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The bus drive from Los Antiguos to El Calafate was literally the most boring of my life! The scenery consisted of totally flat landscape with tiny shrubs no higher than 30cm, not even any trees, for 12 hours, with the occasional sighting of nandus (emu like birds) and guanacos (kind of like llamas). The bus driver actually stopped the bus when we got to a lake and made us get out and take a photo as it was the first remotely interesting thing we'd seen!
However the trip was worth it when we got to El Calafate and went to see the glaciar. I can't even describe the size of it to you, it was pretty difficult to get the right perception, and it was full of cracks that glowed bright blue in the sunlight. Its one of the only still advancing glaciars in the world so its almost reached the land, and there are a series of boardwalks on theground at different heights and distances from it. If you stayed for long enough and had a lot of patience you could even catch massive chunks of ice falling from the front of the glaciar into the lake (we did NOT manage to catch this on film!)
We left El Calafate and returned to Chile, to Puerto Natales. Our main reason for going there was to visit Torres del Paine national park, but we actually stayed 4 nights and managed to fit a lot of things in. Our first day we didn't get up til quite late as we were catching up on a massive sleep defecit, but in the afternoon we went to a hill nearby, Cerro Dorothea, and climbed to the viewpoint at the top. The entrance to the trail was at a little farm, where you paid and then were given food and drinks when you returned. The actual 'trail' up the hill was a bit of a health and safety hazard, but when we reached the top about two hours later the view was pretty amazing, and when we got back down we were met with a spread of bread, cheese, ham, eggs, biscuits, crackers, tea and coffee, the woman just couldn't gtet enough of feeding us and kept bringing out more and more!
Our second day in Puerto Natales we went to visit the nation park. A lot of people do hiking trails for a few days, but I wouldn't have been able to manage with my ankle so we just did a day trip where the bus took you round and stopped at the best places for you to walk for an hour or two, so we got to see one of the waterfalls and a lot of lakes and another glaciar called glaciar grey, but to see the glaciar you had to walk across a beach and go up onto a hill/island at the end of it. The beach took us 20 minutes to cross and the wind was insane, definately winning on the windiest place we've been stakes!
The third day we went with one of the guyd who runs the hostel to another big hill/cliff to look for condors, as thats where they make theire nests. The climb up to the top was a bit of a struggle for my ankle and I was in quite a lot of pain when we reached the top. We saw a few condors from the top but they were quite far away from us so you couldn't really grasp how huge they are (about 2m in width). After dosing myself up on cocodamol, when our guide asked us if we wanted to go back down the way we'd come up, or the cliff path/rockclimbing way, I agreed to the latter and I'm glad I did because it was way more fun if not a little dangerous! We got to see lots more condors from up so close that when they flew past you could hear the air rippling through their wings, we also saw a few eagles, and collected some feathers that were bigger than my head! Add to that the fact that we were on a sort of sloping ledge with a sheer cliff face on one side. I fell over quite a lot of times (Ben also fell over a few times) and the only plants which grew on the cliff were stupid spikey plants that I kept putting my hands/arms on and ended up looking like I had measles, as well as a lot of splinters, which are still happily embedded in my hands, I also acquired a number of impressive scratches, but our dangerous cliff walk was definately worth it!
- comments
Ansa Brink Looove reading your blog!! Please continue, I wish I was there :)
Brook Haha sounds amazing! Stop injuring yourself Sophie!
Funk Master Pete Is that nandu creature related in any way to Nandos the restaurant?