11/27/05
USHUAIA, ARG.

Backing up a week:

Inland Patagonia is yellow-green and dotted with sheep. I went to El Calafate, a tourist town in mountains and lakes. It´s small enough that you get to know the stray dogs that roam the cafes. A few blocks off the main street, burly horses graze and ibises poke at the weeds. On an evening walk I was dumbstruck by a lake full of pink flamingoes.

The main tourist draw is the Moreno Glacier, an hour away by steep roads. Filling a wide valley, it´s a field of ice two hundred feet tall, echoing with crunches and pops. The crevasses glow blue in the sunlight. Every now and then a tower of ice-- thousands of tons-- breaks off and plunges hard into the water, the waves knocking icebergs against the rocks. Amazing, but at the same time you´re clumping around on a boardwalk with hundreds of camera-toting Germans. So much of nature is turning into Disneyland.

El Chaltén is four hours northwest via rattling bus. It´s a mountain hamlet that was founded to end a border dispute with Chile. Essentially, Argentina built some A-frame houses and said, "See?" It sounds like something that would happen in the 1800s, but this was 1985.

Jagged mountains loom in the clouds over town. Streams run pale turquoise from glacial flour. I stayed four days and hiked, getting snowed on, sore in the legs, and thoroughly aerated. My last day on the trails I watched three dark birds as they turned slowly on updrafts. They swung low and close, pumping huge white-backed wings: Andean condors. These mountains simultaneously thrash and exhilarate you.

In town, houses are walled with wavy boards split from beech trees, and vehicles are old trucks pieced together from older trucks. Evenings I sat around windburned with other backpackers. A few hours late I realized that my Thanksgiving dinner had been pasta cooked by a German woman, yogurt, and a liter of Quilmes beer.

Back to El Calafate and to Río Gallegos, a run-down oil city, to catch the morning bus to Ushuaia. We ferried over the Strait of Magellan in freezing wind. On Tierra Del Fuego the bus wound through gnarled forests hung with Spanish moss, huge vistas opening up as we climbed. The Andes run all the way to Cape Horn, which makes Ushuaia a seaport backed by snowpeaks. If it´s not the southernmost city on Earth, they need to change the sign.

I´ve been traveling with Israelis for the past couple of days. Good guys, but there are some cultural disconnects. Over dinner in the hostel kitchen, one was proclaiming a certain restaurant in Tel Aviv as the best place for shawarma. "Before the bombing," another clarified, and they raised their eyebrows and nodded.