Days 14 & 15 - Animals!

After the big hike of day 13, we decided that we deserved another lazy day, because we are lazy bums. However, the one thing I was determined to do while still in El Chalten was to see an armadillo. After reports from a couple of other people staying at the hostel that there were some near the ranger station, we headed off on a short stroll in the early evening. We managed to spot an armadillo with surprising ease. It was just casually chilling out on the side of the trail about 5 minutes out of town.

Wee (big hairy) armadillo chilling out by the trail


Look at it's cute little (half-hidden) face

This is a “big hairy armadillo”. I kid you not, this is the actual common name for the C. villosus. Armadillo names are great, and I hope I get to meet the relatives of the big hairy during this trip, including the screaming hairy, pink fairy, and hairy long-nosed (seriously, these are real armadillo types)

Day 15 saw us off on a 3 hour long drive to the town of El Calafate, where we were to spend our last 2 nights in Patagonia. Our hostel was situated right at the edge of Lago Argentino, the biggest freshwater lake in the country. Although this meant we were a little bit out of town (although a 15 minute walk isn’t bad at all), it also meant FLAMINGOES! Being an utter cheapskate, I didn’t want to pay the entrance fee to the nature reserve that supposedly housed an abundance of bird life, electing to stand outside with a pair of binoculars instead. After a minute of sneaky viewing, we noticed that outside the reserve, in the lake itself, flamingoes were actually dotted near the shore everywhere, along with many other types of birds and horses grazing in the shallows. Why the heck people pay for the reserve is beyond me when it’s not like birds respect park boundaries and choose to only hang out in the reserve rather than the rest of the wetlands area separated only by a low fence...

So pink!


So fabulous!


So horsey!

Bonus Jesus for extra XP: Ok so this isn’t actually Jesus, but I'm including it because it has more than a whiff of the religious about it. I kept spotting these little red shrines throughout our drive between El Chalten and El Calafate. Here is one from the entrance into the town of El Chalten. Almighty google tells me that these are shrines for “Gauchito Gil”, a legendary character in Argentina akin to Robin Hood who although not canonised by the Catholic Church, is regarded as a saint by locals. He seems also to have a penchant for cheap alcohol, judging by the bottles in the shrines. 

Hooray for alcoholic semi-saints!


Not a bad place to chill with a bunch of alcohol

Day 13 - why is "Fitzy Roy" two words?

We woke up feeling grumpy and ill-rested on day 13 (thanks to a loudly snoring but otherwise uncommunicative guy sharing our dorm and the sound of super strong winds gusting outside). However, it would be lazy in the extreme to take 2 bum days in a row, so we psyched ourselves up in order to tackle the most epic (and as a result, most overcrowded) day walk of them all - the Laguna de los Tres (three of what? We have no idea...) This is the hike to the base of the iconic Cerro Fitz Roy. The other name for this mountain is "Chaltén" (which the town is named after), meaning "smoking mountain" in a local indigenous language. This is due to the clouds usually shrouding the peak. Clouds that were out in full force as we set off on our 20km walk.

Heading off, hoping the wind is blowing the clouds away from us, not towards us


At the first viewpoint, the clouds were still against us


Woodpeckers rock out the hardest out of all birds because are such haradcore headbangers. Check out the sweet mohawk on this one!

It's a wild Jeremy! *use pokeball*


Where's this glacier going? I don't know, it's just hanging out *ba dum tchsss* (sorry, sorry)

To our delight, we got super lucky and by the time we made it to the lake at the base of the mountain, the weather had cleared up enough for us to see some of the mountain. The lake was the most amazing blue colour (obviously magic, once again), and the water was absolutely delicious (yay for lack of chlorine taste!). I had vaguely understood the advice of one of the Italian guys from the night before, who had said to not stop when we got to Los Tres but continue beyond for a couple of minutes. There was another lake, just as blue, lurking just around the rock pile! This place was seriously magical, a fact keenly felt by a cranky old man sitting on a rock who yelled at chattering people nearby to "shut up! This place is a church!". Preach, dude.

SO BLUE!


The next lake over - bluer than Jeremy's eyes


We huddled behind a rock and ate this chocolate bar. It tasted like despair and familial betrayal.

Clearly the mountain gods were displeased with Being disturbed by so many tourists, and by the time we were 1/3 of the way back the clouds had returned in full force and a relentless drizzle had set in. Speed-walking to keep ourselves from being swallowed by the steadily descending clouds, we completed the 9 hour walk in 7 hours and 58 minutes.

Stir Crazy

I've had a pretty awful cold for the past 3 weeks or so, and haven't really left the house apart from to go to work and for various errands. I've only got the lingering tail-end of a cough left to fight off now, so hopefully I'll be able to go out and do something fun this long weekend. Meanwhile, here are some random things from inside my apartment.

The only vaguely active thing I've been doing is some gardening in the corner of our balcony which gets a bit of sun. I'm trying to be good with remembering to water things, but it's anyone's guess how long I'll be able to keep these little guys alive for. My negligence is notorious when it comes to things that don't vocally nag me to feed them. Thank goodness for flatmates who are less slack than I.

Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary - Ubud, Bali

I'm a big fan of monkeys. They're like tiny furry people, with more cheek and less spite than the average human. The Padangtegal Mandala Wisata Wanara Wana Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud is home to over 600 crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis), which unlike what their name suggests, seem to subsist on a diet of kumara and cucumbers,  as well as bananas viciously wrestled from unwary tourists. This place is definitely worth a visit, as it's pretty cool watching monkeys have free reign over their surroundings without the constraints of a zoo enclosure. And much like any other primate, this generally results in pillaging and hoarding food, putting lesser monkeys in their place (with us tourists being on the bottom of the ladder, of course), with a healthy (?) dose of sudden surprise monkey sex on the side. We watched a particularly determined one try to crack open a coconut in vain for ages, while another macaque sat to the side, judging him and making what were no doubt patronisingly sarcastic quips about his fruit-handling technique. We left him alone after a while, in case he was failing due to performance anxiety. I hope he got to eat his sweet sweet coconut in the end.

Pictures taken March 2015.