Get yur Patagonia on

I thought I had it right. I ordered a Hamburger, a plain old Hamburger. Nothing fancy. I even pointed to the thing, and said that I wanted a "Hamburgesa". I was sure the guy understood. He asked if I wanted anything else. I said no, "soloameinto hamburgesa" - just a hamburger. And just a hamburger was what I got - no lettuce, no, tomato, no onion, no sauce, not even a bun. Just a hamburger patty on a plate.

Yeah, must work on the spanish a bit more, it seems. This posting is coming to you from Comodoro Rivadavia, a coastal town in Northern Patagonia. We left Ushuaia about five days ago now, and headed north on the bus back over the barren steppes of Tierra del Fuego, over the Straits of Magellen (it was still stonking, just like the first time we crossed it), up to Rio Gallegos, and then onwards to the inland town of El Calafate. Calafate is a rather touristy town in southern patagonia, and it is centered around one attraction - Perito Moreno Glaciar. And what an attraction it is - from the southern patagonia ice field it descends down to a lake and pushes its way across it, almost slicing it in half (it has done so on six occasions in the last 70 years). The front of the glaciar is about 3km wide and 60-70m high, and it is everything that you expect a glaciar to be - big, white, loud, spectacular. Dorthe and I spent an entire day from 9:30am to 4:30pm sitting at the view point watching it calve ice-bergs off into the lake - in addition to the many small falls and collapses, on we saw a massive hunk of ice simply peel off the top of the glaciar and crash into the lake four separate occasions, creating a suitably large splash and sending a huge wave out across the lake towards us. Absolutely spectacular, and a day well spent.

From El Calafate we then took a bus 225km along a dusty, rutted gravel road to El Chaltén. Chaltén is a mountain town that sprung up recently as part of a terroritorial claim between Argentina and Chile, and it is about as remote as you can possibly get in Patagonia using public transport. And it feels like it - dusty, unsealed streets. Half built houses. Corrugated iron roofs partially blow off. And the incessant Patagonia westerly, stirring up a duststorm like you´ve not seen before. All it needed was a few tumbleweeds and Clint Eastwood, and you´d have yourself a spagetti western. Very frontier. Very cool.

And the real reason it exists? Cerro (Mt) Fitz Roy. The Fitz Roy range is everything you expect of Patagonia - stupendous granite spires soaring 3000m into the sky, with glaciars and snowfields barely clinging to the sides. Below the snowline, the hillsides are again covered in flaming red ñirre (which I now know is called Antarctic Beech, Nothofagus antarctic, in english), and just a smattering of glacial lakes here and there is the iceing on the cake. I have no more superlatives to describe it. For me, this has been the highlight of the trip so far: remote, desolate, windswept, extremeley beautiful and absolutely unforgettable. We spent two days there in total, walking, watching the cloud swirl around the peaks, and trying not to get blown off our feet too many times.

But as I alluded to earlier, that, unfortunately, is about as remote as we can get. It is possible to get more remote, and we tried, we tried very hard actually. Unfortunately though, it didn´t quite work out for us - we looked at renting a car, we looked at hiring a guide, we looked at trying to find a punter to drive us, and unfortunately, they were all beyond our price range - strangely, it was cheaper to hire a 4WD with a driver and english speaking guide than it was to hire the car ourselves! So, as much as I liked the idea of rocking around the most remote parts of Patagonia in a rented Toyota Hilux, we turned back to civilization....

...which brings us to Comodoro Rivadavia. We are basically leaving Patagonia in the next few days after what has been a fantastic trip through this part of the continent. In an hour or so (1:15am), we catch the bus on to Puetro Madryn, where we pay a quick visit to Peninsula Valdés. There, we hope to see some Orca and maybe some Magellanic penguins. Then onwards, northwards to Buenos Aires, and warmer climes. As appealing as the prospect of putting away the fleece and goretex is, I think we are both a bit sad to be leaving cold, windswept, barren Patagonia.