As a kid, to me Argentina always seemed faintly villainous. It most likely had something to do with the Falklands War and Maradona (who for many years I thought was also Madonna) and his genius/scandalous cheating. In truth, this feeling stayed with me well into my teenage years – Argentina bad, Brazil good. This was no doubt something to do with football too.
It's only been in recent years, talking to people who know better and watching some eye-opening movies, that my opinion has started to change. Brazil, it seems, is the real shithole; Argentina, meanwhile, is a lot of people's favourite country in all of South America.
Time will tell whether I agree with that opinion or not, but after a week I can say without doubt that Argentina is infinitely superior to France. For a start, there are no French. Secondly, you can go into a restaurant, absolutely mangle a sentence in Spanish and the waiter will smile, coach you, encourage you and get your order. Yes, they may take an almost laughable amount of time doing so, but by-Christ, they're helpful.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the average Argentinian restaurant has been designed specifically with weight-gain in mind. The choices essentially: pasta, pizza, sandwiches, and meat, all with enough cheese to cause cardiac issues for a diplodocus.
Because we were tired after a ridiculously circuitous route that involved 36 hours of flying, and because we'll be back there at the end of January, we decided to spend our first two days in zombified isolation in Buenos Aires filling ourselves with cheese, before flying three and a half hours south, to the end of the world.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Ushuaia, the planet's southernmost city, was originally populated by an indigenous population that, like most others, has been steadily eradicated by the White Man. The Spanish set up a brutal penal colony here that makes Alcatraz sound like a loveable play park, but today it is a booming tourist town.
When we land, it really does look like the end of all things. The sky is low, the wind is violent, and the precipitation spikey; the jagged tail of the Andes lie behind the city, while across the perennially tumultuous Beagle Channel, Chile's Isla Navarino looks similarly discontented. Perhaps it doesn't look so much like the end of the world, but like a planet being born.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Being so far from anything, things are predictably quite expensive in Ushuaia (and the menus are similarly stodgy). There's the world's southernmost train, which seems like a total rip off, or helicopter rides which sound terrifying given how furious the wind is.
Thankfully, walking falls within our budget. Setting off from our beautiful, free, digs it takes an hour and a half to reach the bottom of the mountains. From here, we think, it takes two hours to get to the top of the Marital glacier. This seems quite reasonable, until we realise that actually it's two hours from the end of the ski lift, which is out of order for one thing, and a 90 minute walk straight up a hill for another.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
Still, we aren't complaining, or if we are it's the sort of silly whining that just helps fill the brilliant mountain air. And it feels so good to be out of Asia and its oppressive heat and its open idiocy and its endless, Gollum-esque hunger for our money. Just to breathe the free air in the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, is to make your life better, and so any grumbling from our legs is quickly extinguished by sites like these:
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
At the bottom of the dysfunctional ski-lift, we have some pretty excellent coffee, regroup and begin going up yet again. Now, with the wind avalanching from the mountains and our out-of-shape legs failing, things do cease to be such a romantic stroll and become more of an old-fashioned slog. Still, we've had worse.
Eventually, we leave the path altogether and head into the snow. The ground is surprisingly colourful, with almost exotic moss, and weird woody textures hiding in the rocks.
Finally, after six hours of hiking, we reach a stand-still, unable and unwilling to go much further and with no real point in going further. There isn't a grand plateau here, or a dramatic basin, as I had kind of expected, just more ice and more mountain.
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| Photo: Wee Mo |
As always seems to be the case, it's the getting down that is the really tricky part and as we approach the nine hour mark, our feet are in extraordinary pain. But it's been great to be out taking pictures. Again, when I was much younger, I used to have dreams in which I'd shrink to a tiny size and see ordinary things at an entirely different perspective (this had nothing to do with football, though was possibly influenced by reruns of The Land Of Giants on Channel 4). Now we have a macro lens, I can actually do it, and it's fun... A lot of fun.
When we finally get back to town, we're glad of the heavy food, having both walked to near exhaustion. It was a good day, a grand day, and now we're about to set off for Antarctica.
