Up the coast

Valisas, Rocha, Uruguay – 10/01/2009

My last day of beach in Uruguay and probably my last day of beach until the sun and the heat com back to the Iberian coasts. In a single day, several hundreds of kilometres to find and visit 3 beach towns in the province of Rocha. Each one with its specific mood.

First stop: Cabo Polonio. After many kilometres, countless mates and a lot of uncertainty we finally arrived at the Cabo Polonio access point. Carefully hidden behind a sea of dunes, you can only get to “El Cabo” through a truck service that carries the beach-starving people from the parking to their desired destination. The beach, of course.

Cabo Polonia has 2 beaches, Calavera y Sur, it has an enviable sandstrip, it has a lot wind, it has a little market laden with hippy stuff for sale, it has a lighthouse that I didn’t visit, it has an amazing colony of sea lions, it has a few dozen shacks with no light or running water where a few lucky people get to spend a few days, weeks or even the whole summer. As far as beaches go, by far the most beautiful beach I saw in Uruguay. Not sure if I could spent 3 months here, as some do, but I would certainly spend a few days enjoying the rest, the sun and the sea.

Unfortunately, the clouds and the wind decided to come to Cabo Polonio for lunch so we decided to take off to Punta del Diablo, 40 km to the North, to have some lunch ourselves. Punta del Diablo could be an incredibly beautiful place, and I’m sure it once was, but nowadays it’s so absolutely saturated with commerce, cars which are nearly parked in the sand and beer-drinking teenagers that a few minutes after I arrived I already wanted to leave. On thing is for sure though, you have to go the market and try the fish and shellfish “empanadas” and the original seaweed “buñuelos”.

Last stop before going back to Montevideo: Valisas. Quite similarly to Cabo Polonio it has no electricity or running water, except for those who have their own generators, but it is a lot easier to get to. Anyone with a car can get there from Ruta 16. Some mate with some excellent company to end the day and now the 3 hour drive back to Montevideo.

Rocks on the rocks

Perito Moreno glacier, Patagonia, Argentina – 07/01/2009

In the twenty seven plus years of my existence I had only read about glaciers and had seen nothing but photos and videos of glaciers. Yesterday and the day before yesterday I got to see glaciers live, today I get to walk for over four hours on top of one.

A remarkable evolution in my relationship with glaciers.

In the middle of the austral summer I put on my windproof coat, my gloves and ice walking spikes on my feet to set out, together with twenty other strangers and five guides, into the icy vastness. The first thing that strikes you once you’re on a glacier is that it’s a lot of ice. I mean a lot of ice. Really. The second thing that strikes you once you’re in a glacier is that there’s even more ice, a lot more, than you imagined. Never ending ice moving two meters a day, despite the apparent stillness, born in the icy mountains and dying in the waters of the Lago Argentino. A slow suicide, with huge ice blocks jumping from its imposing walls into the waters, in a roar of foam and thunder that sets off a string of photographs and interjections from the tourists who wander about. And there are a lot of them.

Walking on ice for four hours, four hours of ice and more ice, is a “strange” experience, to say the least, for a Portuguese guy who grew up two minutes away from the beach and now lives in Barcelona.

Strange, beautiful and impressive.

Strange because you have to adapt to walking with two extra kilos of metal in your feet which cling to the ground, because at first so much white numbs the senses, because, in the beginning, when I am putting on my spikes while the wind nearly tumbles me over I can’t help to ask myself “What the hell am I doing here?”.

Beautiful because once the wind dies down and you go into the glacier’s valleys, hills, creeks and waterfalls, the wind, the weight of the clothes and even the wound the spikes caused in my heel are rendered irrelevant to give way to a new concept of beauty my poor Iberian brain was not prepared to face.

Impressive because as the hours go by and the weather goes back and forth between nice and not-so-nice, I realise that without the 5 guides none of us would endure much time in this labyrinth of cracks, this mountain range of razor sharp hills, this field of bottomless “sumideros”. As I looked into the sumidero the guide half-jokingly called La Boca del Diablo (The Devil’s Mouth) I let myself be conquered by a true sense of respect for this white titan.

Already on the boat back, while I enjoyed the whiskey and the alfajor the guides offered us, I reviewed the dozens of photos I took without truly realising how beautiful they were. It was only in the night when Marc and Martin went berserk with some of the photos that I really grasped that I had the privilege to spend four hours walking in a truly special place.