Bus ride from Hell...

Okay, so maybe I am a bit melodramatic, but I wanted to get your attention after not posting for so long! No excuses this time, it will be easier on all of us if you all just expect there to be long gaps between my postings :) Even my journal isnt getting much use (as pretty as it is Andrea!) - its very different travelling here in SA compared with the Pacific Islands or the Philippines. Here I actually meet people and have friends to do day trips with, whereas there I spent weeks without someone to talk to so naturally my emails and journal were getting a lot more of my time. Anyways, I get sidetracked so easily, the bus ride...

Last time you heard from me I had just come out of the Torres del Paine - from there I went straight to El Chalten for more hiking, but this time just day trips. It is another great place to go, this is where you can see Mt Fitz Roy and several glaciers coming out of the mountains. Appropriately the park is called Parque National Los Glacieres (I'll leave you all to translate that on your own and feel good about your superb Spanish skills). I did 3 days of hiking there, doing most of the trails/loops in the area and had great weather for most of it. I can imagine how disappointing it would be to hike 5 hours to the view point and have the mountains covered in clouds, but I got lucky. Even after the hiking in TdP, after my first 8 hour hiking day my legs were not very happy with me. They were even less happy when I made them take me back out to get food for dinner (bad planning on my part not to get food first). Anyways, the town is only about 30 years old and is the Trekking capital of Argentina (did I mention I crossed the border to Argentina?). Mostly it is hostel, restaurants, and tour agencies, but it is still very cute and didnt have the completely fake tourist fell that El Calafate had. Maybe because the only things to do here are trekking so you dont have the tour-tourist crowd here. I am a bit of a travelling snob...

From El Chalten I planned to take a bus North towards Bariloche, the heart of the lakes district on the Argentina side. This bus takes (supposidly) 24 hours and actually goes out to the coast and then back close to the border between Chile and Argentina - one road, Rte 40, goes straight up but it is unpaved much of the way and that trip takes about 36 hours. I actually tried to get on the long bus as Rte 40 is one of those amazingly horrible trips to do but the buses were all full so I went the shorter route. The bus was about an hour late picking us up from the bus station - which is unusual since the bus systems here are usually excellent - we got on about 7pm. We were a pretty scraggly backpacker crowd waiting for the bus, which should have told us that the locals know better than to take this bus...So after getting on the bus, all seemed to be going okay, except that a few hours into the trip there was a buzzing that kept coming on and off. In Rio Gallegos we stopped at the bus station and were told that we all had to get off while they fixed something (at least this is what I managed to understand from people around me since, just like anywhere, announcements coming through intercoms are impossible to understand, especially if you dont speak the language). We waited about an hour before the let us back on the bus - it was now about midnight. I had a nice sleep and woke up at about 9am. The bus was still motoring along and we made it to Comodoro Ravaldivia (or something like that) about 11am. People were getting off at stops along the way, but they were asking the rest of us not to get off as, I think, they were trying to make up for time lost. This wasnt a problem for me, and I came on the bus will a full supply of food (typical, right?) but others were starting to get hungry as they were counting on there being food stops. I later met a couple guys who were on the same bus, and hadnt brought any food with them; they were the ones gulping down the pop that was offered in an effort to get some sugar :) We got about an hour outside of C.R. before we were stopped again - this time for an accident further along the road. The police had set up a road block in the middle of nowhere but supposedly there was an accident. We were told that we would have a 1.5 or 2 hour wait to get through...it turned out to be about 5 hours waiting by the side of the road. After about 4 hours people started getting annoyed and there were some honking protests going on. The police stood firm, and wouldnt even let the people through who had come from the other direction! So there was our line of cars on one side of the barrier, another line on the other side, and an accident somewhere a few km away! It was really ridiculous. Finally we were allowed to go and after about 30 minutes of driving we made it to the site of the accident - an oil tanker had rolled but it didnt seem as though the tank had exploded. But the truck was in very bad shape.

The rest of the ride was uneventful and I made it to my destination safely, however, I was 9 hours late and so it was 2am when the bus unloaded me and my bag at the bus station of some random town. Welcome to Esquel.

I had no hostel reservation here as I had planned to move to a smaller town about 30 min south of Esquel, so I started wandering the streets looking for a hostel. I had a similar experience in Vanuatu, but this one was much better. There the streets were quiet and scary, and here it was just a nice town with well lit streets so it was okay, if not my ideal way to arrive someplace new. I found a hostel, woke up the night person, and got a bed for the night before moving onto Trevellin the next morning.

Okay, so maybe not the bus ride from hell, but I got you to read all about it, didnt I?

I hear you are moving into Spring back home - good or bad thing?

A
xox