Ushuaia, Isla Navarino and the best trek in the world!

Ushuaia is in the very south of Argentina. The Tierra del Fuego or land of fire. Its 1000km from Antarctica! Flying into Ushuaia was incredible. The views of the beagle channel lined with forest and snow-capped mountains and then the pretty little port town of brightly painted wooden houses, looking very Scandinavian.

The Tierra del Fuego is the largest of south Americas southern Islands (73,753 sq. km) and split between Chile and Argentina. It’s so far south that in summer the sun sets very late, about 11pm, that you can do plenty of stuff outdoors in day light hours.

The Argentinian Fuegan Andes form an arc of wilderness around Ushuaia and resemble a scaled down version of the far higher mountain massifs.

I’d met up with Julie and Kim in a very nice modern hostel with great views and heated floors. The plan was to have a couple of days relaxing and also to explore the nearby Tierra del Fuego national park. Chile and Argentina are much more expensive than other parts of South America and we were really trying to keep costs down by cooking for ourselves and sleeping in dorms. The entrance to the national park was a quarter of my daily budget and the dorm was a third!

The national park was lovely and well worth the visit. Easy trails to follow and at sea level for a change, along a beautiful coast line. We spent the day there, unfortunately the one day it rained! The weather is very changeable and very unpredictable in this part of the world, a bit like the UK!

Our plan was to do the Dientes trek on the Isla Navarino. Navarino is the most southern island in Chile, and the circuit is the most Southerly trek anywhere in the world, before Antarctica. The only way to get to it was in a small and expensive inflatable speed boat, across the Beagle channel. We booked our tickets for the Monday morning with a plan to be able to do the trek easily over 5 days and then catch a once weekly, 30 hour ferry from Puerto Williams, the only settlement on Navarino, north through the Chilean fiord lands  to Punta Arenas.  We were going  to carry all our food and equipment ourselves and do the trek on our own.

Monday morning came and we marched down to the port fully laden will all our gear, most of which we would leave in Puerto Williams. We boarded the little vessel, thankfully covered, in the pouring rain, got about 40 minutes out to sea before the skipper pronounced that we would have to return to port. We were in line with the last of some small rocky islands and just about to hit the channel, but the boat was too small and the waves too big. It was too dangerous. We turned back.

We found another hostel in Ushuaia for the night and prepared to give the crossing another shot in the morning. This meant we only had 4 days including the voyage day to do the trek.

The next day we were back at the port, earlier, and with more passengers.   After going through immigration and having our passports stamped for the second time, we crammed into the little craft and set off once again. This time we made it past the little Islands and we were out into the choppy waters of the channel. Within the hour we had made it across to a small landing platform and the Chilean boarder post and customs control. From there a mini bus picked us up to take us to Puerto Williams on the other side of the island. It is the only settlement and it mainly a navy base and port for ships going to Antarctica. This was definitely the town at the end of the world, where the wild horses and dogs roam.

The island has the windswept, bent over tree look about it. It is very green around the edges with densely wooded foothills leading up to the spikey brown rock peaks of the Dientes Navarino. Although it is summer time here and even though the highest point of our trek was only going to be 829m there are still patches of snow on the ground.

As soon as we got into town and cleared yet more passport stamping officials, we hired a tent and camping stove, went food shopping, notified the police of our trekking intentions and return date, found a hostel for our return day and where we could dump our excess baggage, went to book our ferry tickets and finally set off…….at 5pm! Luckily the first day hiking was only going to be about 4.5 hours and we managed to get a lift to the trail head, knocking off about an hour of road walking.

The Dientes circuit leads around the jagged pinnacle known as Los Dientes de Navarino, the highest summits on the Island.  We started off next to a river and followed a trail steeply uphill through really thick forest. Although this part of the circuit is a popular day hike, the trail is still vague. Every so often we would see a red mark painted on a tree or rock, pointing us in the right direction. We had 2 different route guides which we were cross referencing to make sure we stayed on track. The hill got increasingly steep and there were tree trunks to climb over and under before we reached the clear ground leading us to the summit. It took us about an hour of hard climbing. A real baptism by fire, with our heavy packs!

 It was worth the effort, because as we emerged onto the higher ground out of the woods we had amazing views right across the channel back to Ushuaia on the other side of the water to P Williams on the other side of the Island. From the summit we skirted round the peak, traversing steep scree slopes, before finally descending over large boulders to a beautiful lagoon which was where we planned to set up camp for the night. It was about 8.30pm. After tea and dinner of rehydrated pasta in sauce we squeezed into our 3 woman tent and went to sleep at about 11pm, just as it was getting dark!

The following day we woke early had breakfast and broke camp. The first couple of hours took us steeply up the side of a waterfall and then over a pass between two peaks. We had magnificent views of the Dientes now. There were lots of patches of soft snow, and the wind was ferocious! It was so strong that there were times we just had to hang on to the rock, or fall to our knees to stop ourselves from being blown over. Julie at one point was actually picked up by the wind and dumped on a rock a couple of feet in front. Things quietened down a bit once we got over the other side of the pass. An Italian couple we had met the day before had decided to turn back; it was all a bit too much for them.

 We had to put in 2 long days to make up for missing the first day due to the failed boat crossing and for having such a late start on the second day. The walking was incredible. The scenery changed constantly. The island was colonised by beavers about 200 years ago and they have bred prolifically and built amazingly ingenious damns and caused an incredible amount of destruction to the Islands forests, but this just added to the magical spectacle of the views around us.



Beaver dams

 Some parts were dry and rocky and some were deep snow or deep mud. Julie managed to be knee deep in mud at some points and for some reason by the end of the day I could feel the heat from a blister building up on my left heel. Weird considering I’ve been hiking in the same boots constantly for 6 months and never had a problem.

Julies muddy feet

 We managed to go a good distance by about 6pm and found a nice campsite near to a lagoon with a fast running stream next to it. We had been told we were allowed to have camp fires and as the beavers have left so much dead wood everywhere we set about building one. Dehydrated pasta again for dinner plus tea and biscuits. My feet were in tatters and had swollen up from all the ankle twistingly hard walking we had done carrying a heavy pack.

 A couple of neurophen and some compeed were hopefully going to help! We managed to cook on the camp fire, saving our gas. Julie had a complex sock and shoe drying operation going, but mainly just managed to burn holes in her socks!

We woke to beautiful sunshine the next day and headed off feeling pleased with ourselves that we had covered such a good distance the day before. Again the scenery was just brilliant. It was thrilling to be somewhere so remote and to be wild camping and guiding ourdelves. Some of the path finging was really tricky and the markers were pretty much non existant or very faded, but we were still on track. By lunch time we knew we just had one pass to go, so after our sandwiches we had a little sleep on the hill before heading up the last  pass.

The pass wasn’t so big,  but what we hadn’t accounted for was a seemingly endless rocky plateau at the top. Ankle twistingly hard on the feet, especially mine!

 But again the views were worth every bit of effort and pain. We had all gone knee deep in stinking bog mud at some point or other during the day! When we finally reached the edge of the pass to start our down hill decent we could see views below us of big lagoons and the channel once more, which would be the end of the circuit. First we had to tackle an almost vertical decent down an incredibly long scree slope. Thank god it wasn’t windy!

We made our final camp at the end of a large lagoon with views back up to the pass and over to the sea. It was a beautifully sunny evening and we knew we only had a few hours to walk the next day to get to the road, where hopefully we hitch hike a lift the 7 to 8km back to Puerto Williams. We sat up late round the campfire drying our muddy, now rinsed, boots and socks. Julie managed to burn another pair!

We didn’t get up until 8.30 the next morning and it was only that the sun had made the tent so hot we were baking. After breaking camp we set off down hill, past beaver dams and lagoons along a river and into thick forest. The trail soon disappeared and we found ourselves doing an assault course of climbing over, under and through tree trunks, our only real direction was that we should be heading down hill, and where ever the wood was thin enough to let us through. It took us about 2 hours to get through the tangle of trees which cleared to allow us views of the water, a beautiful bay and the road running along the coast.

 We ended up walking the 8km back to Puerto Williams. A couple of vehicles passed us but one was full and one going the other way. It was a nice feeling to get back to the hostel, have a shower and put on my flip flops! We cooked up a storm of a meal, ribs, mash potatoes, greens, tomato and avoacado salad and cake, sorted all our stuff out and got our bags ready for catching our 7am ferry the next morming.

Wine and desert!

After finishing the Salar de Uyuni tour I was dropped off at a little outpost in the desert, which was the Bolivian border, to wait for a mini bus to take me across and into Chile. For some reason you can’t take fresh food or flowers across the border so there was a growing pile of produce outside the little office that travellers had left behind.

The bus took us down from the high altitude desert in Bolivia to the low altitude desert of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile.

Arriving at the immigration office and customs control in Chile, San Pedro just looked like a shabby little muddle of low rise dwellings built out of just about anything, from mud, straw, glass, wood, corrugated iron etc. We had to queue for a long time in the baking sun for our turn to get our passport stamped by the one official on duty. A coach load of people from Paraguay were ahead of us. A weirdly mixed bunch with quite a few Mormons, all identically dressed in pristine black dungarees, pastel short sleeve shirts and baseball caps. The people in the Southern parts of South America are much more western looking. Often fair haired and fair skinned, I was no longer the only blonde on the bus and aside from my back pack could blend in quite easily. After a couple of hours we made it through immigration and completed the short drive to the centre of San Pedro. On the way I started to notice signs for increasingly boutique and swanky hotels nestled behind adobe walls. The centre of san Pedro was really smart red and white clay buildings that gave way onto shaded courtyards and restaurants full of people drinking chilled wine and eating gourmet food. I was surprised to say the least.

I found a nice little hostel tucked away for 20,000 pesos. That’s about $40. Not cheap, luckily I was only staying one night. I had met a couple of 18 year old on the bus, Ross and Joanna, so we had decided to go for lunch and hang out. Being at a much lower altitude it was noticeably hotter.  About the only thing I wanted to do in San Pedro was a night time tour to an observatory in the desert, where I had heard that due to there being no light pollution, you could see the stars brilliantly and that they had about 15 telescopes you could look through, whilst a professional astronomer explained all about the planets and the solar system. Unfortunately the English tour that night was booked out. There were spaces on the French tour and against my better judgment, Joanna persuaded me to part with $25 to go…..It was turning out to be an expensive day. We spent the evening first of all watching a local cultural performance in San Pedro’s main square, eating take away grilled chicken and chips and drinking red wine, before joining the tour at 11pm to go out to the observatory. The sky was a blanket of stars, it was really impressive. The astronomer guide had a laser light that he could point to individual stars of constellations as he was explaining about them. Sadly most of it was lost in translation as neither Joanna nor I speak much French!

Early the next morning Joanna and I boarded a bus to take us to Salta in northern Argentina. About 16 hours through the desert and another border crossing. Thankfully this one was a lot quicker than the last. I spent one night in Salta and then got a bus four hours south to the wine region of Cafayate. The journey was stunning. I had a seat right in the front to of the bus, next to a young lady who was from the region, but studying in Europe, and just returning home for her best friend’s wedding. She was a great source of information and interesting conversation about Argentina, its history and politics. The scenery was amazing. We were driving through a red rock desert. Sandstone carved over time by water and wind into the most unusual shapes and textures. After 4 hours we emerged out of the hills and down onto the hot, dry valley floor that made up the majority of the vine yards. I spend 4 days in Cafayate, cycling around the vineyards, hiking up to waterfalls and generally just relaxing. It was boiling hot in the day time and it was necessary to go inside to escape the heat. It was definitely siesta country. The little town had wide tree lined avenues, South American colonial architecture and horses and donkeys just roamed around, with the odd Groucho trotting up the road too.

After Cafayate I bussed down to Tucumán and then connected straight through to Cordoba. Argentina’s second city. It was still uncomfortably hot. I spent 2 nights in Cordoba, where thankfully I met a nice English guy to go out for meals with.  When I had arrived at the hostel the Argentinian B team for American football were also staying there. It was a bit over whelming. The whole place was full of these gigantic men all shouting at each other in Spanish. They had a game the day I arrived, which they won, so sprits were high to say the least!

Finally I arrived In Buenos Aires! Wow what a city! I was only there for 24hours but had a whirl wind guided tour and was really impressed. It was much cooler and windy. The city reminded me a bit of Barcelona and east village in New York. There were wide avenues lined with plain trees and lots of quirky little shops and restaurants. The area I stayed in was called Palermo and if I had known how nice it was I would have skipped Cordoba and headed straight there.

The next morning I was on my way to the domestic airport to get my flight to Ushuaia to meet Julie and Kimberly. I felt quite excited. Since finishing the tour in Bolivia, I felt like I had just been wasting time in the cities and I was really looking forward to getting out in the hills again.

I left La paz on a local bus full of gringo tourists like me except for the rather large Bolivian lady in the seat next to me. The seats were small, she was large and her multi layered skirts and shawls took up even more room, not to mention her bulging shopping bags! I squeezed in next to her. We had a little chat, she was very sweet, and then she promptly fell asleep, on my shoulder. It was a night bus and the road became increasingly bad. We stopped in the desert at about 2 am for people to use the loo and stretch their legs and then continued down the bumpy road slowly into the breaking dawn. Through bleary eyes the next day broke spectacularly on the desert revealing blue sky and endless stretches of sand. Eventually we pulled up at a collection of concrete buildings, which turned out to be our final destination. My heart sank. It was a dump.
I hurried off the bus, to try to find a hostel. After checking into a rather run down motel I bumped into Greg, the motorcycling Canadian who had arrived the night before. We went for breakfast and he told me his adventures and mishaps during his ride down from La Paz. The Bolivians dont like selling petrol to foreigners and charge, legally, about three times as much as to locals.  So Greg, being on a budget brought as little as he thought he could get away with, and then run out in the desert. Next he had been driving through an area where there is quite alot of civil unrest and had been caught up in a road block and then struck by people with baseball bats as he tried to pass through it. I was glad that our bus journey had been trouble free.

 

Next I went in search of an agency to book my Salar de Uyuni tour. Its a 3 day tour in 4x4 vehicles of the salt desert and then the surrounding mountains and lagoons. I had heard from everyone who I had met who had done it that it was absolutley spectacular and not to be missed, but I was a little sceptacle that 3 days driving over 1000km was going to be my cup of tea. Still the tour would drop me off at the Bolivian and Chilean border and that was where I was headed. There are about 70 tour agencies in Uyuni, so it wasnt hard to find one and I was mostly concerned that the other 5 people in the car would be a good mix. I ended up in a group with 2 French, 2 Colombians and a young English girl.

The following morning we set off early and our first stop was a rusty old collection of trains. In the setting of the desert and the blue sky they looked like some sort of art installation you would see at Tate modern rather than just a grave yard for trains!

The Salar de Uyuni is the worlds largest salt flat, sittling at a high altitude of 3653m and blanketing an amazing 12,106 sq km. It was part of a prehistoric salt lake, Lago Minchin, which covered most of SW Bolivia. When it dried up it left this enourmous salt desert, the Salar de Uyuni. There are several islands that pepper this white desert. The isla del pescado at the heart of the salar is a hilly out post covered in Trichoreus cactus surrounded by a sea of hexaganol salt tiles.

The flat, white expanse of the salt desert is just broken up by the odd tracks left by the 4x4 vehicles zooming accross them and the odd conical piles of salt ready for harvest. The islands seem to float when viewed from a distance and the perspective in all this whiteness is very perculiar.

We stayed the night in a little hotel constructed from blocks of salt with mud and straw roofs and salt shingle on the floors. Our second day was spent driving through a surreal, treeless landscape punctuated by red and orange hills and snow capped volcanoes and heards of llamas and vicunas, near the Chilean border.  There were sparkling aquamarine lagoons with 3 varieties of flamingoes, caked white at the edges with all the minerals in the water.

In parts of the desert the wind had carved the rock into Daliesque sculputres.

One of the most beautiful lagoons was the Laguna colorada, a bright adobe red lake with black  and white shores.

Our second night was spent at a very basic and not very clean hostel, sleeping bag came out, as the sheets didnt look like they had been washed for quite a while. I awoke in the night to find a small cat had nestled on my chest and was contentedly purring while gently scratching at my neck. It refused to budge and I just hoped it didnt have fleas! Our final day was spent visiting geysers at dawn that blew powerful jets of smoke from the bubbeling muddy earth, then driving through still more spectacular landscape, where we were dropped at a small outpost which was the Bolivian and Chilean boarder.