A year ago, we made a choice to book an Airbnb for a month in Buenos Aires on the chance that I would get invited to participate in a challenge for that full scholarship I had been dreamin about. Well, it happened, and for the past week our little apartment in Palermo has been a full time painting studio, furiously working to produce 3 works before the end of the month… Which leaves little time for things like blog entries. So while I’m taking a little break, I thought I’d get things a little caught up on a long overdue post about Patagonia.

Patagonia is two things: full of remarkable things and huge. So while there are some incredible stops along the way, like the Torres del Paine, Perito Moreno Glacier and Penguins, there are also lots of long bus rides and layover and accessory towns. This is the story of those things, and all of the little differences between places in the world that make traveling the strange life that it is.

El Calafate

On the southern coast of Lago Argentina lies the tourist depot and waypoint to the Perito Moreno glacier, El Calafate. It’s the kind of place that would be lined with salt water taffy and fudge shops back in the states, but here many of the storefronts advertise expeditions and day trips, steak dinners, and alfajores – the ubiquitous argentine sandwich cookie. Cute place with an intense wind problem.

Puerto Natales

Our first stop in Chilean Patagonia meant a 7 hour bus ride and an hour long border crossing involving produce sniffing dogs. Puerto Natales is the gateway town to Torres del Paine. You pretty much have to stay here if you’re going in to the park. It’s little more than a motley pile of shacks along the Strait of Magellan and a few drastically overpriced restaurants. Apparently the prices rise pretty wildly at the onset of tourist season. This sticker shock had as pretty worried about our budget when we arrived in Patagonia, but it turned out that the grocery stores were dirt cheap.

I I don’t want to offend any of our Patagonian readers here, but this is a good time to mention that there is a pretty drastic difference in fit and finish between Argentine and Chilean Patagonia. Argentina tended to be newer, cleaner and with more options, where Chile tended to be older, in disrepair and with fewer options. On the other hand, Argentinian Patagonia tended to be FAR more touristy and tacky where The Chilean side was quieter, more practical and down to Earth. In any case, Puerto Natales had a certain charm that won us over. Maybe it was because our hostel had the best breakfast spread in all of the realm, or maybe it was because the town mascot with a prehistoric ground sloth called the “milodon”, but Puerto was probably the fav of the little towns.

Punta Arenas

Leaving Puerto Natales, we made for the town of Punta Arenas. Most people bounce through it on the way to Ushuaia or vice versa, many using the opportunity to visit Isla Magdalena and the breeding penguin colonies. We opted to stay 5 days, because we had time and we had read that the architecture and history were appreciable. We should have known this was a bad idea when people’s responses to our plans were often “but why?”. It didn’t help that our hostel sucked really bad – our “private double” was a small bedroom with a bunkbed and two singles, the kitchen was not accessible (and restaurants cost a fortune), and the old lady that ran it tried her best to make me pay her the booking fee that I’d already paid hostleworld. It also smelled like pez and had paper thin walls and floors.

There was clearly a Genghis Khan of street dogs here as there’s a huge population of dogs with the same genetic abnormality of one white eye.

Punta Arenas had a wealthy heyday back before the Panama Canal as a port town and for its wool industries, and there are some well preserved historical / architectural stuffs to show it. Its also serves as a supply and transit depot for the scientific efforts in Antarctica, though Ushuaia seems to be the primary port for the tourist ships. Outside of that, well, there’s a huge duty free shopping mall thing, some mundane eateries, a lot of teenagers that are bored as shit and so they start metal bands, a decent churro stand, a really funny quasi religious museum with a 4th floor dedicated to the petroleum industry, and lots and lots of wind.

As we were preparing to leave Punta Arenas, we actually enjoyed the idea of being on the bus for 12 hours.. And for the most part we did, if only we didn’t get stuck at the ferry crossing for 7 hours due to intense wind and high seas on the Strait of Magellan. We watched in fear as one by one the first ferries went out before us, and we watched these vessels, loaded with cars and people, spinning wildly in the surf and disappearing within the troughs of giant waves.

Ushuaia

Ok, Ushuaia was our fault. Something that we learned about Patagonia as a whole: the thing you know about it (glaciers, mountains) is the reason to be there, not to hang around in town. We pretty well wasted our time in the southern most city in the world in overpriced restaurants, and only in the evening before we left did we realize how we completely overlooked the idea of taking a boat on to the beagle channel and taking in the seals and sea birds. So.. Learn from our mistakes, folks. Still, it’s a cute town, built on a hill that spills into the beagle channel, surrounded by gorgeous mountains.

At least we didn’t mess everything up: Lucy spotted a flier for a free horror film festival – we spent our last night in a tiny community cinema with a dozen of so local teenagers. After a costume contest and a few shorts we watched “What We Do In The Shadows”, which was really the funniest film either of us had seen in a long time. Score.

Street Dogs

One thing they got going down here is a great madness of street dogs. Dogs happy to follow you all afternoon for just a pat on the head or to wait patiently and with manners for some crumbs. There’s clearly a mutual appreciation between the lovely mongrels of both the canine and human species here that goes deep – we evolved to love each other, you know? In our history together, the friendly ones do well and the mean ones don’t, so there’s a mix of natural and social selection here. The dogs that remain are friendly, fun and cute. Even the sidewalk cafés are perused by the dogs, and unless a customer puts up a fuss, the employees are not only tolerant but often quite friendly with their canine neighbors. Occasionally, they go in to a mania, churned up by some young wild friend, and chase cars into the evening. They don’t seem to choose or become irritated by specific cars, I’m finding, but rather seem to get upset internally at interval and go running after the first one they see. Bad practice, fellas.

They generally seem to have an easy going order and fight little over resources, though I’m sure things are tougher outside of the summer tourist season. We witnessed an old lady laughingly tossing her pack of patio dogs a bunch of meaty bones from a shop’s side door, and the dogs politely and unhurriedly took their pieces and moved on without friction. We thought it might be fun to pick up some dog treats to share with some of the dogs we met along the way, and as a testament to how well they tend to eat, they had no idea what to do with the dry dog biscuits we tried to feed them.

Yeah, the dogs are kind of a hobby at this point.