North Island

We had met an Irish girl, Emma, in the hostel in Santiago who had an intinerary similar to ours and who was heading to New Zealand. After a couple of days in Auckland the three of us rented a car and began to explore the North Island. We got a Nissan Sunny that had 253,000 kilometres on the clock! And it showed. The roads in New Zealand are quite windy and everytime we went up a hill, we had to hold our breaths and push the accelerator to the floor. And still only after awhile did it hum into action. The Kiwi drivers are known to be agressive drivers and 100km/h is the minimum speed they travel at, even if the speed limit is less. Our Nissan Sunny can barely hit the speed limit and we are causing alot of traffic lines as we make our way across the country.

Well what a beautiful country it is. Our first stop was in the Bay of Islands, a seaside town on the north coast. There are all sorts of sailing tours offered to see the bay. We just wanted short jaunt out onto the water. Chatting to the girl in the tourist office we managed to catch a bargain. There was a Tall ship, the ' R Tucker Thompson' that did daily trips around the bay but included showing you how to sail the boat. The evening sail had been booked by a school to bring 30kids out. But half of them had gotten in trouble earlier in the day and were punished by not being allowed on the boat. So the three of us got tickets onto the evening sail at a bargain price!! The ship sailed the bay for an hour and a half and we all had to coil the ropes, open the sails, climb the mast etc. It was great fun.

From there we drove down to Hot Water Beach. So named because there is a fault line that runs through New Zealand. And on this particular beach there is couple of metres of sand that sits on top of hot thermal water that rises to the top from the rock beneath. When the tide is out, you can dig a hole and sit in the thermal waters. What a nice way to start the morning!! The local shop rents spades but we were lucky and managed to get find a hole that had already been dug and was full of really hot water.

To date the best experience i have had was the black water rafting we did in Waitomo Caves. These caves are home to countless numbers of gloworms and have even been featured in David Attenboroughs Planet Earth. There are a number of options to see them but we picked on of the more extreme. A 27m repel down into the cave, followed cave hiking, floating on inflatable tyres led us in to gloworms. Living in the darkness these creatures use their light to attract prey. It is like watching the stars on a really clear night. As well as the gloworms the caves have some fantastic stalagmite and stalagtite formations. We got a taste for caving as there were plenty of options to squeeze through tiny cave holes. It is amazing how small a hole the human body can actually fit through!! The icing on the cake was the 30m rock climb to get back out of the cave. What an adrenalin rush that tour was.

Kia Ora New Zealand

From Santiago, we had a 13h plane journey that brought us across the international dateline to Auckland. The flight began on a Saturday night and we arrived early Monday morning. So we lost Sunday November 16th. I wonder if that means i am technically a day younger??

After the first view hours in Auckland, i had a nice vibe about the country. The people are so friendly and so laid back, that nothing is a hassle to them. Catriona from work had arrived in Auckland a couple of days before with her friends. We managed to meet up with them and headed down to the Sky Tower. It's the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere and here was our first taste of the extreme sports that the Kiwis are famed for. If you so wished you could get harnessed to the outside of the building, 220m in the air. You are strapped in so you are horizontal and facing the ground. The harness is lowered and you approach a platform on the ground at a rather fast speed. None of us were brave enough to try though we did take the elevator up to the viewing deck at the same height. The floor at the edge of this deck is made of glass and you can see all the way to the road below. A very funny feeling! There is a ticker tape that operates in the viewing deck to notify the viewers when a jumper is about to go. Suddenly you see a person in a blue and yellow jumpsuit passing by the window, that's quite surreal.

Santiago, Chile- Last stop in South America

From Mendoza we made our way over the border into Chile. I have to say that this bus journey runs along the most impressive landscape i have seen. Its a couple of months into the spring and while most of the snow has melted from the mountains there were many places where thick slabs of ice still scatter across the land, it is a very impressive view. Getting through the border went without issue, just had to wait for a couple of hours. Everything was offloaded from the bus, put through the xray machine. Some bags were picked for random searches but luckily none of ours were chosen- not that i was bringing anything dodgy across the border, just had a heap of dirty laundry in the bag!

The concesus on Santiago from other travellers wasn't good so i wasn't expecting very much from the city. But i have to say after spending a couple of days there, i am very impressed. It is one of the city's that i really liked. This was probably helped by the fact we were staying in the bar and restaurant district of the city. It had quite a bohemian feel to it and was surrounded by many theatres. As we were only spending a couple of days in this place, we did a bus tour of the city. One of the stops was in the city park that has a small garden dedicated to a Benjamin Vicuna MacKenna. Well once i saw the surname, my interest was piqued. It turned out he was a Chilean historian and journalist in the 1800s who was sentenced to death for his part in the revolution of 1851. Escaping death he lived in exile for many years before unsuccessfully running for presidency in 1875. His greatest achievement was the 100 volumes of Chilean history that he penned. In this particular park they have a hermitage dedicated to him and there is even an avenue named after him. Good to see the MacKenna's up in lights!

Sun, wine and cycle

From El Chalten we had a long bus journey to Barlioche. Eventhough Barlioche is located north of El Chalten, the direct bus route from El Chalten to Barlioche did not open til Nov 15th, well after we'd be gone. So we had to head down south east to a town called Rio Gallegeos to catch a bus all the way back up to Barlioche. We were pretty much travelling for 24h. We have done about 4 overnight buses in total and even at that we didn't get to the southern most point in Argentina, Ushaia. That would have taken another 16-19h and we just couldn't face it.

Instead we opted to head for Barlioche, a town famed for its hiking and water activites on the lake. But unfortunately for us the bad weather followed us and for a couple of days we were restricted to watching DVDs in the hostel. When we did manage to get out, we went on a cable car up to the summit for an amazing view of the surrounding landscape. Described in national geographic as one of the top 10 views in the world. Well it might have been if it wasn't cloudy!!.

After a few days we headed to Mendoza, further north again. This is the wine making region of Argentina and gets mostly sunny weather. What a nice change as we had sun for the three days we spent there. It's funny but since we are following the tourist trail we are constantly bumping into the same people. On a bus or on a hiking trail you come across friends that you met in a bar or in the previous hostel. The same happened in Mendoza where we met up with a Portuguese couple we had gotten to know. They had arranged to do a cycling tour of the wineries and we joined in. It had been recommended to them to rent the bikes from a 'Mr. Hugo' in Maipu town. We were given a map of the area with 5 wineries highlighted and set off. We were a group of 11 and after a few kilometres cycling we arrived in the first vineyard. Wine tasting is the proper thing out here, known of that 'spitting out of the wine' when you have tasted it. You down it all. As you can imagine the cycling got easier as we visited each winery. In addition to the wineries we visited an olive factory and finished off the tour with a visit to a chocolate liquer factory. On return of the bikes to Mr. Hugo, we were invited to sit down in his garden and he proceeded to open 6 bottles of wine for us over the duration of the evening- that is why he comes highly recommended!!

Wind and rain in El Chalten

After the glacier trek we said our goodbyes to Rachel and Noreen who were heading back home. We continued on further south to El Chalten, a two street town that was only founded in 1985. This town has no banks nor ATMs and has developped as a result of fantastic hiking that can be done in the nearby mountains. On the day we arrived the weather was so bad we were restricted to staying in the hostel all day, no hiking possible. The following day it was somewhat better and we headed out on a 3hour hike to a viewpoint of Mt. Fitzroy. Unfortunately the clouds were out and the view of the peak was totally obscured, nonetheless the hiking was good. And on the third day we managed a hike to Cerro Torre, again another fantastic view of mountain peaks if the weather had permitted, but it didn´t. Directly below this mountain peak is a lake into which a glacier feeds. We were able to see the glacier which we hadn´t expected so that was a nice surprise. We were leaving the next day and just as we were exiting the town the clouds cleared and Mt. Fitzroy was visible in all its glory. The bus driver stopped to allow us to get photos- i may have seen the mountain from a distance but it is impressive nonetheless.

Glacier Trekking

From Puerto Madryn we made our way to El Calafate, right in the centre of Patagonia. It is a small town built around the Perito Moreno glacier. This is one of three Patagonian glaciers that are not receding and the experts don't know why. It advances into Lake Argentino and forms a dam with the land on the other side. When the pressure builds up enough, the face of the glacier caves, creating a spectacular big event. The last big rupture was in July of this year. The tour we did brought us to the national park where we got quite close to the glacier. It is addictive as you watch the glacier, waiting and hoping for a big chunk to fall off. We managed to see some small parts calve, nothing spectacular, though the noise would make you think it was a catastrophic collapse. The remainder of the tour brought us to the west side of the glacier where we did trekking on the ice. We were all given crampons, very basic metal spikes tied onto the foot with rope. It was a bit unusual to walk on at first but totally necessary if you wanted to be able to climb the ice. The bedrock underneath the ice is bumpy and the glacier follows that topography so the top of it is also bumpy, giving lots of wonderful shapes. The ice reflects the blue colour from the sun so the ice has an amazing blue hue. The trek lasted for 1.5h. It was great and for a few moments i imagined something of what Tom Crean and his fellow explorers must have experienced as they set off on their explorations. Needless to say i didn't discover anything new but was nicely surprised when we rounded the last corner and were greeted with a glass of whiskey- on ice!!!