Blog Roll

Merry Christmas from La Paloma, Uruguay! We are baking in Glorious sunshine, it just doesn't come across in the pics...

Big up 4 2008!

lots luv manda & Jim

Tucked away in the middle of nowhere is a small town called El Chalten. It sits in the shadow of the Andes and looks a bit like a goldrush town. Most of the buildings along the unmade roads are under construction. Builders hammer while their materials flap in the harsh Patagonian wind (see pic of Amanda trying to walk). The town was established in 1985. Argentina and Chile were in dispute over the land so Argentina paid people to come and live here. Now lots of hikers come to walk around a national park that skirts the southern Patagonian ice field. It´s the same ice that pushes out that glacier in the previous pictures and is the third biggest freshwater reservoir on earth after Antarctica and Greenland.

We spent three days walking around here, once again camping in the wind whipped shadow of a glacier and seeing even more crenellated peaks. It is possible to get too much of this though. I found myself thinking,´oh yeah, there´s another turquoise glacial lake´. The glacial scenery is fascinating, especially if you like geography. The huge piles of rock (is it moraine?) deposited by moving glaciers look like they´ve been shunted about by JCBs. I thought I might have done better in geography at school if the field trips were to places like this. I went to Devon, and the River Cray in Bexleyheath.

After leaving the park we visited Perito Moreno, one of the few advancing glaciers. It´s said to be the most impressive example in the world. I forgot to take the camera. It´s possible to stand on a peninsula and face the 50m wall of ice which is continually cracking and banging as ice blocks fall off it.

We started to move north on long bus journeys where lunch is served like this (see pic). Patagonia´s mountains and lakes are celebrated but most of it is featureless brown scrub. It´s possible to travel for hundreds of miles and see nothing but this, no people, towns, or anything. One journey was brightened up by a quick round of bus bingo. We didn´t win.
On the way to Buenos Aires we stopped at Puerto Madryn, one of the Welsh Patagonian towns. I had always imagined these places to be lost in time, where people would walk around in traditional Welsh gear. Sadly, this isn´t the case. The big deal here is not Wales, but whales. In November killer whales swim up to the beach to eat seals but all year round it´s possible to see huge Southern Right Whales. This is their breeding ground so we saw three females with their young.

After throwing up in Mozambique I was a bit apprehensive. But I bravely toughed it out on these stormy waters.

Happy 4th birthday Holly Lovelock! I hope you like this picture of a strange sort of bambi animal we saw at a cafe. It was a little girl´s pet. Perhaps your mum can get hold of one in Kent.
lots of love, uncle jim and auntie manda

Three years before Amanda´s great-grandparents headed off to New Zealand, my great-grandfather George Read set sail for southern Argentina. The plan was to make lots of money and return to England to buy a farm. He docked in a town called Rio Gallegos in 1907, two years after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid raided the bank, and exactly 100 years before we arrived (give or take a few days).
Rio Gallegos is scruffy and dust-blown. It´s the kind of place that can alter your mood, a bit like Burnley. The dogs run free; plastic bags whip across abandoned land and the houses look like they´re under seige from the unrelenting wind. It also has the most whacked out collection of old cars we´ve seen since Africa - frail 1970s Renaults and hulking great flat-bed Fords. Having said all that, it´s a friendly place, although the woman at our hotel didn´t appreciate me asking for some milk for my coffee.
"You asked for coffee," she snapped. "Not coffee with milk".

(The pic shows a typical Rio Gallegos scene - a stray dog lounging under a bin; and the bustling docks.)
In 1907 it was a wild west, tin shack sort of place where respectable women stayed indoors on Saturdays while prostitutes hustled on the streets. At least that´s what they told us at the tourist office.
The oldest building in town is now the Pioneer Museum (pic at top) and it just happens to have once been the home of the man who employed my great grandfather. Here we discovered that a descendant still has a farm in the region where he runs a guesthouse.
So we booked in for the night, hired a car and headed off across the featureless scrub (see pic below) that runs in every direction for miles. We passed sheep, the occasional nandu (a kind of ostrich), oil installations and a village-sized ranch owned by Benetton, before arriving at the farm. It´s tucked away at the end of mainland Argentina, wedged between the Chilean border and the Magallanes Strait.

I spoke to the farmer David Fenton (pictured with his wife Peggy) whose great (great?) uncle employed George. We discovered that he probably never worked here at all, it was somewhere else, but no one really knows where. So I made my excuses and left. No, not really, but I had been full of these romantic notions that my own kin had walked around these very fields. What a load of old cobblers. Oh well, at least we got to the southernmost tip of mainland Argentina and visited the continent´s second biggest penguin colony. We were also given huge amounts of meat. Even the bread had meat in it.

(The pics show the view south to the southernmost point; some penguins; and Amanda at the Chilean border)

We also got to see a traditional Argentinian wedding (see pic above). Only joking! That´s a farmhand preparing to shear a sheep. We managed to catch this impressive display of clipper skills before heading back to the mountains.