El Puesto Sur - El Chalten, Argentina

El Chalten was the site of our best hiking to date and it was also the site of our locking the keys in the rental car! We picked a great place to do it too: a tiny town with only two mechanics, both of whom were out of town that day. After searching around for someone to help we finally found this guy who fished the keys out of the ignition with a long stick-like thing and then pried the door frame far enough away from the car frame to allow the keys to be pulled out. Whew, that was a close one. It only took 2 hours to start to finish, which sort of finished our day.

El Puesto Sur was a set of rather ugly cabanas from the outside, but they were quite nice on the inside and Omar, the owner, was extremely helpful and friendly. We loved having a refrigerator and a kitchen of our own, not to mention the two bedrooms and the ability to spread out a bit. It had no TV, but that has come to be a plus for most everybody.

WGGSH? - Yes

WWSHA? - Yes

The Coast of Argentina

Actually, we are now inland in Patagonia at the eastern side of the Andes Parque Nacional Los Galciares. We first visited the Perito Moreno Glacier in the southern section of the park, near El Calafate. (Look for Ainsley’s upcoming posting about trekking on the glacier.) Today we are in El Chalten, in the northen section of the park, listening to the wind blow and blow while the rain whips. In fact, we have been here for two days and have yet to see the famous Fitz Roy peak because of all of the clouds and rain. Hopefully the weather will clear and we will see it before we leave tomorrow. We head further north then, planning to have TV coverage wherever we are on election night. We’ll post some pictures soon about our hikes around El Chalten, but here we will catch you up on all of the wildlife from the coast in this posting.

Reserva Faunistica Peninsula Valdes

The Lonely Planet Guidebook says that this is one of South America’s finest wildlife reserves and we definitely concur. What I didn’t appreciate from reading the book and looking at the maps was the massive size of the peninsula. It has a total area of more than 3,600 sq km and more than 400 km of coastline. We drove over 250 km the day we visited the three main wildlife-viewing sites on the Peninsula. Of course, we saw the Southern Right Whale that Jack wrote about, but we also saw sea lions, elephant seals, Magellanic penguins, guanacos, sheep, rheas and plenty of seabirds. We hoped to be lucky enough to see some Orcas off Punta Norte, but there were no sightings the day we visited. Six were seen the day before, but it wasn’t to be for us. If you have ever seen film footage of orcas lunging onto shore to snatch a baby sea lion or sea elephant for lunch, it was filmed at Punta Norte on Peninsula Valdes, the only place where orcas have been seen to exhibit this behavior.

Overall, we were all awe struck by the wildlife we were able to see on the Peninsula. Seeing it on TV and in books is one thing, but actually seeing these animals up close was stunning. Kelli and the kids even watched a whale directly below them from the Puerto Madryn town pier for about 15 minutes. Just like the whale on our whale watch, it was right there for them to observe only two feet from the pier. What a great thing!

Gaiman and Parque El Desafio

We stayed one night in the small town of Gaiman after departing the Peninsula. The main attraction here was the teahouses resulting from the town’s Welsh heritage. No surprise that Kelli would search out a teahouse during our travels. We had a very relaxing down day here, enjoying the treat of afternoon tea, playing at the playground and exploring the most bizarre park we have seen, Parque El Desafio. Eccentric octogenarian Joaquin Alonso, the “Dali of Recycling,” created this park constructed exclusively of recycled beer cans, soda bottles and other materials, which gained it Guinness World Record status in 1998 as the Earth’s largest ‘recycled’ park. Amidst the truly zany designs he has painted small plaques with humorous sayings such as ‘Si quieres vivir major, mezcla a tu sensatez unos gramos de locura’ (‘If you want to live better mix up your sensibility with a few grams of craziness’). That he certainly did in building this park.

Reserva Provincial Punta Tomba

Yes, we saw Magellanic penguins on Peninsula Valdes, but we didn’t truly see them until our visit to Punta Tomba, Continental South America’s largest penguin nesting colony. There are more than 500,000 penguins in this colony and the number can grow close to 1 million after the two eggs from each of the 175,000 or so nesting pairs hatch in November and the juveniles from the season before return to molt in February. What a site that must be! We were fortunate anyway to walk through the park and observe the penguins keeping their eggs warm in their nests dugout from the desert-like ground, see them walking the “penguin highways” to the ocean and watch them zoom at fast speeds under the water. We also found a pair of English speaking park rangers who were able to answer the kids many, many questions about the their migration patterns, breeding and other aspects of penguin life in general.

Monumento Natural Bosque Petrificados

After our “lovely” (said with much sarcasm) stay in Comodoro Rivadavia, a powerhouse in the now privatized Argentinean oil industry, we headed further south, stopping at a petrified forest park. I had seen a petrified forest during my family’s cross country trip in 1976, but Kelli had yet to see one. So, this was a priority for her and a good side trip for the kids. We had some explaining to do for Eliot, that while this is called a forest, the petrified trees won’t be standing up in an actual ‘forest’. After a 40+ km drive down yet another dirt road, we had a great time looking at the massive petrified logs (some more than 7 feet in diameter) and learning about how they were first covered by ash from a nearby volcano some 150 million years ago and then began the petrification process when water carried various minerals into the wood. One of the most interesting things was the variety of colors in the petrified wood, resulting from the different minerals. This was also the location of our fox pictures for Pop, Pop. After a brief stop of 2 hours or so, we continued further south to Puerto San Julian.

I’m sitting here in the internet kiosk with really slow internet access and am running out of time for this posting. So, I’ll do another one soon with our time in Puerto San Julian, Parque Nacional Monte Leon, Perito Moreno Glacier and El Chalten.

Glacier Perito Moreno: Way colder than the coast

When I heard that we were going to see a glacier I was thinking, “cool, a glacier, I’ve never seen one before, I bet it’s huge!” Apparently I had no idea how huge. After driving 45 minutes on a straight but thankfully paved road that turned into a curvy and then dirt-curvy road we got our first views of the glacier. We went to the main touristy area with all of the miradors and short little walks. They had recently built a new walkway that was nice. At the mirador itself the view was incredible! The glacier looked so tiny below me though I knew that it was huge. The face of the glacier averages 50 meters tall. I know, Huge. That has nothing to say to the 130 meters that sit below the water. Because it had been warm the day before the glacier was especially active. Every couple of minutes you could see a huge chunk fall and hit the water, and then a couple seconds later you could hear the big boom. I would have never imagined that a glacier could be that loud.

At 1:30 we were rushing a little to get to the port to catch our boats. It was time for Jack, my mom and me to take our boat out to hike on the glacier. Eliot, because he is 7, was not able to hike on the glacier. Instead he was going with my dad on a boat tour. He was really bummed even though we assured him that he was going to have fun too. My mom, Jack and I took our boat to a small little port next to the glacier. We did a little hiking to get closer to the glacier. We were divided into groups of who speaks English and who speaks Spanish. Everyone else in the English group except for us was from Holland. They eventually moved a family from Madrid to our group though because the Spanish group was too big.

We got crampons at little racks up next to the glacier. They worked, but they were not very nice ones. It was just a rectangular outline with spikes. I could not help thinking how much it would hurt if someone stepped on your foot wearing a pair of crampons. They were also incredibly heavy.

The first step on the glacier felt really cool. In truth it did not feel much different than the ground, but to think that I was walking on the glacier was really cool. The walk was not too hard and Jack and I got to walk in the front with the two twin 13 year olds from Madrid. We got to fill our water bottles up at glacial springs. At the end we had alfajores and whiskey on glacial ice (for kids glacial water on glacial ice). After that hike we were all really cold (my hand could barely take off my crampons).

We took a boat back to a disappointed Eliot who was cheered up a little bit by bottle of glacier water and the front seat of our no airbag car. Because the day had really started at about 12:00 it could not be considered long, but by the end of the day everyone felt like they had been on the road since 7:00. Jack fell asleep on my lap, Eliot on my shoulder and me on my shoulder. We slept all the way back to the hostel.

The Jungle

(Here is Eliot’s first blog entry, about our time in the jungle back in Ecuador. Told by Eliot, typed by John.)

Blowguns

If you want to save money, buy a blowgun and hunt for dinner. (Even though you won’t catch anything, ha, ha!)

We were in Runa Wasi in Ecuador and we were trying blowguns out and our goal was to hit a piece of foam on a stick. Everybody tried to hit it, except they couldn’t, and then our guide tried it and he hit it.

Fishing

Also, we went fishing and instead of using fishing poles we used nets. I couldn’t even throw one out and also what I didn’t think we were able to do was that we were able to swim in the pond. The fish had sharp fins and that was kind of weird that we got to swim in it.

Tubing in Rio Blanco

My mom said that I shouldn’t go tubing except I wanted to go. So, I got in the dugout canoe and what I wasn’t expecting was that our guide fell out into the river and also that the other guide fell into the water too. We were going up the river and went over a rapid and our guide had to get out to pull the canoe over the rapid. Once we got over that we still had to canoe up the river until we found a good spot. Then we stopped and we were going to start tubing. I wanted to see it to see how scary it was going to be. It looked really scary so I just decided to go into the canoe and go down. Then it wasn’t that crazy going down the river so I decided to get out and it wasn’t that scary in the tube. I said “Dad, we have to go back up!”

Hostel de las Manos - El Calafate, Argentina

The kids really have come to prefer a hostel over every other type of place to stay, with the exception of a Servas stay. The reason is that we meet other travelers while staying at hostels and the kids can really hold quite the conversation. They enjoy meeting people from other countries and sharing stories from our travels so far. In fact, we almost need to forcibly remove Jack from a room to keep the conversation from going on all night.

This hostel was a fine one, with adequate bunk beds, a private bath and a good common room/kitchen area. The location was pretty convenient and the price was right.

WGGSH? - No, she probably wouldn’t go for the true hostel stay.

WWSHA? - Yes

Fox Pictures for Pop Pop

Just a quick post to put up a few pictures that we all think Pop Pop will really like. The fox is his absolute favorite animal and we were excited to see a pair at the Parque Bosque Petrificado, or Petrified Forest Park. The 150 million year old logs were neat, but so were the two foxes that were nearby.

We are now in El Calafate, after a long drive on more than 240km of dirt road. Cheers to the Eisenhower highway system in the US. Today we head to the Perito Merino Glacier.

Sea Lion Pup Jumping in the Ocean

We’ve got many, many pictures and videos from our last few days driving down the coast of Argentina. What an education about sea life for all of us, especially the kids. We learned about the threats posed by overfishing in the world’s oceans, the migratory cycle of elephant seals, the mating process for Southern Right Whales and the nesting behavior of Magellanic Penguins to name a few.

Look for more details and pictures soon, but in the meantime we want to share a video that we really loved. Timing luck was on our side and we caught a little sea lion pup jumping into the ocean. The setting for his jump was pretty remarkable with wind whipping around at more than 50 mph, very choppy seas and much sand blowing us back to our car. The little guy remained undaunted by his natural environment and patiently “walked” down to the edge and perfectly timed his jump to the arriving waves. If you look closely, you will see that he pops right back up out of the water almost immediately after hitting it. Here are some pictures leading up to the video.

The Whale Watch I Will Never Forget

In Puerto Piramides, after we moved into our hostel, I thought “what are we going to do today?” Then we went down to the beach and got a whale watch for 4 PM and as quick as I could think we were out on the bay off of Puerto Piramides. I couldn’t wait to get out and watch whales and I thought, “how long are we going to see one of the whales?” I didn’t know how long we were going to see each whale. Would it just go down and we would leave or would it go down and we would wait for it to come back up? But, as we finished our boat ride out to the whales it just faded away from my mind because the whales we were seeing were amazing. Although I had already seen Southern Right Whales off the dock in Puerto Madryn earlier that morning, it was still amazing, but I did feel like we were disturbing them a little more with the boat.

The first two Southern Right Whales we saw were mother and calf (I was happy to be able to see a mother and calf, not just a mother and not just a father). As we watched the mother and calf, we didn’t really see the mother because she was turned upside down and her white belly was right there in front of our faces. It was pretty cool to see the mother really, really tired of feeding her calf, which was why she was turned upside down so the calf couldn’t reach her. It was a pretty amazing sight and they came pretty close to the boat. We didn’t really get to see their tails much, but that didn’t matter. I was just happy to see whales. Now, here are a few pictures.

Now, we had to leave the mother and calf, but later I was really happy that we left them because…….

We came upon a female with two males trailing after her. I was happy now to see all of the different kinds of Southern Right Whales that we could see; a male, a female and a calf. The males and female I found out were getting ready to mate and the female was going to find out which male was strongest. They had to reach her but first had to follow her. Then we saw the female go down with her tale flopping up in the air and the males followed her, trying to mate with her, but only one would succeed. I thought that the last one was the one that was going to fail. As they kept going under and up, and under and up, and under and up, I thought “how long are they going to be able to do this” and then the boat stopped and turned as they turned around in a circle. As the two males were there a third one came up and one of them faded away. Then as one went under water the other backed off because he probably thought he was too far away. The male that was underwater I thought was belly to belly with the female because she wasn’t going down. As the female circled, they would have done a half circle, and then they started turning a little sharper. As the female was maybe only as far as from my head to my feet away from the boat I was wondering what had happened to the male. But now some quick pictures (make it Quick the good part is yet to come)

Then one thing happened. That in a lifetime I will never forget how excited I was when I saw the body of the male Southern Right Whale popping up right in between the female and the boat. I could have touched him. Everybody here (or tourists here) always are amazed by how close you can get to the whales. They say it felt so close that I could touch them. But to everybody, and to even you, I have to tell you one thing. I could have touched them. I’m not saying that I FELT like I could touch them, I COULD touch them. He came up, bubbles rose, and then a humongous body just went PPPOOOOOOOLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! *

It surprised me so much. My hand was kept in the boat, but I wish I could feel the difference of the whale skin and other skins, but I knew that I shouldn’t do it. That is one thing that has sunk into my mind and will stay there for as long as I will live. That might have been one of the maybe five times already in my life that I have had something that will stick to my head. It was so amazing I just can’t bear to think how mad I would have been to have not picked that whale watch. I wish I could have paused my life and played a movie of that whale coming 50 or maybe even 100 times before I would have been able to start my life up again. The video is up there* and you can watch, 100 or as many times as you would wish, but for me that’s just not as amazing as seeing it in person. So, for me that is not enough, but hopefully I get another thing that will stick to my head as long as I live soon. Hopefully before we get back to Buenos Aires, but I don’t think so because the only thing that will stick to my head like that is usually wildlife. One of the favorite things that I have ever seen is wildlife. I would have died to see the amazing sites that some people, very few, but some people have seen of wildlife. But, that was only the beginning. I have yet to make my life an interaction with the hardest wildlife to find in the world.

but as I said the beginning has started the rest has yet to come I will be waiting for more to come…..

(typed by John, but definitely written by Jack)

Hosteria Miramar - Puerto San Julian, Argentina

We pulled into Puerto San Julian in the late afternoon and made a stop that would become a familiar one, to the local tourist office. They gave us a listing of the local hostels, hospedajes, hosterias, etc. and we set off to find the right one for us. This time around we found a really nice one. Hosteria Miramar was right across the street from the water, near to a playground and it had wireless. The trifecta I suppose. In addition, it had a bathtub and bidet, which now are also crowd favorites.

This was a definite YES to WWSHA and a pretty strong YES to WGGSH.

Commodoro Rivadavia - A Night to Forget

This was one of our most favorite, just joking, places that we stayed during our stay in Argentina. It was merely a stopover point as we continued our drive south along the coast and we couldn’t wait to leave. Commodoro Rivadavia is the oil capital of Argentina and the guidebook made it clear that there was little of anything with redeeming value for tourists. As far as we could tell from our short stay they were right.

We ended up staying in Viente Cinco (25) de Mayo Hostel and we definitely give it a NO on both the WGGSH and WWSHA. It was one of the most expensive hostels during our entire trip and one of the worst.

The only lasting impact from our stay is a “Commodoro Rivadavia” theme song that Jack penned. Ask him to sing it for you some time.

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