The Birds

While in El Calafate, Argentina, we visited a bird sanctuary, the Riserva Municipal Laguna Nimez.  It’s most popular for the flamingo flocks, which look striking with snowcapped peaks behind them, but it contains a wide variety of birds (80 species) in their natural habitats, in the wetlands between El Calafate and lake Argentino.  It’s a large space, including two lagoons, and it took us a few hours (we got stuck in a duck blind during a rainstorm for a bit) to walk the main path that runs through it.

The area was a cacophony of bird calls and songs, but one of the loudest of all—and we heard them everywhere in Patagonia, actually—is the black faced ibis, as seen above in flight. They are an odd-looking bird, but they seem as common as a crow at home.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about the reserve, so we’ll just let the photos speak for themselves.

We took a video of some of the birds as they were chasing each other and squawking quite loudly at the end of the day.

We will say, if you ever have the opportunity to see a flock of flamingoes take to the air, don’t pass it up. They look like they aren’t going to make it for quite a while, until they finally straighten out and pull up.

Nothing like watching a flock of flamingoes flap off into the sunset over a glacier to make you realize your life is pretty great.

El Calafate, Argentina

Some of the most enjoyable adventures we’ve had on this trip are the ones that have been unexpectedly delightful. Either our expectations were low, or we’ve just sort of stumbled upon something. Our Patagonian steppe safari was just such an adventure. We found some glowing reviews of it on Tripadvisor, and emailed them when we were still in Buenos Aires to set up a tour. Most of the time in South America we’ve found this to be a fruitless effort, as companies or hotels invariably don’t respond at all to email. We’ve had hotel reservation requests, as well as reservation requests for tours, go unanswered completely. It’s just one of the less lovely quirks of South America, and Argentina and Chile in particular.  But Patagonia Profunda was prompt in responding, and let us choose the day we wanted to go (and were very gracious in letting us reschedule when we were stuck two extra days in Buenos Aires). 

The tour we chose was a safari in the Patagonian steppe, in which you drive onto a working estancia (or ranch), which is also a natural reserve, in a 4x4 Land Rover, learn about the geology of the area, see wildlife including guanacos, nandu (a small ostrich-like bird), and Andean condors, and learn about the traditions of the gauchos, including the ritual of yerba mate.  The tour also included lunch out on the steppe.

When Lana told the proprietress of our hotel what we were doing for the day, she looked at her skeptically and said there was no such thing.  We think she prided herself on knowing all the tours, and this was one she wasn’t familiar with. It gave us pause, but we hope she recommends it in the future—we certainly sang the company’s praises when we returned from the trip.  When our guide arrived that morning, she interrogated him briefly—we think she was concerned we were getting ripped off.

Our guide for the day was Teo, who picked us up at our hotel in the promised Land Rover. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that there was no one else booked for the tour, so we got the experience of a private tour without having to pay extra for it!

As you can see from the photos, everything was in bloom on the steppe.

 

After a stop to look at the geological formation of the steppe and identify, and in a couple of cases even taste, various plants we drove a bit further until we spotted a few Andean condors circling in the thermals above a valley.

While we were watching them, Teo told us that some Andean condors live for 70 years.  The ones that reach this age do so because around the age of 40, they find a cave at the beginning of winter, pluck out all of their damaged feathers, and then grind their beak down on rocks, and let it regrow.  The condors that are able to do this live much longer than those that can’t or don’t.  After watching the birds a little longer, he went on to say he thought that people needed to do the same sort of thing; stop, re-examine, and start fresh.  Ahem.

Teo also talked about the geology of the area.  There are two different ash layers that contain numerous fossils.  One is a Jurassic sea bed, full of fossilized marine life, and the other contains mammalian fossils.  We took a hike to the marine layer.  The white rock from the compressed ash is a striking contrast to the otherwise dark earth and green vegetation.  It also shatters into thin, plate-like shards.

You almost couldn’t throw a rock without that rock containing a fossil.  Many were composed almost entirely of fossils.  The small ones—an inch or two long—were most numerous, but there were some shells as large as bowling balls too.

Amongst the fossils, we saw lots of what we thought were moss-covered rocks.  Teo pointed one out, and explained that it was actually the only tree that grows in the steppe—nearly firm as a rock, but composed of the woody roots.  Locally, it is known unkindly as mother-in-law pillow.

As we walked, we also saw free ranging horses, wild birds, and guanaco.

Guanaco are the wild variety of South American camel; llamas, alpacas, and vicuna are the more familiar and domesticated varieties.  They are between llamas and alpacas in size, and while they are wary of humans, they are also extremely curious, and will approach you if you remain motionless for long enough.  We tried to find a spot where they could see us, and approach at their own discretion, but the wind was coming from the wrong direction, along with some light rain, and they kept catching our scent and moving off before they could get curious. 

We saw some vigorously and persistently chasing each other, and Teo told us those were males, fighting.  One of the tactics of guanaco fighting is to bite the opposing males testicles off (Teo used the word eggs), rendering him an ineffective reproductive challenge to the alpha male’s herd of females.  The fights start with heads low, angling for a good bite, and devolve into a very spirited chase, with high motivation on the part of the lead guanaco, and a very stretched neck on the chasing guanaco.  Once we saw the behavior, it was obvious, and yet none of our other guides mentioned this.  I don’t know if it wasn’t deemed family friendly, but we thought it informed highly on the nature of the animals.

The Patagonian steppe itself was very pretty.  In some ways, it reminded us of other high dessert tundra.  It was dry, cool, and breezy, but it was also unique.

We circled back around to the estancia cottage to try and get closer to some guanacos.  But the wind was against us again and once they got a whiff of us there wandered oh so casually off.  Because it had been raining on and off, Teo had a bit of a change of plans for us. Instead of making lunch for us out on the steppe, he opened up the estancia cottage and started a fire.  While we got warmed up and the fire got going, he told us about the gaucho tradition of drinking yerba mate, and we shared a couple of cups of mate. 

Mate is an herb that many Argentinians drink, and they claim that it has many antioxidant properties similar to those we learned about coca leaves in Peru and Bolivia.  What is more interesting about mate is the ritual with which it’s drunk. Mate is a social drink, to be shared with friends. Everyone drinks from the same cup, generally a hollowed-out gourd which has been covered in silver or leather, which you pour mate leaves into, and then cover them with warm (but not hot) water, generally out of a thermos.  The drink is sipped from a silver straw, which has a fine, perforated, bulb strainer at the bottom, so you get the liquid and none of the leaves.  The first couple of cups are somewhat bitter, so the host drinks these to prepare the gourd for the next drinker he passes the cup to. The etiquette involved is that you drink the entire cupful of mate before passing it back to the host, or refilling it and passing it on to the next drinker.  You only say ‘gracias’, while handing the gourd back empty, when you are finished drinking entirely, and don’t want to be included in future rounds.  There are two different types of mate: suave and dolce. The suave is stronger, more bitter and unsweetened; the dolce is, well, sweeter.  Since we were out on the steppe with gauchos, we only had the suave. It was very strong and bitter. We likened it to an oolong, but more weedy.  We each drained the gourd, and had a scone that Teo set out for us to try and get the taste out of our mouths. It wasn’t bad, per se, but we didn’t want any more than one full—so we said ‘thank you!’

While lunch was heating up, we shared some bread and cheese and a glass of wine, all of which was very tasty, and quite welcome after our tromp around the hills in the mist.

Lunch was a beef and rice stew, with a good glass of red wine added while it was on the fire. It was delicious, and very warming. 

After a dessert of stewed fruit with a little more wine and some whipped cream, Teo took us down out of the steppe and dropped us back in town.  It was an unexpectedly lovely morning, and we find ourselves coming back to it as we think about all the amazing things we did in Patagonia.

Travel Apps and Digital Gear

When we were planning this trip, we looked at a lot of other long-term travellers’ gear posts for ideas.  I didn’t see a lot of info on electronics and apps, however, so I’m hoping this will be useful to other travellers in their planning.

Update: As of February 2013, avoid purchasing apps from Amazon's AppStore.  When you have limited connectivity, the AppStore will regularly de-authorize your purchased apps, making them unusable until you can connect to the internet again.  This is a huge problem if you rely on any of these apps.  Google's Play store handles this differently; in the six months we've been traveling, we've never had a problem with apps purchased from the Play store.  We've lost track of the number of times our Amazon apps stopped working.  Typical errors are similar to "You must be connected to the internet to use this app" and "Unknown AppStore error.  Please download this app again."  More info on this issue here.  We encountered this problem even when we had internet access, but were required to sign in to a web page to get access.  Amazon's AppStore refused to connect on some of these networks, even though we could access the internet with all of our other apps.

For the first two months, the app we used the most was a Spanish-English Dictionary, pictured above (and that was a word I needed to look up, yes).  It was always with me, but not in the form of a heavy, thick book—and occasionally I would make use of the pronunciation feature too, though this would be a lot more useful for a language you were completely new to.  If you’re evaluating translation apps, consider if they work when you have no internet access—this one was completely offline, so it worked in areas two days’ walk from electricity.

Our second most used app is MapsWithMe Pro, which is to paper maps what ebooks are to paper books.  We can carry maps for every country, city, and remote countryside area we’re going to visit, and they’re always in our pocket, on our small Android devices, so we don’t have to remember to bring a map, let alone purchase one.  Not only is it a huge space and money savings, but it gives us detailed info in areas that would be difficult to purchase paper maps for.  Google maps are great—when you have connectivity.  This is entirely offline, and you can choose where to store your maps, which is great if your device has an external memory card option.  There is absolutely no turn-by-turn navigation provided in this—it’s simply a map, though if you have a GPS in your device, it will optionally center the map on your actual location, or swivel the map so that “up” is always the direction you are traveling.  The Pro version of this allows you to search by street, address, point of interest (gas, grocery, hospital), or coordinates; search has been very useful.  The Pro version also allows you to place pins on the map, with names, details, and colors.  We've gotten in the habit of dropping a pin where our hotel is, making it easy to orient ourselves at a glance.  We have used this in every city we’ve been in at some point, as we wandered around.  Often we knew where we wanted to go, we just didn’t know what street we were currently on, or simply which direction we were going.  In South America, the street signs were highly variable, so you could walk a long distance before finding a sign that confirmed whether you guessed right or wrong.  Since we are no longer using the Spanish-English dictionary, this will probably become our number one app soon. Update: This is definitely our most used app now, bar none.

When we are driving, since the otherwise excellent MapsWithMe does not have navigation, we use the free (currently—after it leaves beta, who knows) Navigator app, which again, allows you to download maps for later offline use.  It’s great for high-level directions, but like any GPS navigation, it’s best paired with a competent human navigator.  Fortunately, we have at least one of those (there is debate about a second—that would be David).  We’ve named the AI speaker “Maude” as she sounds like a surly British teen, and tends to give you critical directions just after you wonder aloud why she hasn’t told you left or right already.  When you’re navigating intersections with no street signs, it’s easy to put up with her sometimes eccentric route choices.  The travel time estimates have been pretty accurate, and that’s very useful, even just for planning.  All of that said, the map data is not as accurate as MapsWithMe, and the interface is a little clumsy, so we’ve never used it while walking, even though it has a specific pedestrian mode. And regularly, we actually just use MapsWithMe while driving, since it's a lot more stable, and we just use it like a paper map, typically with Lana giving David her own turn-by-turn voice directions.

Unit Converter has been a great tool.  Not only for converting the distance, length, and temperature units used everywhere else in the world, but for currency conversions, which we use more often, especially as we’ve developed a feel for metric and Centigrade. 

Some of the more standard apps have been very useful for travel too.  Obviously eBook readers, like Kindle, Moon Reader (which can open many non-proprietary formats, like EPUB) allow us to bring as many books as we wish, without taking any physical space.  This has been very handy for travel guides, as well.  We are also able to bring our entire music library with us (thanks to a 64GB microSD card in the Samsung Galaxy Player), which is great for flights, road trips, and evenings at wherever we stay.

We’ve been ‘packing’ the complete Lord of the Rings trilogy (all 1138 pages of it) with us, and the complete works of Agatha Christie, among others:

Some of Google’s standard mobile apps have also been great: The GMail app caches received mail for offline access, so we can pull up details from accommodation we’ve booked online.  Similarly, Google Drive allows you to pick files which you want to access offline, such as the color copy of our passports, our entire trip itinerary, etc.  We’ve also used Evernote for storing some trip info, or just for jotting down tips from other travelers, for future reference.

When we’re planning activities or photography, and want to know when sunrise or sunset will be, without needing internet access, Sunrise Calculator gives us what we need.  Simply turn on the GPS, and it will update the times based on your current location, as well as  telling you exactly where in the sky the sun will be.  For photography, I’ve been using Moon Phase Pro to find moon phase and rise/set times.

MoonPhase Pro:

For more mundane matters, David was able to configure his mother's multi-function printer to scan directly to a Dropbox folder, which was then shared so that either of us can view the contents from our Androids or the laptop.  That way, and important mail (like those upcoming tax documents) can simply be scanned and we can read and deal with it from the road.  Also, our debit card bank allows us to use an app to take a picture of checks to make deposits, which we can use to transfer additional funds in, without leaving a large amount there in case of a stolen ATM card. 

For travel info, both the TripAdvisor and Triposo guides have been useful, though they are not a replacement for a complete guide for more in depth treatment of an area we’d spend more than a day or two in.

After some debate, we did retire one piece of electronics--our classic ‘keyboard’ Kindle reader.  We’ve mentioned our computer bottleneck in previous posts, and our solution to that was to get a Nexus 7 tablet as a sort of Christmas present to each other (and to our marriage).  We also got this Bluetooth keyboard, and a USB OTG cable, which allows our light, travel mouse to connect to the Nexus, so it can act as a very lightweight portable computer with a tactile keyboard and two button mouse.  Now one of us can work on correspondence with a keyboard, or booking/research with a mouse while the other is working on pictures on the actual laptop.  Since Lana was carrying the Kindle Fire in her gear previously, and the Nexus replaced it, it tricked down to David, and replaced the Kindle classic as his reader.

“You sunk my battleship!”

David, after some Googling, found a way to configure the laptop as a WiFi hotspot, allowing all of our devices to connect through one Internet connection.  This is necessary for a lot of Internet access in New Zealand, as it is controlled by a single-user login, which does not allow subsequent logins from other devices until the first has logged out.  When we bought a phone SIM at the Auckland airport, we also picked up a tiny USB GSM modem, for use in areas without WiFi, or where the pricing is ridiculous, and the laptop can share that Internet access to all our devices too.  After rooting the Nexus 7, we can also connect that USB modem to the Nexus 7 directly, through the USB OTG cable, and using the PPP Widget app, connect to the Internet anywhere there is a 3G signal.  It could come in handy for some unexpected internet use on the road.

An interesting side note on Internet access:
On our road trip in the US, WiFi was spotty, but when available, was generally free.  In South America, it was available everywhere there was electricity, and almost always free (and almost always pronounced wee-fee, in case you need to ask for it).  In New Zealand, WiFi is not quite as spotty as it is in the US, but it’s almost never free, and frequently it’s quite expensive, although some central business districts have free WiFi access.

At the end of 2012, we had the opportunity to refresh our gear; ship worn stuff home, replace it with new, or simply offload things we weren’t using. To some, we probably have a dizzying array of electronics weighing us down; I’m sure there are others who think we’re on the minimalist side too.  Everyone travels differently.  But when we had the chance to offload, we didn’t (we’re counting the Kindle classic as ‘replaced’), and that’s because the electronics we did take ended up being very useful, and not the mental burden we feared they might be.

Shoes - January

My shoes have made it 4 months, and many miles.  The Ecco’s brushed up nicely after their abuse on the glaciers, but they do have a few deep scratches that are there for good, now.  There doesn’t appear to be a lot more wear on the tread than last month.

I’ve put some more miles on my running shoes finally, but they’re still nearly new.   We’re finding it a lot easier to pick safe and pleasant places to run in New Zealand, weather willing.

And the Tom’s are holding up better than I expected, given how much I’ve been wearing them.  We’ve seen very few people in NZ with them (or similar), and have never seen anything like them in the many, many shoe stores we’ve walked past.

I'm still quite pleased with all three shoes--no regrets about any of them, or with lugging them halfway around the world.