The Real Argentina

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Originally uploaded by Becky Barrett.

I´m very excited that my friend Harsh is coming out to join me in Santiago in a couple of weeks, and in the few days before meeting up with him I am booked on a cruise of the Chilean fjords leaving from Puerto Natales. This means that I need to be in El Calafate (home of the famous glaciers and just over the border from Puerto Natales) no earlier than Saturday. As a result I have been able to travel in leisure down Patagonia´s east coast, visiting towns that don´t normally make it onto the average tourist´s itinerary and some of which haven´t even made it to Lonely Planet!

Since Puerto Madryn, Richard, Jon and I have visited Comodoro Rivadavia (pictured, with sunset), Puerto Deseado and Caleta Olivia (very briefly). We are now in Rio Gallegos, which officially qualifies as The Deep South. To get to these places we have taken overnight buses along endless bleak, featureless highway, punctuated every few hundred miles by a petrol station and rusty corrugated steel or concrete cafeteria, always with the obligatory Argentinian flag and a Coca-Cola sign.

While it´s been fairly obvious why these places aren´t major tourist attractions, it´s been great to see a little of the way Argentina goes about its business when it´s not trying to impress bus-loads of backpackers. One of the main things that has struck me is just how little an impression humans have made on the land here. In England and Europe I am used to being able to feel how the countryside has been shaped and tamed for generations, but here many of the towns are only a little over a hundred years old and there is almost a feeling that people are just camping here. No surprise given the vast distances that people have to conquer to set up home in these places.

Easter this Sunday and I will be saying goodbye to the boys (who have promised to be guest columnists on the blog) and arriving in El Calafate in time to catch a glacier or two before my cruise.