When thinking about places to visit in Chile or Argentina, people often mention places in the south or the north.  I think it’s fair to say that if you’re strapped for time and want to visit Chile and Argentina it’s best to focus your time in either the south or the north. Our time in the south of both countries was scenically quite rewarding.  For extremely beautiful nature, stunning vistas, and great hiking you can’t go wrong with a visit to the south of Argentina and Chile.  However, the north is quite different. The north has colonial cities, deserts, interesting rock formations, fossils, indigenous culture, vineyards, geysers, volcanoes.  The list is exhaustive and the differences between the two are huge!

Here are our highlights from northern Chile and Argentina, including our favourite accommodation and dining experiences.   Continue reading →

Salta, nicknamed ‘Salta the beautiful’ is an old colonial city in the north west of Argentina. The guide book says the city has a population of 535,303, smaller than Mendoza, but still a decent sized city.  We had looked forward to visiting it for a long time, having read about the city when we were still researching destinations to visit while still living in Wellington.  Driving into the city first impressions weren’t great.  Narrow busy streets, chaotic traffic with lots of pedestrians doing random stuff.  The municipal campground 6km from the centre was where we’d planned to stay but it gave us bad vibes so we decided to move on.  We were lucky to find space at a Posada very close to the city thanks to the help of the tourism office.  It was also insanely cheap, only 170 Pesos. Unfortunately Semana Santa (Easter) was starting the next day, and most people have five days of vacation as a result, Thursday through to Monday. It felt like all of Argentina descended on Salta and the north west of Argentina.  For the next five days we were constantly battling crowds and having difficulties with finding accommodation (even campsites). In the end Semana Santa won, and instead of taking our time to see Salta and the Jujuy provinces we ended up spending one day sight seeing in Salta and then camping in San Lorenzo, a village 12kms outside of the city.  However a whole group of dogs were at the campsite as well and they barked all night long, and even fought with each other.  Not a wink of sleep was had, and while we thought we’d stay a couple of days extra in the village we ended up packing up mid afternoon and driving four hours north to the village of Purmamarca where we camped the night before crossing back into Chile via the infamous Paso de Jama.  The one good thing about this rushed finish to our time in Argentina  was that we came in on budget, and spent the very last of our Pesos buying expensive fuel in Susques, a small village just a couple of hours before the border crossing into Chile. Continue reading →

Crossing the border into Chile once again was a piece of cake, we know the drill exactly, old hands. The border is on top of a mountain range and when descending into Chile the change in landscape was apparent. Where Argentina was dry, Chile was lush and green, the rain doesn’t make it over the mountains too often. We had read in our guidebook that the area on this border was ‘Mapuche’ area, the indigenous people who are still getting a very bad deal in Chile. We stopped at a small town called Curarrehue where 80% of the people are Mapuche. There is a little museum and a Mapuche restaurant. We had a great lunch here, it started off with sopapillas, assort of deep fried bread with spreads. The bread reminded me much of ‘oliebollen’, a Dutch New Years tradition. For our main Julia had a soup with local ingredients and I had a sort of stew with a large piece of cow meat and a lot of coriander, it was all very tasty.

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Our time in southern Chile and Argentina started with our road trip down the rugged and extremely scenic Carretera Austral in Chile and ended with brilliant day hiking from El Chalten in the stunning Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina. Distances between destinations are huge, and you can drive for a long time without seeing anything other than the odd guanaco. Here are our highlights from southern Chile and Argentina, including our favourite accommodation and dining experiences.    Continue reading →

After our brief stop in Puerto Natales we crossed the border into Argentina and drove north to El Calafate. El Calafate is the most touristic town we’ve visited so far.  It has good infrastructure and facilities for tourists and many fine places to eat and drink.  However it is a busy place to visit after being in the sleepy towns of Patagonia.  It seems to exist primarily because of the Perito Moreno glacier, a stunning glacier in the southern sector of Los Glaciares National Park.  Perito Moreno glacier is unusual because instead of receding it advances at a rate of 2m per day.  It is 30km long, 5km wide and 60m high.  Massive!  Giant icebergs the size of buildings carve off the face of the glacier and collapse into the channel below.  It sounds like a gun going off and is an amazing thing to watch.  To visit it, you walk along a series of boardwalks across from the glacier which allows you to see it from different angles.  This makes it one of the most accessible attractions to visit in Patagonia, probably why El Calafate is so busy! From the town it is really easy to arrange a tour to see the glacier.  We didn’t do this, instead first visiting the glacier on our way to a campsite on Lake Roca, also in the National Park.  We spent a couple of days camping at the lake, before heading back to El Calafate to meet Erik and Nelleke for dinner.  Erik and Richard went to school together and hadn’t seen each other for at least ten years so a good old fashioned catch up was in order. We had a great night out with them! Continue reading →

We spent a few a days in Ushuaia, the most southern city of the world and the southern most point of our trip here in South America.  We did nice hikes from the town and in Tierra del Fuego National Park, visited some interesting museums, and saw lots of wildlife. In short there was plenty to do! Continue reading →

On the 25^th of January we crossed the Argentinean border at Chile Chico to Los Antiguos. Quite exciting as we just had to hope all our paperwork was in order. It got scrutinised, especially the Argentinean insurance and we were there for a while. But eventually we got the green light, after we had thrown out all our fruit and vegetables which you are not allowed to take with you. Los Antiguos is an oasis town and was a breath of fresh air after all the gritty Chilean towns. We struggled to find accommodation as it was busy with tourists, but eventually lucked out on a hostel room where we met some travellers who were on the gringo trail which we were crossing paths with.

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