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Crossing the Andes by Boat
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Volcanoes on Patagonia's lakes
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NO TWO JOURNEYS are ever the same. Not even the journeys of close friends or lovers travelling together and checking their impressions, step by step.
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Each
has different experiences, reached by different approaches through
different senses and different interests. Six of us, saw the same
things differently as we travelled across South America - but what all of us appreciated in unison was the timing of our journey.
It was March 2004 – when it had become possible to plan in advance an expedition to cross the mighty Andes in a boat, and to do so in conditions suitable even for a party of pensioners.
A year later the scene of our ‘adventure’ was already turning into a tourist trip. Yet we travelled with the sense of pioneering strangers in an isolated world. We hardly saw a tourist group on our entire journey across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It was different on our return journey around Cape Horn, for our ship carried 750 passengers, mainly from the US and Europe. . .Fortunately that number was not big enough to impact on Puerto Arenas and other small harbours - but a year later no less than 83 cruise ships – with a total of at least 80,000 tourists aboard! - suddenly descended on the same route along the Chilean fjords. The number of cruise passengers visiting this hitherto remote coastline continues to increase at a speed that seems to correspond with the speed at which the snow, the ice - and adventure- are decreasing.
The trans-continental expedition across the lakes that span the Andes is so spectacular, however, that it will still be worth doing when it is littered with luxury cruisers, buses, hotels and hotdogs.
The facts of this tour across South America and to ‘the edge of the world’ are easy to record.
Dates: Sunday 1st March to 23rd March, 2004
Group: Three South African couples, average age, over 60 (ahem maybe 70, two of us much older).
Route: Outward-: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Sao Paola, Buenos Aires,
Bariloche, Puerto Verras, Puerto Montt, Santiago; Valparaiso.
Return- Valparaiso, Pacific Ocean, Chilean Fjords, Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn, Falkland Islands, Buenos Aires, and fly home.
Transport::Ten flights {including return in charter aircraft to Torres del Paine]
Ten buses and chartered mini-vans.
Three ferries, and two catamarans, and one ocean liner.
Distance: Approx 22,000kms by air and land, and 3858 nautical miles.
(Enough maybe for a southern hemisphere round-the-world trip)
It is also easy to name the birds we saw,
even though nobody kept a formal list. As a sample here are just some
names, unchecked and jotted down on newspapers and maps and paper
scraps as we I.D.-ed them (over the whole journey across South America
and back round the Horn):
Patagonian Mockingbird. Bandurria. [Buff-necked] Ibis (so much more beautiful than most in Africa). Upland Goose. Kelp Goose (the male totally white, the female totally black – or was it vice versa?) Tero [Southern] Lapwing.
Tree-creeper. Coscoroba and Black-necked swans. Flightless steamer-duck ['makes like a paddle-steamer on the water']. Brown Pintail duck.
Blackbrowed and Wandering [poetry in motion] Albatrosses. Sheathbill. Sooty shearwater. Five petrels: Giant, Diving, Grey-backed Storm and White-chinned.. Four cormorants: Guanay, Roquero, Gris and Imperial. Great Skua. Dolphin gull. Magellanic penguin [similar but bigger than our African Penguin].
Three caracaras: Chimango, Striated and Crested. Three vultures: Condo, Black and Turkey. The small ostrich-type Rhea. And of course the spectacular Longtailed Meadowlark. We regretted not finding a Torrent duck in the rapids below Orsano volcano.
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We sail into the mountains on a large sight-seeing boat. . . then ride a wheezing bus up to a second lake – a smoky-green expanse of water with towering condor cliffs above. Beyond is Mount Tronador signalling the Andes watershed |
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The memorable highlights of this journey are different for each member of the party, depending on their interests. Neither photos nor words can do the expedition justice.
My first memorable moment grew out of the scene witnessed while standing on a lichen-covered rock above Hidden Lake in the Andes outside Bariloche. We had been driving through a protected, primeval rain-forest on a peninsula that also contains the hotel and golf-course owned by billionaire philosopher and peace-maker, George Soros. (The peninsula is between lakes, and neatly contrasts the civilised patches among the wild.)
As we wound up the hilly peninsula among the lakes, we were suddenly enveloped in a dense forest of Redwoods, indigenous trees, bamboo thickets and flowering creepers. There was a clearing around our rocky ledge over Hidden Lake, and I listened to the wind roaring through the tops of 400-year-old Patagonian pines, drowning our laughter and chatter. Four hundred years seemed a grand old age until one remembered the Redwoods, which live a thousand years or more. And these rocks; these cliffs; these snow-capped peaks all around us: their estimated age is about twelve million years. It was only a couple of generations ago that mankind believed the Earth itself was not that old. A hundred thousand years at the most, estimated some of the wisest in grandpa’s time. However, this grey, cold-cracked rock we were standing on was at least a hundred times as old as that. Even so, these mountains, these ‘Andes’, are now known to be relatively young. So young they are still growing. Our grandparents would spin in their graves if they could hear us saying that our planet is considered to be – not a hundred thousand or 12 million years old– but more likely five billion years old.
These were not the thoughts prompted by that cold, barren, beautiful view of an unspoilt lake fringed by ‘new’ rocks and ‘ancient’ trees. My thoughts probably were: ‘Let’s get back to our transport, and shelter from this blasted wind’.
Faced with such an unexpected, primeval scene, the mind boggles. One cannot even think of a suitable joke. No, such moments are more about feelings which cannot be framed in words. My memory of the scene however is in a frame of perspectives - stretched perspectives of infinite solitude and timelessness.
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At the top of the first lake we begin our climb from Baraloche ski resort. The boat, and most passengers turn back. We ride a rickety bus over hills higher than those you see... and down a short, steep way to a higher lake, where condors fly. ________________ |
My second memory is a kaleidoscope of scenes on our long day’s journey ‘up’ the Argentine lakes, over the mountain pass, and ‘down’ the lakes into Chile. We ferry the lake, on a large sightseeing boat, from the ski-resort of Baraloche to the waters' furthest edge. As the boat and most of its sightseers depart, we climb into a wheezing bus for a brief winding, ride up to a second lake – a smoky-green expanse of water with high cliffs in front of us, mountains behind. Mount Tronador’s snow-covered peak is still awaiting us around the corner as we approach the Andes watershed.
Before our second boat sets off to find the main mountain, we see against the skyline, above the soaring granite cliffs, two condors. We’ve had them in our binoculars before, these great black birds with wingspans wide enough to match the outstretched arms of two men. But here a pair of them are in the grandest setting of all.
Two condors – clumsy white-ruffed, black-cloaked vultures really, often huddling over carrion – float like dark angels above the continental divide. They glide effortlessly across the heavens, wheel in the high thinning air, then drift down below the skyline where we trace their flight-path against grey rock. They swoop home to roost, still thousands of feet above our second little ferry-boat which sails on a green pool in the mountains. Around the corner we arrive at an isolated, summer-time customs post where another bus - this time neat and modern - is waiting to carry us spiralling down to the volcano peaks on Chile's remote lakes .
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We leave Argentinia and cross the Andes watershed - straddled by Mount Tronador in the background - and are ready to spiral down to the Chilean lakes in a smart new tourist bus.
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Are their more exhilarating sights; better memories?
Well, yes there are.
There are the Chilean fjords, described elsewhere. There are the Torres del Paine and the rest of Patagonia . And there are the ‘flat, boring, sheep-filled’ Falkland Islands - surrounded by historically romantic shipwrecks and filled with marine adventures.
You'll find descriptions of these in "Travels - South America' and 'Travels- Cape Horn'
For South Africans, looking for this tour - or any sea cruise - we recommend Chris Hunoldt of Cruises-for-Africa & AfriTours
Tel: 021 782-6979 /
Fax: 021 782-3499
E-Mail:
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www.cruises-for-africa.co.za ▪ www.afritours.co.za
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Yes, it rains in Chile (below the deserts). But you can gorge yourself on smoked salmon, from the 'farms' in the lake behind, and watch live volcanoes at work. There's even high culture. . .
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. . .The nearby town was a German ' colony' a hundred years ago. Now it's a renowned music centre, attracting classical stars and fans from Europe, America and Japan. It boasts other forms of genteel culture too.
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