Woke up at 5 this morning and went for a walk eastwards out of town along the shore after I´d showered and had some tea. Later went along to the language school to see about lessons. Am going to take a few private lessons in the mornings if possible. The joint classes they have now are in the afternoon and it´s not so handy to have 3 hours in the middle of the day as it means you can´t really go on any other excursions. After breakfast took a minibus up to the skilift with an Australian woman who´s going for a 10day cruise to the Antarctic on Wednesday. We went up in the ski-lift together and then she set off up the path while I was getting my stuff sorted and recovering from the scary ski-lift. I met her coming down shortly afterwards. She´d decided not to tackle the real slopes.
Well they said it wasn´t as spectacular as Perito Moreno but I suspect it wasn´t even a glacier, just some leftover snow from the winter. The pics look better than real life. Drank mate (can´t make a nice link with this puter as pop-ups are blocked but if you cut and paste this "http://www.infj.ulst.ac.uk/~jcaug/mate.htm" in your brouwser you can read all about mate, Argentina´s national drink) at the top of one path with an Argentinian man with lots of piercings - we´d already taken photos for each other on various places on the way up. Then went off up the other path to the Mañada Negro. The path no-one else was taking... it was all scree and sliding rocks. After a while a young guy from Ohio caught me up and we looked at each other and at the top with raised eyebrows. Were we going to persevere to the top? Well I was, so he did too. We were getting slightly hysterical laughing at the non-existent path and the fakeness of the ´glacier´. And we had no idea if this hellish climb would be worth it in the end. It was. The view once over the top of the scree was literally breathtaking - the wind that hit us once we got there almost blew us straight back down. Hiding behind a rock we could just look at the prototype green valley complete with stream at the bottom of the canyon and snow topped jagged mountains all around. The weather was alternatively sunny and cloudy, sometimes too warm for all my layers and sometimes when the wind came up I had to fish my scarf and rainjacket out of my bag again. Filled my waterbottle with the best water I´ve ever tasted and ate some more of my emergency chocolate almonds.
Well they said it wasn´t as spectacular as Perito Moreno but I suspect it wasn´t even a glacier, just some leftover snow from the winter. The pics look better than real life. Drank mate (can´t make a nice link with this puter as pop-ups are blocked but if you cut and paste this "http://www.infj.ulst.ac.uk/~jcaug/mate.htm" in your brouwser you can read all about mate, Argentina´s national drink) at the top of one path with an Argentinian man with lots of piercings - we´d already taken photos for each other on various places on the way up. Then went off up the other path to the Mañada Negro. The path no-one else was taking... it was all scree and sliding rocks. After a while a young guy from Ohio caught me up and we looked at each other and at the top with raised eyebrows. Were we going to persevere to the top? Well I was, so he did too. We were getting slightly hysterical laughing at the non-existent path and the fakeness of the ´glacier´. And we had no idea if this hellish climb would be worth it in the end. It was. The view once over the top of the scree was literally breathtaking - the wind that hit us once we got there almost blew us straight back down. Hiding behind a rock we could just look at the prototype green valley complete with stream at the bottom of the canyon and snow topped jagged mountains all around. The weather was alternatively sunny and cloudy, sometimes too warm for all my layers and sometimes when the wind came up I had to fish my scarf and rainjacket out of my bag again. Filled my waterbottle with the best water I´ve ever tasted and ate some more of my emergency chocolate almonds.
