A five litre jug of wine can be had in Argentina's wine growing capital, Mendoza, for between five and six dollars. Many of the town’s restaurants have fixed price menus. Your choice of beverage is soda pop, water or wine. Coffee is extra. Massive tall trees line the streets that bring tourists from far and wide to tour the area’s bodegas, or wineries. Ellen and I had never visited our own wineries, in the Niagara region, so it seemed like kind of...

A man in Puerto Montt explained to us that Santiago de Chile was very dangerous, that thieves could steal your socks without removing your shoes. I tried to tell him that those who live close to us, just outside Toronto, think the same way he does. But my Spanish wasn´t up to it. We caught a flight from Puerto Montt to Santiago. No one went for our socks or anything else. Almost everyone we met in the Chilean capital was friendly and helpful. The next day it was...

 Ellen and I are spending four days on a boat travelling up the coast of Chile, through fjords, bays, channels and open sea. They call the boat a ferry, but that's just a pretty word to describe what it really is, a freighter. A thousand kilometres into our fifteen hundred kilometre journey we travel up an inland channel to a small port town. There's a change of boats. The second boat is far more freighter than ferry. Two containers of cattle moo at us a...

     We had our own quiet, little, private room for the first night in Puerto Natales. A handy shared bathroom was right next to us. At 5:30 AM the quiet went away and the bathroom became pee central. A constant flow of echoing urine invaded our silence. The sounds from the endless stream bounced off our thin bedroom walls for almost an hour. Behind the doors of the rooms that are outside our hallway hide a warren of dormitory beds. We´re not there any more...

 I didn't really want to visit Moreno Glacier. The photos I'd seen of it weren't particularly impressive. The big ice was an hour and a half bus ride away, the day was cold and the wind blows all the time in southern Patagonia. But when we got there I couldn't take my eyes off the glacier and didn't want to leave when it was time to go.  Moreno Glacier's jagged peaks climb sixty full meters out of the water. It calves constantly. That me...