Matt & Rob's Big Trek

Hey folks, merry Christmas to all the folks back home and all the brill people we’ve met along our mammoth walk, 1,426 miles so far..wahooo! For those who miss my face, which I’m sure is everybody, here’s a little comic hairy something for the 12 days of Christmas…a tranformation from Hitler, through Bronson, and straight out the other side of mad-ass Santa!

Love yoooooo, byeee x x x

Rob

Ola! Firstly, a big thanks to Mattias, Marquito, the Los Vikingoes crowd and Carolina and the folks at the Condor de los Andes hostel (great place opposite all our favourite bars) for making our return to Bariloche a triumphant one. Somehow, despite the hangovers, we made it to the port of Llao Llao in good time. This side of the Andes it is pronounced with the spanish ‘y’ for the double Ll but in Argentina it is Xiao Xiao, like the panda, or the lovechild of two sexy tellytubbies. We’d been able to ditch our last resort plan to cross into Chile via the volcano road after a little investigation and some haggling booked us passage on the paso de Vincent Peres Rosales, which goes through the Andes across three beautiful lakes, for only $80 U.S. It is normally $230 but we said we’d walk all the non-watery bits (my thanks to the DIT Team Team and all contributors in BTA for funding this part of the trek). In between the 2nd and 3rd lakes is a 20 mile stretch that is something like a mountain island and it was here that we finally crossed the border into the Republic of Chile. At the top of a 2 mile climb was a great wooden gateway. No personnel, no one on either side, just a great wooden gateway. It was very cool to be there all alone and not a little momentous for us. Argentina will be missed but we shall return soon enough!

The walk down into Chile was an agonisingly steep 4 miles and when carrying loads of heavy stuff it is as much a fight against gravity to go downhill as up. I could feel my buttocks for days afterwards. I could so I did. It’s just something I like to do. At the bottom was the office of the Carabineros, a type of state police, where one chap sat, but aside from him there was only us, the road, the occasional tour bus and loads of jungle, for we had left the dry forest of Argentina for a land of rainfall and it showed in a vivid asymmetry of undergrowth, overgrowth, of any kind of growth you can think of. We had two days there during which I taught a monkey to read. We had to eat that monkey, poor chap, but nature faught back. Oh, the tabanos. We’d been warned that they were worse on the Chilean side and for every second on dry land we were plagued. We simply could not stop to sit down for the attacks. Awful. And putting up tents was a dancing, screaming, swatting ordeal. Once inside and secure I could only sit and watch in amazement the assaults from outside and thank heavens they could not get in. That was the first night. The second night they got in. Half way through pitching my tent the first of them breached my feeble defences and in seconds there were 5…8…15…20 all buzzing hedeously and waiting for my blood. I drew my flip flops and did what I could from the outside but even a clean smack between the two would only stun them and whiloe I finished them off with up to four smacks on thew floor more would come in to join the party. It was no use; I would have to finish the tent and go in with it sealed. Matt guarded the door while I went in to do battle. The horror! The horror! Picking up the dead ones was almost as bad as they look so awful and some of them would still buzz when I touched them. Urrgh. Neither of us ventured back outside in those days.

Thankfully the tabano is a mountain insect and the slopes of the Andes soon gave way to rich farmland. And Chile is pretty. My, is she pretty. The dramatic rocks and deserts are replaced on this side by rolling fields and trees and around lake Llanqihue the blues and greens pierce your eyes and come flooding in like you’ve bever seen them before. Pretty wooden-slatted houses dot the countryside in bright colours and it’s all very nice, even a little familiar as it often resembles northern Europe and our own little island. It is also pretty hot. Often cloudy but hot. The south is known as a very wet place but what we did when we changed our plans and stayed in Argentina five months was cannily turn up here for the driest three months. Still, we’ve been wet a couple of times already. Rain makes a change, though. Every cloud…

We’ve skillfully skipped a second run at Mount Doom but we still see it spewing out from across the lake and for Tolkein fans Mount Osorno has been looming on the horizon for days and is very much like the Lonely Mountain. The people are nice, generous and there is a lot of energy and laughter here. At 3am this morning we were hailed as ‘my friends from England’ by a barman we’d met for 5 minutes earlier, and taken to a kind of speakeasy in a big house where we drank with the locals until 8 or 9am. Good stuff. It’s also very Christmassy in the town of Osorno so if that is a sign we should have a merry one in Valdivia after all.

Here’s wishing you all one, and especially the staff and children at Woodingdean Primary who have raised a phenomenal £1,200 for our cause. We can’t add it on the charity page as it had to be sent by cheque but it’s there and it’s amazing.

My official Christmas card will be out nearer the day but apart from that I hope the new year finds you all well.

Love you, byee! x x

Rob

Hey there, folks. It’s been a while but don’t worry, we have not been kidnapped yet.

There is always a fear when booking a long distance journey. Memories of bursting bladders, aching stomachs and sleepless, restless hours abound. In Argentina, however, cross-country travel has become an art form and our 27 hour ride to El Calafate was on board the smartest coach in coachtown. Hot meals, leg room and mega-comfy reclining seats you could really sleep in. If I had a bed anywhere on this planet it would have doffed its pillowy cap to it. As it is, my arse paid its grateful respects.

You arrive at El Calafate from the top of the rising hills above the lake on which it is set and at first glance I thought we had turned up at some sort of tip, but at the second I saw what a brilliantly bats and charming town it is. It is as though a town planner took all the necessary pieces in his hands and, like scattering hotels on a Monopoly board, just threw them up in the air and ordered everything built where it landed. This and the fact that no one house is the same as another give it a really quirky look and I loved it! The hostel we stayed in, the Albergue Mochileria, was a welcome relief from a lot of the lonely hotels we’ve been staying in. People from all aver and bags of energy. Quick roll call for the cool peeps: Martin the liaison at the hostel: knows everything that goes on in that town, globe-trotting, deep fried-spider-eating Mel , lively Essex Keeley, horse-rescuing Brandi and Genevieve and Caroline, lovely French Canadians to whom I mistakenly toasted “vive la France!” Well, you hear the accent…It turns out that the French moved Quebec across the Atlantic at around the end of the dinosaurs and it is no longer considered part of mainland Europe. You learn things when you travel!

We were there to see the great glacier, Perito Moreno, creaking and groaning its way down the local mountainsides and it was cool (chortle chortle). Staring at a big block of ice for four hours is more exciting than you’d think. A) its relatively rapid pace of two metres per day mean that chunks are often falling from the front and crashing into the lake before it with thunderous sound, and the anticipation is wild, especially when you hear a great crack from within. My head was springing round like a cat’s. And B) the walkways are flippin’ brill! Thousands of yards of wooden planks and rails that went all over the place and there was always another bit to explore. When the apocalypse comes you will find me there having a whopping game of paintball. Book now! (hello to Elwin, Evo and Rod – old Bariloche friends re-met on those very planks which was funny)

The next day we happened upon a gaucho festival with lots of sheep-herding, traditional music and, later, loads of rodeo. Cripes, I’ve never seen the bucking broncos in real life and wow! It’s as if the horses don’t want those chaps on their backs at all. Yee, and indeed, Hah. One chap had to be taken away in an ambulance. You simply couldn’t pay me enough.

On the way back north we got off the coach early, in Esquel, as we’d had our fun and needed to embark on stage two (not that stage two, Ted) of this walky thing, and in between there and Bariloche are 200 hundred of the most stunningly beautiful miles you could hope to see in life, and also a couple of places of interest. First up we walked a little south to Trevelin, which if you’re thinking doesn’t sound too Argentinian is because it is one of the places that Welsh settlers built up in the 1800s. It even has the Welsh dragon on the entrance to the town which was nice. Met some folk down on hols from Wales too, which was nice, and had a traditional British afternoon tea with a great big pot, scones, cakes and cold milk. The serving of hot milk whenever I order tea has already resulted in fourteen separate fist fights.

We then set off north to Cholila as I wanted to visit the cabin of one Robert Leroy Parker. To get there we had to walk four days through the Park de los Alerces and it was Eden itself. My favourite park in the world by far. Not even the Preston or Stanmer parks can quite match up to this one. Robert Leroy Parker’s better known alias is Butch Cassidy, and not only were we soon to see his cabin, we were about to sample a little of the life. Just outside Cholila we jumped a fence, for the first time in a while as it is so foresty down here, and pitched up in a cow field that seemed remote enough. In the morning, just as I was packing away and Matt was in his tent, I heard an engine and a toot behind me, and there was a man. With his spectacles and his flat cap he was somewhere between The Squire of Rupert Bear’s Nutwood and Captain Mainwaring. And he was angry. Angry like Mugabe. I offered my apologies and said we were just leaving but was met only with red-faced shaking of the head and unintelligible bellowing. “Private Property”, I did make out amongst what I generally took to be Spanish for, “Get orf moi land.” So we did, but there he was waiting in his car along the road in order to do a drive-by glare and went off to town. We wandered into Cholila like Butch and Sundance to re-supply and get directions to the cabin, half expecting and angry lynch mob. “We might as well rob the bank now,“ Matt said, but we resisted. However, on our way back out and while refilling water from a river we saw our man driving our road with the police just behind him. I was sorely tempted to say, “Who are those guys?” “Christ, what if he’s actually mad?” we both said. All I could think of was ‘trespassers will be prosecuted ‘ signs in England, so like those outlaws of old we holed up under a bridge until at least the coppers had driven back down. Later we put it down to coincidence but they certainly had us there. We made it to the cabin Butch built eventually, a draughty little place that you wouldn’t much want to stay in, but it was terrific to be inside a little bit of history. Here, he and Sundance and Etta Place might have larked around on bicycles whilst playing Burt Bacharach mixes on i-Tunes (although it was 1902/3 so probably still using CDs). The Bandidos Yankees. But if you’re ever down that way and you see a ‘Wanted’ poster with two faces, one a bearded, older looking varmint with a hat, the other a Spanish looking killer, them’s the Bandidos Ingles, meanest trespassers ever walked the south.

Wow, you guys must be winding down/warming up for the festive season. It won’t feel much like Christmas out here with the days now turned hot and darkness at 10pm so I’ll be pining for wet and windy or cold and sharp views from English pub windows for the next four weeks. Not in January and February, though. Mooohahahaha. One thing that the heat has now brought is bugs and we have met our new mortal enemy. I saw Matt dancing around with agitation just outside Trevelin because “this fucking wasp won’t leave me alone,” but we soon found out that it was not a wasp. The cunning fucker has yellow streaks and looks like a wasp so you pay him a little respect but he is an ugly, nasty and persistent biting fly, called a tabano, which is endlessly trying to stick his dirty great nasal protrusion into our now short-clad legs. They make me SO ANGRY! I’ve decided to go into genetics when I return to England and create some form of pathogen that wipes them all out, then we’ll see if the ecological balance collapses or if nature just shrugs its shoulders and says, “Nice one.” We’ve been told that it’s going to get much worse with these gits in the next month or two. Yay!

Anyway, that’s about it. Bit of a long one but lots to tell so hope you enjoyed and like the bumper photo set. Might need to watch Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid for some of the references but that is no chore so go do it : ) On Monday we’re headed for the pass under Mount Doom and back to the deadly ash to get to Chile and the Pacific coast. Exciting!

Ciao for now. Love you, byee!

Rob