of things that everyone else seems to get excited about but which do nothing for me. It's mostly just a long boring walk with many miles between you and the nearest proper toilet. If you don't at least have a dog with you that you're trying to tire out, you've wasted a perfectly good afternoon that could be better spent enjoying an adult beverage in the presence of like-minded individuals.

That said, we spent our second day at Torres del Paine hiking up the French Valley that bisects the massif (the middle peak in the "W" tour). Our streak of uncharacteristically good weather finally broke as the infamous Patagonian winds showed up and demonstrated why this area has such a blighted and blasted look. As for the scenery, once you're right up against the mountains and can't see the iconic towers, it doesn't look all that different from Kananaskis country back home, making us realize that we take for granted how nice the Rockies are.

The highlight for me was the most decrepit bridge over white-waters I've ever seen: missing boards, rusted nails pulled 3/4 of the way out, etc. They probably considered filming the final sequence of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" here but then decided it was too over-the-top.

After a moderate 7.5 km we stopped for lunch a ways up the valley. At this point we had the option of continuing another steep 1.5 km to another lookout, or making our own way back down the mountain. Above us was a viewpoint with a fantastic vista of one of the most famous mountains on Earth; below us was a lodge with indoor bathrooms and a bar. Our choice was clear, though I'm saddened to report the bar was out of the beer I liked.

(Written on Dec 26.)

Christmas in Patagonia

Last Christmas Day we were camping in Botswana. In that case, "camping" meant a 15-ft by 40-ft raised tent with electricity, a bathroom with running water, and an air conditioner.

This Christmas Day we are camping in Patagonia. In this case, "camping" means a 20-ft domed tent with electricity, a bathroom with running water, and a wood-stove heater.

We are getting quite good at "roughing it".

Back in October, the original company that we had booked for getting us to Antarctica went out of business and we had to scramble to find another that could fit around our existing arrangements. While everything worked out, the leg of the trip that suffered most was our visit to Torres del Paine: we only got to spend two days here instead of three. This meant that we weren't here for the full cycle of activities that our camp offered (they have rotating three-day or seven-day programs) and we weren't able to do the iconic hike to the base of the towers.

In hindsight, this was probably for the best. One of the other guests was a 30-ish thin and fit guy who had done the 8-9 hour hike the previous day and described it as "gruelling and somehow it seemed to be uphill both ways". Given that we're out-of-shape and still sore from hiking in Antarctica for a week, it sounds like it would have been a bit much for us. Furthermore, he said it was very busy with constant two-way traffic and every bridge had a queue of 15-20 people waiting on each side; our guide described that hike as "like being at the mall". This really takes the romance out of the journey, so the Torres del Paine "W" hike will join the Inca Trail on our list of famous hikes that we've decided to skip.

The other oddity with our rescheduled visit here is that we are out-of-sync with the other ingoing and outgoing groups, so we had different co-travellers each day. The group on the first day was mostly Americans with a couple of Brits. There were two other Andrews (so a total of three of five of the males in our group being called Andrew, and with one of the women called Annie). We dubbed ourselves "The Andy's in the Andies" and our first  album drops in the spring.

We really enjoyed this group: cynical and raunchy sense of humour that matched our own, and dedicated booze hounds. They had the good sense to bring along some champagne for Christmas lunch (which we drank out of coffee mugs at picnic tables), at dinner several of them had flasks of whiskey from home, and before leaving they exercised the rich oral tradition of letting the new people know the best tips and tricks for getting as much free wine at dinner as possible. These were "our people" and were very sad to see them go.

On our second day they were replaced with dour Europeans and an Aussie family that mostly kept to themselves, so had our first alone time of the entire trip.

(Written on Dec 25.)

Torres del Paine

Apparently Torres del Paine National Park is too far south for Santa to fly on Christmas. He couldn't even bother to deliver us some coal for being naughty; too bad because we could have used it in our cast-iron stove in our eco-dome.

No matter. Who needs presents from Santa when you've got fantastic weather and scenery like this:

We spent the first day here driving around looking at the massif from various different viewpoints.

Then we were taken on a boat ride up to Grey Glacier, which failed to meet our high glacial standards that we developed whilst in Antarctica: not white enough, not calving enough, and we didn't get to hike on it. While everyone else was on deck taking pictures, we stayed inside the boat and caught up on some sleep.

That's right: we're officially glacier snobs.

(Written on Dec 25.)

North to Patagonia

Back in Punta Arenas, we get up very early on Christmas Eve to go and visit Magdalena Island to see... more penguins!

Actually, it was interesting to see the Magellanic penguins who are slightly larger and burrow in holes, rather than building rock nests like their relatives on the Antarctic Peninsula. With a large vegetation-free field of nothing but honking penguins and holes, the island feels like some surreal Dali-esque landscape:

We also spotted the sweetest penguin couple ever:

We spend the rest of the day making a long trip north into Patagonia. Along the way we stop at Cueva del Milodon, a large cave where the remains extinct giant sloths have been found. It is not until late evening that we arrive at our eco-camp in the shadows of the famous Torres del Paine peaks for a Christmas BBQ in one of the domes.

I'll be impressed if Santa manages to find us tonight; we'll have made him come a long way.

(Written on Dec 24.)