Friday, February 28

Chocolate!

We are off to Ushuaia this morning, but had to stop by the chocolate shop em route and met Corina, who hooked us up with some fresh samples. Absolutely amazing. And it's her birthday today, happy birthday Corina!

Monday, February 24

Glaciers and peaks. Penguins next.

My eyes have never before seen the amazing natural wonders that they have in the past week. After leaving Mt. fitz Roy we went south to Perito Moreno, arguably the most famous glacier there is. I've seen glaciers before. They are nestled up in cold snowy mountain peaks where they make sense. Not this one. It comes down from the southern Patagonian ice field, thru the mountains where I thought glaciers belonged, down thru a lake (which it often dams up) and smashes into a peninsula. 5 kilometers wide at the viewable end and 14 kilometers back up to the ice field where it's born. See the ship in the pic for scale. So blue. So big. The sounds coming from it as it cracked and fell (it moves 2 meters per day forward) are like a rolling thunder. If I sat there for a week my jaw would still be dropped in awe. Makes no sense, but it's real.
From there we went back into Chile to see and hike Torres del Paine NP. Amazing area. You can really see the range that it's connected to as you approach it. Only the desert on the dry side of the Andes, then suddenly a crazed snowy amusement park of mountainy goodness riddled with make believe peaks and valley, epic and wild as a child's drawing of the wildest mountains. We camped on a lake viewing the park the night before we went in. See pic. We spent 2 days hiking the W trail in the park, up a gorgeous valley with peaks and glaciers. Again, as we hiked, we were often interrupted by the sound of rolling thunder that is the mountains and glaciers and rocks singing their song. Although we did get rained on, we kept our spirits high and after arriving back to were we had stashed the bikes, treated ourselves to a fine breakfast this morning as a reward for hiking 26 mountain kilometers yesterday.
Today we are southbound. On a quest for penguins. Puerto Notales is where we are fueling now, and we are being told that Punta Arenas has got spades of them. That will be our destination for tonight.
Enjoy the pics. The roads are so windy that we actually ran into a team riding a sailboat down Ruta 40 the other day. Had to get a pic of that.