On 21st February, the cross-border bus was supposed to leave Puerto Natales at 8:30 am, but there was some kind of delay, and by the time it arrived to pick us up the “bus” had become more like a van, and it finally left at 9:15. On board were a group of Germans who I’d helped to get their bus ticket 2 days previously – it does seem that my command of Spanish is now significantly better than many other backpackers, most likely due to the amount of time I’ve been on this continent.

It does now seem an incredibly long time ago that I crossed the Rio Grande, and it barely seems possible that within 2 weeks I will be in a non-Spanish-speaking country…

The first 60 km of the route to the border was along the same road that led to Torres del Paine. Then we turned right, down a narrow dirt road in the middle of nowhere and immediately stopped for Chilean immigration – this was my 8th (and final) time crossing the Chilean border! Then into the wilderness, over the border to Argentine immigration near the village of Cancha Carrera, which turned out to consist of approximately nothing at all.

From Cancha Carrera the RN-40 led north (I’d travelled this road in the opposite direction on Monday to reach Rio Turbio). The National Route 40 actually runs the whole length of Argentina along the foot of the Andes. That doesn’t mean it’s in a good state of repair everywhere – it is a pot-hole-ridden dirt road in this part of Patagonia.

A few hours later we rattled into the village of Calafate. The reason for coming to this area of Argentina was to see the famous and highly recommended Perito Moreno Glacier, 75 km to the west. The only place with accommodation is the village of Calafate, which my guide book describes as “…an oversized encampment of rapacious merchants fixated on making a year’s income in a few short months, by maintaining high prices rather than increasing sales.”

Thus warned that owners of hotels in this part of Patagonia are a greedy bunch, who jack the prices up in summer, I headed for the Youth Hostel, but even this was expensive and full and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I saw the wretched Swiss Queue Jumpers there! They didn’t see me this time…

After asking around I was eventually directed to an alternative albergue (hostel) which had plenty of space, apparently because it only opened recently and few people know about it. It was shiny and new and had a nice kitchen to use. I walked down to the town centre where I saw the Germans from the bus trip and had a burger for lunch with them, after which I went to the phone office to phone home: my sister in Bedfordshire answered and was pleased to hear that all was well, despite me being a very long way away.

I then booked my bus trip to the glacier for the next day. There was no choice here – one company seemed to have a monopoly on the glacier trip, and the only available option was a guided tour which included seeing other sights on the way.

A visit to a corner supermarket provided me with some things to cook back at the hostel. A Brazilian couple were also in the kitchen, and they told me all about their glacier visit – it sounded well worth it.

My cooked breakfast on 22nd February was cooked by me, which made a nice change! There was no particular hurry since the bus didn’t leave until 9 am. However once I was on the bus I soon got frustrated by how long it was taking, and how many unnecessary stops there were, as we headed westwards across the barren flatlands on the south side of Lago Argentino. I could see that the weather was good but clouds were building, and I wanted to get to the glacier before it clouded over completely.

The bus stopped again at some rocks that were supposedly shaped like elephants, and the guide kept going on and on about how amazing she thought they were. Then further on we had to stop again to get out and wander off to pick and eat calafate berries from the bushes near the road – there’s a superstition that if you eat calafate berries then this guarantees that you will soon return to Patagonia. Well, in my case I know I will come back! – my flight to New Zealand has to land to refuel at Rio Gallegos in 10 days time. I just wanted to get to the glacier, and after a few more km it appeared, still tantalizingly sunlit in the distance…

But another stop was scheduled – this was the final straw! We were within 5 km of the glacier, and the cloud building rapidly, when the bus stopped at a large restaurant and we were told that we had an hour to have lunch there. I went and looked at the prices and they were exorbitant – a classic tourist trap. I had brought lunch items with me, so I decided to skip lunch and walk the rest of the way to the glacier. Before abandoning the tour, I politely told the guide what I thought of the calafate berries, the elephant-shaped rocks, and especially this expensive restaurant.

I started walking and soon a sympathetic pickup driver stopped and took me the rest of the way. On the way 3 condors flew overhead – they were huge, gliding for minutes at a time without flapping their wings.

Of course the rain started just as I reached the viewing platform and had my first look at the glacier. But even in flat lighting and drizzle, the sight was tremendously impressive – a huge blue wall of ice bearing down from the distant snowcapped peaks towards the promontory on which I stood. The base of the glacier pressed up against the end of the promontory.

This promontory actually divides the lake – Lago Argentino – into 2 parts, and every few years the glacier forms a natural “ice dam” that makes the water build up on one side (the south “arm” of the lake) since it is not able to escape. Then the pressure gets so high that the ice dam is destroyed in spectacular fashion over just a few hours.

The glacier was deceptively huge – the face was 70 m high and 5 km wide – much more than I had expected. Every so often there would be a rumble and a crash as ice dropped off somewhere along the face. Blocks seemed to fall in slow motion – only when this happened could you really appreciate the vast scale of it. This became even more obvious as I descended the walkway and got closer.

Eventually I’d seen enough and the rain was starting to come down quite hard so I went to find the bus. The guide wasn’t too upset with me for abandoning her tour, and let me rejoin… fortunately the bus didn’t then stop at all on the way back to Calafate. I bought a ticket for the following morning towards Rio Gallegos on the Atlantic coast, and headed back to the hostel. A fun evening then followed, cooking supermarket food in the kitchen, in the company of 3 friendly Spaniards who had arrived during the day.

The Spaniards mentioned a place called El Chaltén, 200 km north of Calafate, that is very hard to get to but has amazing views if the weather is good. It has a brief mention in my book, but it seems it would take a full day to get there and a full day to get back, on awful roads. They mentioned 2 mountains that I believe I have heard of, in connection with major international mountaineering expeditions – Cerro Torre and Fitzroy. I think I will have to give it a miss – if I ever return to Patagonia I may well try to get to El Chaltén.

The next day (23rd February) I was up very early and by 6:30 am was on the bus, heading southeast across the featureless arid plains of southern Patagonia. The trip was good except for the presence on board of none other than… yes… the wretched Swiss Queue Jumpers. They saw me this time, and gave me a dirty look.

My plan was to get off the bus where the road from Calafate meets the main east coast road – Ruta Nacional 3 – and then try to hitchhike north on RN3. I had asked the bus driver to let me off at the junction, 30 km before Rio Gallegos, but in the end he didn’t stop for another 5 km. This was at a police check point near a place named Guer Aike which (like many Patagonian locations) consisted of approximately nothing at all.

I started walking back to the junction only to find, after an hour, that it wasn’t much of a junction, but was a fast shallow curve on a hill, and not a good place for hitching a ride at all. Also there was hardly any traffic. I waited for an hour, but it was becoming clear that anyone who was leaving to go north on RN3 had likely gone earlier in the day (it being many hundreds of km to the next significant destination). Barely half a dozen vehicles sped past me, and by early afternoon I had little option but to walk an hour back to the police post where all the traffic had to stop anyway.

But the police told me I wasn’t allowed to hitchhike from there, and said my best option was to get a night bus from Rio Gallegos. When I made it clear I was about to have to walk 25 km to Rio Gallegos if I couldn’t hitchhike, they took pity on me and asked a truck driver who was going that way, carrying building materials, if he would take me. The truck cab had no space but I was allowed to sit in the back, and thus unwillingly reached the city of Rio Gallegos (which I had never had any real desire to visit anyway) sitting on a pile of soil in the open back of the truck…

As if things couldn’t get worse, when I reached the bus terminal to buy a ticket for the 9pm bus northwards, still brushing dirt off my trousers, the wretched Swiss Queue Jumpers were there, tickets in hand, glaring at me…

With several hours to spare, I headed for the centre of Rio Gallegos. The guide book said there was nothing of interest in the city, and that it was just dusty streets, squabbling dogs, and rubbish blowing around. I reached the “seafront” which actually overlooks the estuary of the Gallegos River, and wandered along.

The only thing I could find to take a photo of was a rather striking war memorial in honour of the Argentinean Air Force pilots who had given their lives.

Behind the monument was what looked like a secondary school, with ugly graffiti and what looked like a lot of broken windows. It occurred to me that the kids at that school must be a seriously unruly bunch, but luckily being Saturday they were away – presumably breaking things elsewhere… [A mysterious voice from the future is trying to tell me that I will one day meet and marry one of these very same unruly students… this is clearly absurd!!]

I had a coffee at a small cafeteria and tuned in to the BBC to discover that there has been a coup d’etat in Thailand. This is a little concerning, since I expect to be in Thailand in a few months. I wrote some letters and postcards and eventually left the cafeteria to head back to the terminal to get my night bus. Curiously I had to “check in” for the bus and was given a boarding pass, as though it was a flight!

On the bus I got chatting to girl from the French-speaking part of Switzerland (I was glad to see that she was the only Swiss person on the bus..!). It wasn’t quite that easy to finally get clear of Rio Gallegos: the bus soon broke down. While waiting for them to resolve this, I tuned in to the BBC and heard that the ground war in the Gulf has just started – allied land forces have crossed from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait and the Iraqi invaders are finally on the run…

After an hour, a replacement bus arrived and the journey northwards resumed.