Chuck

A useful suggestion from Senor Cuthbert has prompted me to include a map with this blog. Unfortunately Blogger's own 'interactive' map gadget is a bit of a nightmare to operate, and my fear is that rather than show where I am, it will probably show the precise location of where you are - defeating the object entirely. So just in case I've added a plain ordinary map to put on the side. Let me know which is better.

For your information the previous three posts have actually been side trips during the 4 days or so that we anchored ourselves in the town of El Calafate. Looking at the map of Argentina, this town is already quite near our end destination at the very bottom of the continent.

This is hugely misleading because distances take on a different meaning to Hong Kong and England. Gravel tracks can't be driven at more than 50kmh, and as we have found, a simple wrong turn can lead to two hours of fruitless driving before realizing that you are in fact heading towards China. With this in mind, and seeing as our 10-day contract for the little Corsa had expired, we made an executive decision to replace it with 'Chuck', a no-nonsense Toyota Helix 4x4 Turbo pick-up truck, for the remainder of our journey south.



Get out the way bitch

  It cost just a little more; two and a half times more per day to be exact. And it made no difference to us that the remaining journey could be entirely driven on the smoothest tarmac. Epic fail in terms of route management, but a resounding win for team morale.


Apparently Top Gear spent a entire programme trying
to destroy one of these. And failed!

Such was the excitement, another team decision was made to abandon the comfort of Route 40's newly paved asphalt for the eastward R9, a moody, muddy and physically brutal track which took us all the way to the seals and penguins of the Leon National Park (200km north of Rio Gallegos) - something we had both very much looked forward to seeing.

Imagine a horizontal line from Calafate, east to the Atlantic.
Route 9 - a notoriously rough road.

Or. At least it would have done had someone told us beforehand to come here in January, as opposed to April, when the seals and penguins are actually around.

"Not even one??" enquired Graham at the tourist office. He´d been wanting to get a photo of himself and a penguin all holiday, and it didnt matter if the thing was in fact dead. Sadly, even the old penguins who were on their last legs had been washed away some three weeks earlier. Slightly dejected, we drove the remaining 10km east for our first view of the Atlantic Ocean.