Before I add more musings on Patagonia, a little visual image to picture us on our travels - Joe has lost his long-cherished beard and locks but gained a proto-mullet, curling nicely round the nape of his neck. Our visit to an Argentinean hairdresser has also left me with a very severe fringe- think young and scary-looking Sylvia Plath.
And now, prepare to be bored stiff. Patagonia is the most incredible place on earth. So remote, so huge and wild, so prehistoric somehow. Having our own car for two weeks meant we could visit really out-of-the-way places. Joe has already described our route south from Bariloche and back up the east coast - what he didn't mention is that he drove almost 5000km - the place is so BIG. The coast is totally different from the parks tucked up under the Andes. And in the middle is just dust and round clumps of yellow-and-green thorny grasses and guanacos (wild llama-type things).
We went to two towns on the coast. The first was Puerto San Julian - where Magellan spent the winter of 1520 and Francis Drake the winter of 1578, both using the stopover to execute mutinous crews - and Puerto Deseado, on an estuary and amid a nature reserve further north. They were both frontier places, sort of outposts in the dust. I ate tasty fish in restaurants with weather-beaten locals and Joe continued his quest to eat every cow in Argentina. (And we both continued our descent into red wine alcoholism). Like the Peninsula Valdes the wildlife is amazing. You walk down a coastal path with bright blue-green seas and see penguins dotted among the gulls. New Year's Eve in a penguin colony on a nearby island was bliss. We spent 6 hours sitting with rockhoppers and their chicks, as they hopped around, got smashed against the rocks, resolved their daily squabbles and performed a funny head wobble when they stared at you. And all this amid yellow-lichen-stained rocks, blue skies, red cliffs and skuas mobbing you overhead. Will also insert my interesting fact here - apparently the word penguin comes from the Welsh 'pen' - white, and 'gwyn' head, from the early explorers and settlers of the Southern Hemisphere. Who knew?
The parks along Argentina's western border are incredible in a totally different way. Everything is on a vaster scale - the (southern) beech trees are about twice or three times the size of English ones, and the woodpeckers are half a metre long. The lakes are massive, often aquamarine or toothpaste blue, with no buildings on their shores and are full of enormous trout. The Perito Merino park that Joe mentioned is stunning. It's so isolated that apparently it only gets around 1200 visitors a year. The park rangers shake your hand, and its very romantic to think that they live there all year round, snowed in with their dogs for most of it. We camped among hares, curious birds and a herd of guanacos, staring through the wind at clouds moving over a pink mountain.
And a little more on those amazing woodpeckers. They're called Magellanic woodpeckers and rank among my new favourite birds. They're black and red (well, the male is, the female just has a floppy black curl on her head), and apparently you can attract them by tapping rapidly on a tree twice with stones. They think it's a rival and come to scare him off. David Attenborough managed it but sadly Joe never did, despite days of us bashing trees and scanning the canopy expectantly. Even more sadly Joe saw a whole family of them one day when I was having a nap. I still haven't quite forgiven him. But enough of my problems.
A few sites really brought home how little the land has changed since it was Pangea and attached to Africa. We saw a petrified forest in a sort of Death Valley, where 140 million-year old fossilised tree trunks were lying in the desert. And a cave in the side of a huge canyon with Stone Age paintings of hands and pregnant guanacos, where you could almost imagine Neanderthal man swarming up from the valley floor. The place is so devoid of human habitation that such scenes are easy to imagine.
Other lingering memories are Christmas Eve, which we celebrated with a lovely gay couple and the architect and wife that ran the campsite, and also camping by a seemingly abandoned estancia in the desert, with just a dog and cat for company. And to top it off we've just spent a day by a glacier, confusingly also called Perito Moreno. A completely other-worldly experience, especially hearing the ice-field crack, and seeing chunks splinter off into the lake. But I'm sure Joe will describe (and probably paint - his IPad sketches are on Facebook) the blues and translucent whites better than I can.
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