Happy New Year everyone! Sorry we didn´t do the sms´s, no coverage here on my (dodgy) international SIM card (even though we were supposed to). I guess/hope travel blogs these days are also an accepted form of wishing people well?
Anyway, apart from the usual eating and drinking (fairly standard operating procedure), I have to admit El Calafate (where we are now) did have one little twist: at midnight the sun hadn´t actually set yet fully (it was definitely dusk though, but still). A little odd, but pretty cool. Also a good reminder that we´re getting pretty far south now and well into summer. If only the weather would focus on the summer bit more than the far south bit 
So, looking back I have to admit 2007 was pretty good. Not often you´re lucky enough to get married and go travelling for a few months. 2008 has some expectations to live up to I´m thinking . Anyway, off to Torres del Paine National Park tomorrow, so if the weather co-operates, I´m thinking 2008 might get off to not too bad a start either…
One of the classic walks around one of the best national parks for hiking in the world. Hmmm. Unfortunately you need sun for all the postcard views… (low hanging cloud doesn´t do much for 3000m peaks )
Anyway, it was still a great day´s walking and we saw loads of cool scenery (glaciers, etc), the only thing I couldn´t help but be disappointed with was that it was hailing when we were at the highlight (Laguna de los Tres at the base of Cerro Fitz Roy) at 11am and the skies had cleared by 3pm. Did I mention the wind in a previous post? I thought say Scotland had some changeable weather, but this place really is something different. It does really make it an interesting exercise because even if you get up and the sky is clear, you still have NO idea what kind of day it´s going to be.
Oh well, the good part is that we´ll be back in exactly the same place, doing exactly the same walk, in about two weeks time on a separate trip (a trek of a couple of days, rather than just the day walk we did the other day), so fingers we can cheat the weather after all with our second chance draw :)
Now just need to catch up on some sleep and let the blisters heal (48kms in two days was just a little too much…) between now and then. I guess that´s what the truck is for
Next up after Bariloche was a few days of (fairly boring) driving to get us to our next destination: El Chalten in Los Glaciaros National Park.
Again, with our usual time constraints, we got straight into it with a walk up a hill called Tumbado which on a clear day would give you great views of all the surrounding world famous peaks (Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy). Unfortunately the weather had collapsed a little bit by then; I´ve never been to such a windy place in my life (and apparently it only gets windier from here on in as we go further south. Interesting). Apart from the wind, the glaciers around the place seemed to generate their own weather, or hail and mist anyway. At one stage we would´ve been standing a few kms away from one of the glaciers under a perfect blue sky and we were being pelted with hail and struggling to stand up with the wind. Needless to say the view wasn´t great. Nothing a quick glance at a postcard (taken on a sunny day) couldn´t fix, but different nonetheless.
Still a good walk, but a shame with the timing weather-wise. I suspect from here on in, even though it´s mid-summer, the weather is far from guaranteed to be sunny or anything even close. Can´t have everything I guess, it´s just that the weather around the Atacama desert has made us a little spoilt.
Well, Xmas day was certainly a little different this year. Compared to last year (on a plane to Oz) and the previous year (in wintery London), this year was spent in sunny Bariloche in Argentina.
We only had a couple of days here and so we decided to do one of the hikes we had planned (loop to Refugio Frey around Nahuel Huapi National Park) on Xmas day. Not the most laidback option (especially considering the ski lifts which would normally reduce the walk by 5kms and 600m of ascent weren´t manned that day… strangely enough 8-), but glad we did it. 27 kms of walking, sliding, boulder climbing and some light jogging (to make Xmas dinner on time!) later, we had seen some awesome scenery including panoramas of Nahuel Huapi lake, waterfalls, valleys and mountains reminiscent of Switzerland, a condor and even snow (Justine even made a snowman… way too much energy!), all under a dark blue and very sunny sky. Awesome. And yes, we are a little crazy.
To finish off the day (and ourselves), we managed to get back in time to join the others from the truck for a Xmas dinner at an Argentinian microbrewery (or cervezeria). Slept well that night.