Flying into Punta Arenas, Chile, then walking to the beach and looking out across the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego. Around 53 degrees South.
Author: megan
Wandering around Mendoza, it seemed like we could have been in a suburb in Melbourne (but for the fact all the graffiti was in Spanish).
We spent our time cycling round, lazing on the grass, eating delicious food and drinking Argentinian wine.
Travelling to Mendoza from Santiago, we went back and forth on a bus through the Andes. The queue at the border was long, with many trucks. But there are worse places to sit at a border crossing than the Andes, so we had snow fights and snow races, and wished we had our skis with us.
On the way home, once we crossed the border we had to descend from the pass into Chile via an interesting set of switchbacks – by the time this photo was taken we’d already descended a few turns down them (and passed the queue of trucks waiting to get into Argentina).
Kitten fishing, a traditional Chilean sport. Seen practised here by Alex using a standard length green 0.8mm rod, combined with the interesting tactic of a double bait and super visible line. Also of note is the brightly coloured painting on the wall behind him, which may or may not be part of his plan to distract the kittehs so they may be lured more successfully.
The Slush Cup – the idea is to ski or snowboard down this slope and launch yourself at the pond of freezing cold water.
Prizes go to those who do it in the best style. Some even make it across.
Getting more speed at the start was helpful. But even with speed, the majority of the attempts ended like this:
So at the point when we were all getting a bit sick of the snow, and hoping rain would come to wash it away so we could go climbing and hiking and biking, and enjoy Summer … that was when one of the biggest dumps of the season came. It started snowing on Wednesday night – we woke up Thursday morning to heavy snow. And it kept coming, and coming, and coming. More snow. We walked into town, and had trouble keeping our eyes open with the snow. We got saturated, as it was wet heavy snow, and there was a lot of it. On Thursday afternoon, the Jeep (we have a Jeep now) looked like this:
Snow had just started settling on the warm roads. Then we got up on Friday morning. It had been snowing all night. And the Jeep looked like this:
We had to dig it out – we ended up putting the shovel away before digging out the passenger side, and I had to crawl in through the drivers side door as there was too much snow built up to get the passenger door open. And of course, once we got the Jeep moving, we had to go to the snow… and so we skied.
And it was glorious.