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The next part of our journey was just that, a journey. We stopped in Puerto Madryn and Rio Gallegos for as little time as possible on the way to El Calafate. Puerto Madryn was a small town with not much in it, and Rio Gallegos, well, we didn't even make it out of the bus station.
When we did make it out of the bus station, we drove for about three or four hours before stopping at a random bus station in a random town. Everyone was told to get off, which we duly did, and then the bus drove off with all of our stuff.
Everyone, tourist and Argentinean both, was dumbstruck. Luckily, a little over an hour later a different bus miraculously appeared with all of our stuff on it, and we were able to set off again. During that hour though we met an old man that refused to acknowledge that we couldn't speak Spanish, and he spoke to us the entire time. He was nice.
We got into El Calafate and mooched up a rather big hill to our hostel, one of the best hostels we've stayed in on the whole trip in fact, called I Keu Ken. Recommended.
El Calafate was supreme. Here we went to the Moreno Glacier on an organised tour. The sheer scale of this was ball-splittingly obscene. Unfortunately the batteries in our camera ran out within about half an hour so we didn't get that many shots of it.
Back at the hostel we met lots of cool people, including the very-cool-indeed Sam.
Sam is a girl my age from London, and we ended up travelling around with her for quite some time. We also met Scottish Tony, Laine and Dave, a cool Aussie couple and a bucket load of other people that we spent a lot of time eating steak and playing Shithead with.
We also met some Swedish lads that kept having their smelly shoes stolen by the mental dog that lived outside the hostel. At no point did we plan to travel with them, but we seemed to either follow or be followed by them for the next four months. We bumped into them about half a dozen times in five different countries.
It seemed that as soon as we had got here, we moved on to El Chalten, El Calafate's overweight retarded albino cousin.
To get to Bariloche we had to stop off for one night in Osorno on the Chilean side of the border. Unfortunately, on the bus on the way there we got one of our day bags half-inched from underneath our chair.
Luckily there was nothing in it apart from a lot of books, Helen's headscarf and my notebook in which I had meticulously written down every penny we had spent in the eight months previous. It was more of an annoyance than anything else. The fucker probably just threw it away.
There was nothing in Osorno. At all. So here is a picture of Russ Abbott at his wedding instead.
The next day we crossed the border into Argentina without any great difficulties. Although at one point the police got the sniffer dogs out. I haven't carried any drugs anywhere on this trip (as I'm not a stupid cunt), but for that moment that the dogs go near your bag you still panic, why is that?
We arrived into Bariloche and got into our hostel, which was really friendly. We immediately met two Canadian girls that had more than a healthy appetite for the male of the Argentinean species, having been taking sly paparazzi-style photos of them all day. We also met Tom, a lad that we would be bumping into a lot over the next couple of months.
Tom is from Belfast but has lived in Liverpool for some years now, so his accent is pretty mashed up. I have never met anyone that can talk as much as Tom can, and about absolutely nothing. That's not to say that he's dull, he's not, he's just like a scouse Pesci on sniff.
The day after we met Tom we went on a trek with him up a nearby mountain. This was tough going, but the view was fantastic.
That night we went out with a mixed bag of nationalities. We went to a reggae club and had a good drink and a bit of a boogie, and it was very strange being in clubs that you can smoke inside again. You forget how much you stink the next day. After five months of this it's going to be weird coming home and not being able to smoke anywhere again. Giant craziness.
We spent a bit of time up on the top of the hostel, as it had a view like this. The sky turned the most ridiculous colours.
The day before we left Bariloche we attempted to buy our tickets at the bus station.
Essentially, we ended up having to get about three taxis to the station and back into town because of passport problems, lack of money, then just for the fun of it. This was also the first time that I had a slight buzz of pride that I had said something in Spanish and someone understood me. I was learnings.
Eventually we sorted our lives out, and quick as Akabusi getting out of his dungarees, we were off to Puerto Madryn.
We got an overnight bus to Pucon from Valparaiso, and we got in very, very early.
So early in fact that Helen and I were in incredibly bad moods and had a bit of a set-two on the longer than expected walk from the bus station to our hostel. Lord Vader knows what about, the colour Black Jacks turn your tongue probably (midnight blue in my opinion), but by the time we got to our hostel we were in foul moods.
Thus when we had to wait in reception for two and a half hours before anyone even acknowledged our existence, tempers were reasonably frayed. Then the real bad news came when, despite telling them in our email that we would be there at half six in the morning, we were told we couldn't get into our room until one o'clock that afternoon. Fuck sake. Fine. Fucking useless Chilean fuck.
One turned into two, two into four and finally at ten past five in the afternoon we were able to get into our room, lie down and eventually have a shower and wash our balls.
Not happy bunnies, we went outside to lie in the sun for a while and I decided to go for a walk to look for another hostel. That I found, a place called Donde German? (literally Where's German?, so-named because apparently that is the question that German, the boss, constantly overhears being asked in reception) and the next day we moved hostels.
The rest of that day we spent being moody and playing around with the camera, and making the massive mistake of trying to get a hot chocolate in a rich man's town. I think we literally spent thirty quid on a shot of warm galaxy. 'Twere truly tasty though.
The first thing that should be said about Pucon is that it is home to a great big fuck off volcano. It is the sort of volcano that if you asked a five-year-old to draw a volcano, it would look like that. Generic, but awe inspiring. We planned to walk up it, but in the end money and time got the best of us, and we just gazed upon it from afar.
Our time in Pucon was spent mostly riding mountain bikes around, getting lost, finding some cool waterfalls and then being so hungry that we nearly ate a small dead rodent that I found. This is a mild exaggeration but it was hard work and we were pretty hungry.
The day after our bike ride we met the wonderful couple that were, and as far as I know still are called Al and Cerise. These guys were two Englishpeoples who we spent a whole day with, culminating in eating at a reasonably famous (in the backpacking sense) vegetarian restaurant and then getting quite drunk and playing with two of the most amusing puppies in existence.
Leaving Al and Cerise, we went on our merry way to Bariloche, but first we had to have a miserable stop in Asano, where a first did occur.
We got robbed.
Flying out of Auckland we were excited that the proper backpacking adventures were really just beginning. South America had always been number one on our list of priorities before we went away, and it felt good that after seven months we had finally got round to turning up there.
The flight was reasonably back-breaking, for one reason or another. The chairs were pretty rough and there was simply not enough red wine for a long haul flight. It did mean that we time travelled though, we essentially had two 1st of Februarys, arriving before we took off.
We got into Santiago quite early and settled into our hostel. We didn't do a great deal that day other than try and get some rest as neither of us had managed to get any sleep on the plane, we were wandering around like a couple of really preoccupied extras from a George Romero film, but without the kitsch make-up and only half the craving for brains.
The next day we went to ride the vernacular at a place that I believe was called Cerro Santa Lucia, which was great to look over the entirety of Santiago. It was only when we were this high that we realised the scale of the mountains that surrounded the city like big rock bullies. We then made the rather daring decision to forgo our tickets to ride back down the hill in the cable car and instead walk down. This took much, much longer than we thought it would. About four hours longer in fact.
For the next week we could hardly walk. From walking at such an excruciating angle, our achilles tendons felt as though they had been cut out, pulverised and put into a stew which we were then forced to eat using our knee cap as a rudimentary spoon. I hadn't realised the full extent of the pain until three days after the walk I jumped down from my bunk bed and my legs crumpled beneath me like a newborn deer's first attempt at doing the moonwalk.
The rest of the time that we spent in Santiago was general walky-aroundymanship, a skill that we have mastered quite well. It were alreet.
After four days in Santiago we bussed it to Valparaiso. Here we continued to walk around a lot, usually with no real aim whatsoever. Our first full day here we ventured on a public bus down to the beach. This was our first real experience of the Chilean peoples' acute sense of helpfulness, and we managed to not only get to the beach, but go to a much more pleasant one than was first planned, after an old lady told us that the other one smelled like dead fish. I think that's what she said anyway.
Bear in mind that neither of us can speak very much Spanish, and Chileans speak at four trillion words a minute. It's like talking trying to talk to Jools Holland three minutes before the Hootenanny begins, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but you still think that you'd like to be friends.
Valparaiso, interestingly enough, despite not being the capital of Chile, houses the National Congress. The second day that we were there we walked down and had a look at this nice big baby blue building. That evening we went for a walk into the area that we had been told was slightly on the rough side, and were pleasantly surprised to make it all the way back again without losing any limbs.
We had seen a reggae band playing in the streets, been stared at for rolling a cigarette (I quickly stopped rolling as it was quite clear they thought I was the doobie-making squad for the band) and witnessed some full on Christian madness in the town centre with people singing and clapping like the nutters they inevitably are.
The next day we went out and I started trying to practice my Spanish on unsuspecting Valparaisianites. We walked down to the docks and took some photos of the war memorials that are there.
Running off the main squares were seemingly hundreds of labyrinthine little cobbled roads that sprawled up the hillside that the city is built on. We wandered around these for a couple of hours and then decided to go to the very top of the hill on another vernacular to look out across the bay and ocean.
Up there we had a beer and talked about our next move, to fookin' Pucon.
The next stop on this seemingly endless journey (seriously, I'm already home in my dad's kitchen, when in Dennis Bergkamp's name am I going to get this done?) was Westport.
To make things easier on myself, here we ate some food and did some laundry. Dan and Jimbo went fishing and caught a tyre, a boot and a book of clichés. Nothing else much happened in this place, although it was rather beautiful. Oh, I did read an interesting article on circumcision in the laundromat though. Moving on.
Just up the proverbial road was Abel Tasman. This proverbial road was mostly dirt tracks, and when it was not it was a mind-twistingly bendy mountain road. When we got there we attempted to break into a camp ground that good honest Kiwis enter a ballot up to nine months previous to stay at.
We didn't have the nerve to hang around and so drove about fifteen minutes away from the official park and stopped at a - still completely illegal - spot. We went down to the beach and played a lot of football and did a lot of lying about. Like this.
Dan also tried to have sex with a little buoy.
That night we cooked some ready noodles and began to plan our future war against sand flies. They were EVERYWHERE.
We stayed in Abel Tasman for two days, and once thoroughly relaxed and bitten to buggery, we climbed back into our wagons and soldiered on. This was when Dagley's driving was really put to the test.
We were attempting to leave the town on a Sunday evening. Big fucking mistake. If you have seen The Village then you can sort of imagine the sort of amenities that were available in the town. (If you haven´t seen The Village, well done you.)
The petrol station was shut. At quarter-past five. We thought we had just about enough petrol to just about get us over the mountain, where hopefully we would be able to just about roll down the other side to the next town. How wrong we were.
We got about two thirds up the mountain when our car started dry heaving and bouncing along the road like the Duracell Bunny with its leg stuck in a bear trap. We sensibly pulled over by a blind corner and got out. Dan and Jimbo went on ahead to the next town and got us a small can of petrol that would hopefully allow us to make it there to fill up.
We just about made it up the side of the hill, and Helen skilfully rolled us down the other side, in total driving about 40km with the engine off. Getting to the next town had proved a petrol-less doddle. However, there was still no way of getting petrol as the fuckers had shut there as well.
By the time we found somewhere to sleep that night, we were scared that we wouldn´t be able to start the car the next morning. So, logically, we got drunk.
The next day we crawled up to the petrol station and managed to fill up enough for us to push on up to Kaikora, where we stayed at possibly the nicest camping spot of all, cooked bangers and mash, had a fight with a massive rodent and then the most confusing game of 21's ever.
The next morning, after having a swim in a freezing cold stream and in a state of pure teary anguish, we bid farewell to Daniel and Jimbo and made our way back down to Christchurch.
Faster than you can say 'holy-missing-information-Batman' we were on a plane to Auckland, and before you knew it we were on a plane to South America.
Exciting.
