On the road again

Went rafting at Christian's on Sunday again, one of my favourite things to do around here for sure. For the past few days i've been showing a couple of friends - well actually one of them is my dad's friend - the local area. I don't have my car for about another month yet so we have been restricted to the local area, places like Cerro Campanario and Cerro Catedral, with a 50km dirtroad bus to Cerro Tronador. All really nice and unique places, especially for them who haven't seen any of this before.

They have just left whilst i still have a month to wait until i can get the car (mum and dad are kindly letting me borrow some money!) i will be hitching south to a place near El Bolson where there is a series of mountain refuges linked by walks around the mountains. I plan to do this in about five days but it could take as long as ten because i'm taking my whole kit with me on all the walks as i will not be coming back down the same route.
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For the rest of today i will pack a few essentials into my rucksack and be ready to leave tomorrow morning. Feels good to be doing this again after almost two months of being in the same place!

That's all for now, in about 10 days traviajero will be updated and i'll let you know how it all went!

Thanks for reading,
Santiago.

"I'm feelin' rough, I'm feelin' raw,
I'm at the prime of my life." - MGMT Time to Pretend.

The last week has been one of very good weather, finally after too many false starts, it looks like summer is here, with temperatures reaching the high twenties and the occasional thirty. Winds are very calm too which makes it just that little bit warmer. I have been showing a couple of friends - well actually one of them is my dads friend - the local area. I don't have my car for another month yet so just been going to a few local mountains, Campanario, Tronador, Catedral, these are easily reached by bus. Will be going to El Bolson tomorrow and hopefully doing a touch of white water rafting in Rio Azul...which is the best river i've ever seen...just amazing. I'll see if i can take some photos to show what i'm talking about.

All the people that are staying here will be going their separate ways on Wednesday so then i will be able to hitch down to El Bolson again and do the mountain refuge trail, i have been looking into buying a bivuoac bag so i can camp out in the wild and not have to pay to stay in the refuge or worry about setting up or carrying a tent. I will have to travel the lighest i've ever done for this one because i will be taking all my equipment up and down the mountains...which is tiring enough on a light day-pack.

Anyway i just wanted to write a little update, I'll come back with photos from tomorrow and an update on what I'll be doing next week.

Santiago.

Success, sunny days and a touch of mountain rescue.

Imagine this; you have just driven 1650 kilometres from Buenos Aires to a small mountain city known as Bariloche. You and your friends are eager to go out and experience some good times in the wilderness that inhabits the surrounding mountains. You hike out to a beach on a lake where you are more or less alone, in the evening it is an essential part of the whole camping out on the beach scene to have a camp fire where you and your friends can sit around, share a few beers and enjoy the stars on a beautiful clear January night. At about 11pm the fire is lit, a few beers in and everyone is having a brilliant time, laughter can be heard with the occassinal sound coming from the forest, perhaps a fox, a wild cat, maybe even wild boar. Your fire has been going for a while but shortly after midnight a pocket of air inside one of the sticks you picked to use as firewood sends flying a small piece of extremely hot coal...you think nothing of this. No more than five minutes later you hear an unusual noice and turning your head in confusion you discover a wall of fire, easily twenty feet high. You have just caused a forest fire which will lead to thousands and thousands of hectares, national park - land that is to be respected, enjoyed, and shared by everyone who visits- to go up in flames. Most of these trees were over three hundred years old, not even my grandchildren will have the fortune of seeing this area like it once was. All because you thought you were cool lighting your camp fire in the middle of the woods and creating that picture perfect scene for you and all your friends. Nice one.

This is one of the many ways forest fires can and do start as. I drove past ten years ago at night and saw C. Catedral up in flames, half a mountainside completely engulfed, fire crews overwhelmed by their powerlessness against the destruction of this huge fire. Today i had the fortune of taking a two hour walk from the base of C. Catedral to a beach on Lago Gutierrez. Through the two hour walk i went past the 10 year old vegetation that was beginning to slowly forget and regain all that was lost in just a few days of intense heat.

It's recovering pretty well, trees are beginning to grow through the smaller vegetation which is already thriving, but the burnt down, dried out skeletons of what were once hundred year old trees are still there, as a reminder of what something that can start out so small can become and destroy. It is prohibited to start any kind of fire in the area, yet only today i saw a group of people settling down at the beach on this lake, less than two kilometres from the burned down area, starting out their camp fire. There are places to have camp fires at, but some people never learn.

Despite all this, we had a wonderful time at the beach; the lake was very calm, the day was very warm and the Quilmes were very cold...perfect! I even got to use some of the bandages from my first aid kit bought over three and a half years ago for my first Duke of Edinburgh expedition! (boot irritating the heel situation).

On the way back to civilization Edu decided to roll his ankle, so we had to carry him back all the way to the main road, which fortunately at that point it was no further than thirty minutes walking. We took him to hospital, and after a three hour wait and experiencing an emergency room which left a lot to be desired for, just small details like doctors ,a door handle and perhaps a washing basin in the "bathroom". He was eventually sent home and told to rest, i guess that marks the end of adventure on their holiday.

On a more positive note, i passed my driving test on Thursday morning, and will hopefully if all goes to plan have a car sometime in March. A lot of road trips ahead, and it will be easier to access mountains which are perhaps a little far from the city to reach by foot. I hear from some fellow travellers that the peaks near El Bolson still have a lot of snow, so maybe i will stay around here and explore some of the local peaks first before the 10 day mountain refuge expedition i mentioned on a previous post. The weather has started to get a lot sunnier and although tomorrow is supposed to go from 27 degrees we had today to a cooler 18, next week is hopefully going to be back to proper summer weather like yesterday and today's.

Well that's all for now,
I hope for those of you in England the snow is clearing out and all is back to normal.

Thanks for reading!
Santiago.

Thumbs up

Had to get up early today,

"Summer turns to high" - about bloody time.

Woke up this mornin' headache this big, pay all these damn bills, feed all these damn kids!

Woke up this morning and turned on the gas stove, firstly to warm my very cold hands and secondly to heat some water for a cup of tea - there ain't no electric kettles 'round 'ere mate! All that done and a shower later, i phoned up Eduardo and Kirsi whom i had met in Salta back in November, they told me they were around so we wanted to do something one of these days.

We met up in town and went for ...yet another...cup of tea. We spoke about what our trips had in store for us and what had happened since we separated, i filled in the table with stories about hitch-hiking and labradors looking after my tent in Cuesta Blanca, he contributed to the conversation with stories about the amazing salt plains in Jujuy, their trip in Bolivia and the sauna like conditions they had been experiencing in Buenos Aires with 90% humidity these last few days.

It turns out, interestingly, that their trip had not gone as straight forward as mine, yeah okay i broke my camera and got sore feet from hours of hitch-hiking, but they had a lot worse. Whilst unloading bags from a taxi at an omnibus terminal in Bolivia, some people snatched two of Edu's bags, containing his excellent Canon450D SLR camera, three 8gb memory cards, and of course the back ups of thousands of photos on a DVD disc in the secondary bag...oh and just in case that wasn't enough, that second bag also contained his Spanish passport and his Argentine passport..."fml" as he could have rightly said.

They managed to put all this behind, and i gave them some photos of our time together back in November which somewhat filled that empty void in his heart from all the photos that were stolen. We cooked some lunch and took off to do something with this magnificent day that had unfolded above us...perfect blue skies with very light, almost non-existent winds (Bariloche tends to be very windy because it is in a very open area). We took the bus 20 to km 17 of Gustillos Avenue, this one borders the lake and eventually turns into Circuito Chico which is a very scenic tourist route that one can drive and stop around the various lakes, rivers, and high points.

Kilometre 17 of Gustillos is the base of Mt. Campanario, or as it is more correctly said here, Cerro Campanario. This 1052m hill has a cablechair that takes you all the way to the summit in a matter of minutes, on a cold and windy day you have to be brave to enjoy it, but today it was not such a day, today was an ideal day for this kinda thing, perfect visibility to what seemed hundreds of km's away. We spent about half an hour at the summit, taking photos, admiring the view, and greeting the local cat population (which as surveyed by a recent sensus currently consists of one very old cat).

The way down was just as scenic and after hitchiking back to KM 12 we had something to eat at the beach of the lake.

A very nice day out, of which i hope i will have more of soon, just waiting for my driving course to finish then i will be free to roam once again. We are thinking of setting up a tent on lago Gutierrez and camping out there for a few days. Might get my fishing permit sorted and see what i can find, some trout for dinner would sure come as a treat!

Gonna start climbing more of the local mountains soon too, Cerro Catedral now has next to no snow on the summit so is all safe to hike and so are most of the other mountains around. Good times ahead for sure, i will hopefully climb something next week and post that on here.

That's all for now,
Thanks for reading!

Santiago.

If you want it, come and get it, for crying out loud.

It’s 2010 and countless amounts of people like to call the beginning of the year a time for change, a time to put aside bad things and concentrate on positive thoughts, improve oneself to be a better person inside and out from that point onwards. I’m not usually a person to go by this, December 31st for me is just another day, always has been. I decided this year, however, to try something new, to set a few goals, a few aspirations and ideas of how I would like to improve myself and my life. I have thought of a few ‘resolutions’, some of which are included below.

- Become less dependent of a materialistic lifestyle and adapt to a simpler, more beautiful life.
- Adopt and maintain a healthier lifestyle, less junk food and more exercise – go for a run at least 3 times a week.
- Climb and summit Mt. Aconcagua (6962m) by the end of 2015.
- Enjoy the little things in life, because you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
- Last but not least, update this blog a bit more often; I now have the power of a small netbook so i really have no excuse.

In order for any of this ‘resolution’ nonsense to be any kind of good, one has to keep to these and never give them up, get out of bed early even when it’s freezing cold outside yet so nice and warm in the sleeping bag. I will try my best to keep to these, and hopefully by posting these resolutions on here and having other people know about them i will be encouraged to be faithful to them.

I hope you all enjoy this year as much as im planning on!

Thanks for reading,
Santiago.