The Llama Awards

I couldn't finish this blog without a proper conclusion on the Llama awards.  Just as the Oscars has it controversies, so too did the Llamas.  However, after some in-depth discussions, a certain degree of harmony between the judges was restored, and more importantly, agreement reached on the awards themselves.

You may remember one of the earliest recipients of an award was an outdoor cafe in Sucre, which received a provisional silver.  Well, said cafe has now been stripped of the award completely, and instead receives a "special mention".  (I'm trying not to be bitter about this, as it really was a favourite place of mine).






We found it particularly difficult comparing a whole town or city with a natural attraction such as a glacier (and even more so with an indidivual cafe or restaurant!).  There was some talk of introducing categories, but I thought it important to keep it simple, and whilst our final decsion-making might not stand-up to very close scrutiny, this list does reflect our favourite places from the trip.  I'm only putting a select few photos here, including places that didn't feature photographically on the original post due to lack of ability to upload at the time.

Bronze

• The Estancia near Salta - for the amazing food, free flowing-drink, lovely accommodation and setting.
• Maipu, near Mendoza, for its gourmet delights and endless wine-tasting opportunities.
• Mena Clavero for the fanstic array of swimming holes and overall lovely scenery along the river.
• The Andean crossing, for the delightful method of transport and huge variety of fantstic scenery
• Ushuaia - for its uniqueness, wildlife watching opportunities and setting.

Silver



Samaipata, Bolivia, which had to be downgraded from Gold, after we concluded we had got carried away at the outset, but still deserved silver status due to its fantastic guest house and huge variety of day trips out with amazing scenery.

Tilcara, for the amazing hostel, the scenery, walking opportunities and restaurants.

• Salar de Uyuni tour - for one amazing volcano-lake scene after another
• Puerto Madryn - for the fantastic array of wildlife-viewing opportunities in proximity
• Bariloche, for it's amazing lake setting, and especially the day trips we had to Refugio Frey and the bike ride
• Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, for its charming colonial old town, cool bars and cafes, and the beach.

Gold

Iguacu waterfalls, both the Argentinian and Brazilian sides.

Torres del Paine National Park, for the amazing aray of hiking opportunities.

Perito Mereno Glacier, for being one of the most amazing natural attractions I've ever seen.

And last, but certainly not least, the special category of Golden Flamingo award goes to the flamingo lake in Bolivia.

Comida y Bebida 2

With eating and drinking featuring so highly on this trip, I couldn't finish the Blog without adding a further part to the food and drink post. 

Food and drink part one finished part way through our week in Bariloche, with what seemed like an entire roasted lamb.  Pleasingly there was still a number of culinary delights to come.

From Bariloche we went on a day trip to a town called El Bolson, with a plan to go for a walk for the day.  However, some fairly torrential rain made us decide instead to have a day of gourmet eating and drinking.  El Bolson is known for vegetarian, locally grown and organic food, so we started off well with an amazing pumpkin pie with cheese and honey, pictured above, for lunch.

We then focussed on testing some of the products of the many micro breweries in El Bolson.  The gourmet food element didn't progress much further, after our first few beers, but we had a great day all in all.  We finished up with a couple of eponomous beers accompanied by declicous empanadas.











Not wanting to miss out on any Patagonian specialities, on our last night in Bariloche, I had trout in lemon and garlic, which was utterly delicious.

I'd like to point out at this stage that we didn't eat out for every meal on this trip, and quite a lot of economising was done with picnics, some cooking in hostels and of course filling up on empanadas  - but we made sure we had plenty of good meals out and tested as many local specialities as possible!

Next up was the much anticipated crab in Puerto Montt.  It was slim pickings as far as restaurants were concerned, but this one came up trumps with not only a variety of crab dishes, but crab and avocado - that really does take some beating!  So delightful was the crab selection that I found it necessary to have it for both starter and main course.

We then had the three nights on board Navimag, where, whilst the food was okay, it certainly wasn't something to blog about. 

But luckily more crab was just around the corner for me in Puerto Natales.  Sadly Conger Eel was out of season, but this King Crab dish provided a most welcome alternative.





This is in a lovely restaurant in El Calafate, after visiting the glacier.  The main speciality of the town is lamb stew, so obviously that's what I had to have, and it didn't disapoint. 

I couldn't resist taking this photo.  It's in a restaurant in Ushuaia called Moustaccio, which aside from having a comedy name, also served a wide selection of seafood dishes.  Lured by Lonely Planet's mention of a crab omlette, I was then slightly dissapointed with that dish, as the crab did not really predominate.

However, this was made up for the following night in one of my favourite restaurants of the trip.  I did survey the again quite wide variety of sea food dishes, but couldn't resist crab, knowing this was probably my last chance.  I plumped for crab au gratin, and it was a taste sensation.  Chris had the most ginormous seafood soup, accompanied by Beagle Beer, so he was also happy.

There's one last category of food which I consumed throughout the trip, but which strangely doesn't seem to have been captured on camera at all - and that is ice cream.  Argentina in particular is well-known for its ice-cream, and so that gave me an excuse to sample it as often as possible.  We came across a large variety of flavours, some very specific to Argentina.  My favourite (for novelty, rather than flavour) was malbec, located, not surprisingly, in Mendoza.

The End of the Trip

So having managed to escape from the End of the World, we were determined to make the most of the last few days of our trip.  We had a great time in Colonia de Sacremento, in Uruguay, only a hour over the water from Buenos Aries, but a world apart.  

To recover from our Ushuaia experience, and because we liked Colonia so much, we stayed an extra night rather than dashing to another destination back in Argentina.

So we had a lovely couple of days pottering around the old colonial town and chilling out in various cafes and on the beach, which might not have been up to Brazillian standards, but was a welcome treat for us at the end of the holiday.

 

And then it was back to BA for a final day and night, staying  in a different district this time.  It was absolutely scorchio, hitting 35 degrees, so we took it easy and just pottered about various cafes and then later had drinks in some of the historic bars.  I particularly liked this one which had its own microbrewery.

 

To round off our final night we treated ourselves to an absolutely slap up meal at a traditional parilla, where the food was fantstic and came in huge quantities.  I didn't manage to capture the food on camera, but this is Chris clutching his stomach afterwards!!

After eating so much, we had to go a walk along the canal, which looked lovely at night. 

And that was basically that, the end of our trip.  However, I feel the need for a couple of round-up posts, so don't stop reading yet!

The End of the World

This rather apocalyptic title is the nickname given to Ushuaia, which is pretty much as far south as it goes before Antarctica.  We had a most enjoyable time here, despite some rather inclement weather. 

We spent one day on a coastal walk through Tierra del Fuego National Park, which wasn’t quite as I’d imagined it to be, much more green and lush, and slightly less bleak. 

 

Another day we went on a boat trip through the Beagle Channel, visiting various points of interest along the way, including a seal colony, the southerly most lighthouse and a cormorant colony.  Although we weren’t really that far from shore, at times the town completely disappeared as it was enveloped by cloud, and our boat felt rather too little for being bashed around the high seas in the way that it was.  But all in all a most enjoyable excursion.

Our final day in Ushuaia was slightly less enjoyable, and at one point it looked as if we could be stuck there for many more days to come.  The End of the World is not a great place to be stranded, with transport options rather limited.  We were due to leave on a flight, going back to Buenas Airies, with only a few days left of the Big Trip.  However, the ongoing problems caused by an ashcloud from a Chilean volcano finally caught up with us and our flight was cancelled.  Given how many times I’ve had flights and holidays cancelled over the last year or so, it’s perhaps a miracle that it had taken until now, but that didn’t stop it being rather annoying. 

 

So rather than spending the day hiking to Glacier Martial, we spent most of the time at the airport trying to rebook ourselves on to various different flights, which were then also cancelled.  We did manage to dash out at one point and take a taxi and a ski lift up to the glacier which was quite good fun, and go on a small circular walk to see the glacier from afar and the view over the Beagle Channel, but it wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind (glacier in previous post).

 

One slight compensation for spending so much time at the airport is the amazing view of the town and mountains.  Thankfully, after a number of false starts, we eventually managed to get ourselves on a flight.

Glaciers Galore

So, it turned out that glaciers featured quite highly in the Patagonia part of this trip.  First there was Pio XI viewed from Navimag (see previous post, but pictured here to stick with the thematic).  This was spectacular and the boat went really close, but there was a signiciant amount of rain and mist which constrained viewing somewhat.

Next up was  Glacier Grey in Torres del Paine National Park.   

Chris had already been to Torres and done the whole of the famous “W” trek a few years ago (so called because it roughly follows the path of that letter) so we chose this time a scaled down version of the two outer arms plus a little bit in the middle, covering some of the best scenery of the park.  

 I really enjoyed our time here, despite what felt like hurricane force winds on the first day, that really did make it hard to keep my feet on the ground at times (check out my hair!). 

The walk to the glacier was fantastic, great scenery all the way, and the glacier itself did not disappoint. 

We stayed in a lovely little refugio that night, right by the glacier, providing welcome shelter from those gale force winds.

This is the view from the boat crossing Lake Pehoe on the second day, after the glacier walk. 

The weather then turned quite scorchio, which was a bit of a welcome surprise, allowing me to walk in shorts which made me very happy! 

 We went on a short walk in the centre of the park, going to a viewpoint of “Los Cuernos”, one of the signature views of the park.  The scenery here really was stunning.

 

On our last day in the park, we walked up to the “Torres”, named after the Towers, as seen on the photo.  I found this something of a challenge, especially as we had a very tight timetable, to get back to catch an unmissable onward transfer.  Despite starting off at 6am, we were still running the last bit back.  But it was worth it, the view at the top of the Towers is incredible.

There hasn't been much mention of Llama awards recently, mainly due to the slight disagreements between myself and Christopher as to exactly how they should be awarded. However, we concluded that TDP should get a gold, due to the large array of amazing walking and scenery. 

The third glacier was the absolutely stunning Perito Mereno, near El Calafate.  In the same way that Iguacu cannot be described as “just a waterfall”,  this is far more than “just a glacier”.  I’ve seen a fair number of glaciers around the world on my travels, and this totally stood out from anything I’ve ever seen before.  It’s vast, it’s growing, ice breaks off on a frequent basis, making loud cracking sounds, and there’s lots of mini icebergs floating around.  

One of the faces can be viewed from a boat trip and the other from a set of fairly amazing walkways built around this section of the national park.  We happily spent a good few hours wandering around these walkways, viewing the glacier from every possible angle.  And this wasn’t just me being a geeky geographer, everyone we met in Argentina who had been here was equally enthusiastic about it.  We were in firm agreement that another gold llama award was appropriate.

The final glacier really belongs in the next post, and in the end we didn’t view it as close up as we had planned, but it still deserves a mention here– that is Glacier Martial in Ushuaia.

A voyage at sea

So we had decided some time ago that rather than either flying or bus-ing for days on end down to southern Patagonia that we would like to take the boat.  Navimag sails once a week down the coast of Chile, in and out of fjiords and channels, taking around 4 days to make the voyage. 

We also decided against another tedious bus journey to get to Puerto Montt, the boat departure point in Chile.  Instead we went via the "Cruz de Andino", the Andean Crossing, traversing a series of lakes, with bus connections in between,  passing through amazing national park scenery. 

This was my favourite part, crossing lake Llanquihue in Chile, with Vulcan Osorno as a backdrop.

We also stopped to drop off some passengers in a little place called Puerto Vargas, which looked stunning as sun set approached and a rainbow appeared. 

We decided this was a really cool way to travel, but sadly the opportunities to replicate it are few and far between (although perhaps a Manchester to London voyage via the Humber and Thames estuaries has potential??).

Anyway, that was quite a diversion, back to Navimag.  It used to be strictly a container ship, but over the years has adapted to interest from tourists to take passengers as well. We weren´t really sure what to expect, had heard tales good and bad, but we had a fantastic time.

We had a cosy little cabin, sharing with two others, with a little porthole looking out to sea.  The day of departure was fantastic weather, bright sunshine and really warm, giving us splendid views of the volcanos around Puerto Montt and an amazing sunset that night.  This felt like a real bonus as one of the warnings we’d read was that it could rain for days of end, with cloud so low it was impossible to see anything beyond the boat.

The weather did deteriorate thereafter, but did not detract too much from our enjoyment.  One real highlight was a stop at a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere, Puerto Eden, in a national park reminiscent of Scottish peat bogs, with a rainfall of around 8 meters a year. 

That's Navimag in the background.  We had to keep our life jackets on the whole time we were walking round Puerto Eden!

Another highlight was sailing right up to a glacier, Pio XI, which was incredible viewed from the sea (see next post). 

And I also just enjoyed sailing in and out of the various fjiords and channels, sometimes observed from the Bridge when the weather was too bad to be outdoors (I really liked being on the Bridge, I think it gave me a feeling of self-importance being close to the Captain!).  Some lucky people on board spotted killer whales, but I was happy to see dolphins, sea lions and a seal.

The Lake District

Bariloche is at the heart of the Argentinian Lake District.  We were staying in a lovely hostel overlooking the lake, and to begin with the weather was amazing, like the middle of summer.  We even swam in the lake, much to the amusement of the hostel staff who cheered us on from the safety of the hostel lounge.  This is the hostel garden.

 We stayed in Bariloche for a whole week, going on various day trips up mountains and round lakes, on foot, bicycle and kayak.

 

It really is an outdoor paradise with absolutely amazing views all over the place. One of my favourite outings was a day walk we did to a refugio, that was still surrounded by snow. The views were stunning all the way, and it really was a perfect walk.

My other highlight was cycling round the “Circuito Chico”, a circuit that took in the best views of all, and included an idyllic spot for lunch by the shores of one of the lakes, where we swam again, and also a visit to a mircobrewery.

Sadly the good weather didn't last and by the time we went kayaking, it was cold, wet and windy - but we still had a good time.