Update from El Calafete, Argentina

We’re now down in Patagonia, the wedge right at the bottom of South America, split between Chile and Argentina. We’ve covered a lot of kilometres in the past few weeks, so here’s an update:

The entire continent is obsessed with music from the 1980s. We have been brainwashed, and we now like 80s music - you have been warned!! Emily even sang Erasure’s ‘A Little Respect’ in a Bolivian karaoke parlour. The karaoke machine gave her a score of 98 (based on tune and timing) - a shocking result, especially as the same machine scored Phil only 91 points for his flawless rendition of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the wild side’. Needless to say, a stiff letter of complaint has been sent to the national papers.

The route we took down from the Bolivian altiplano into Chile was through a vaguely official gringos-only border. Only found out afterwards that our tour guide’s jeep was allegedly being used for smuggling drugs into Chile…!

Chile is not at all like Bolivia or Peru. Services and facilities are European in standard, and the food is cheap and actually tastes of something besides cardboard…plus we’ve found the people to be a bit more friendly. That’s in spite of the fact that the Spanish we learned in Peru and Bolivia is now all but useless as the Chileans don’t pronounce any consonants. And anyway Phil’s voice goes up two octaves when he tries to speak Spanish, which means he sounds like a Spanish John Inman (camp British actor). We have gone back to miming to get ourselves understood.

After arriving in Chile we flew to Easter Island (technically part of Chile, so the flights counted as internal flights covered by our round the world flight tickets), some 3400km off the coast of South America. It touts itself as a sort of outdoor museum, with the well-known statues dotted all around the coast of the island. The statues were cool, although by the time we left we felt, well, like we’d been in a museum for four days!

After passing through Santiago, Chile’s vibrant and likeable capital, we then headed South to the Chilean Lake District - stunning scenery with the Andes mountain chain in the background. The highlight there was climbing an active snow-covered volcano, Volcan Villarica. It wasn’t all good though - the reflection from the snow gave us both awful sunburn (thanks in part to some dodgy Bolivian “factor 30” suncream) and, as the rays reflected from below we experienced the sensation of having sunburn inside our nostrils. Obviously, these needed to be moisturised thoroughly to relieve the pain, which shocked the locals when Phil subsequently sneezed on a bus…

So here we are in Patagonia. We’re about to attempt to enter Torres del Paine national park and, if the weather holds out, we’ll walk a route known as ‘The W’ (that is it’s shape!). Then we finally point for home, heading up the Eastern coast towards Brazil. One month to go before we get back to London! But we’ll write again before then.

In other news: Emily’s mullet is no more. The weird layers have all but grown out, and Phil is sorry to say that he failed to get a photo (requested from many quarters). You will have to make do with vivid descriptions when we get back….

Bye for now!

(2023 Update: photos from this trip were uploaded to Flickr a couple of years later, here are snaps from Bolivia, Chile and Easter Island and Patagonia, and a link to the collection for the whole trip can be found here)