We fly from Ushuaia to El Calafate, returning from the end of the world back to the Patagonian Steppe. We are going to visit the Southern Patagonian Icefield, the third largest body of ice on the planet and totally different from any icefield that we witnessed in the cold Antarctic. The Icefield is 378 km […]
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Antarctica: way beyond imagination
Day 1&2 – Drake Passage: 1000km of ocean between South America and Antarctica and, reputedly, the roughest waters in the world. I was so worried about being sea sick that I started to feel unwell after breakfast, 8 hours before boarding the boat. What a plonker! Our boat, The Antarctic Dream, was built in 1958 […]
Fin del mundo: end of the world
We’ve arrived in Ushuaia — officially the most southern city in the world. It is little more than a town but is the primary gateway to Antarctica. The name Ushuaia comes from the indigenous Yamana language meaning ‘bay penetrating westwards’, a name that could be used to describe any one of a number of places […]
Back to the city
On 3rd January we drove back into Buenos Aires where we started our travels around Argentina a month ago. The stopover was brief to dump the car that amazingly carried us around the country despite its best effort to fall apart. We also took the opportunity to do some shopping for necessities, pack up some […]
Welcome 2010
For our final stop in 2009 we arrived at an estancia in the heartland of the Buenos Aires province known as the ‘Pampas‘. This is an enormous fertile plain where the legendary gauchos (pampas cowboys) roam managing farms and herding huge numbers of cattle. We were staying on an estancia 2.5hours south west of Buenos […]
What a dire nightstop
Putting aside the dire hotel we crashed in for the night we lost a dear and precious friend whilst here – our trusty guide book. A complete disaster, it’s been with us all over South America and somehow was left behind in a petrol station after we had cleaned and hoovered the car. Most tragically […]
A family Christmas with the elephant seals
At last the wind has abated. It is now just a stiff breeze blowing across the flat, dry ground. This is normal. Windmills twist slowly, sighing and creaking as they draw water to the surface, the sun was high and burning hot and the gauchos and sheep-dogs were ushering their charges into their pens. Horses […]