Notes from a bus

              We are back home, and already it is hard to imagine that it is no more than ten days ago since I wrote the following entry. My good intentions to post a blog once a week were thwarted by the unexpected death of my computer, or rather its screen, and I found it impossible to 'quickly' write a blog the few times we had internet access at an internet cafe.


              I did write in my journal, however, and will try to post blogs in retrospect, though not necessarily chronologically, more like a series of impressions of different stages of the journey. Here is the first one of them.

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

After three days on the ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales through the Patagonian channels, after hiking up to the foot of the Torres del Paine, after watching and listening to Perito Moreno glacier calve, we are now sitting in a 42 passenger bus, on our way north on the (in)famous Ruta 40, Argentina. We started out in El Calafate and will get off in the little town of Gobernador Costa after 23 hours of travel.

7:50 pm

The bus is finally leaving El Calafate, half an hour late because of some mechanical problem in need of fixing, and another stop on the outskirts of town to go through a police control. I’m still not sure what these controls are good for. A policeman came through and wrote down everybody’s name and passport number.

Although the bus is not even half full we got the two last adjacent seats available when we bought our tickets yesterday. I assume we’ll pick up more passengers on the way who probably booked earlier than we did. Our seats are at the very back, right beside the bathroom – not ideal, but we are happy that we managed to get on at all. The next bus goes in a couple of days, which would have made it too late for us to stop at Gretel and Nikita’s at Lago Vintter.

It is pretty bumpy already, even though we are still on pavement. I wonder how my back will feel at the end of this journey: a good part of the way it is still ripio, the Argentinean version of gravel road.

10:30 pm – first stop on the way in El Chalten. Very few people got off the bus here, but a big bunch of backpackers is getting on, and the bus is now full. All of these travelers are tourists, from many different nations, and I believe all but one of them are not much more than half our age. They’ll go all the way to Esquel or even Bariloche; I’m sure nobody will get off at Gobernador Costa with us.

We still had enough daylight to see mighty Mount Fitz Roy, one more of the trademark peaks of Patagonia and one of the reasons why El Chalten is so popular with tourists. Even now it is not totally dark, but it is very windy. I watched the play of clouds across the huge sky stretched over the plains earlier, mountains in the background, with another big lake and its “house glacier”: Lago and Glaciar Viedma. These mountains rise almost without warning from the flat steppe, without the presence of real foothills, just a buffer of bare mounds, one layer thick.

Sunday, January 9^th, 2011, 11 am

At the bus terminal in the town of Perito Moreno, with a 1 1/2 hour break

More than half of our journey lies behind us, and I slept for a fair part of it, even though at first I thought I couldn’t.

When we left El Chalten we were given lunch packs, and the driver pointed out a stack of Styrofoam cups and a big container with water we could use as we needed. After a few minutes the lights in the bus were extinguished, and as the little spotlights were too dim for reading I soon fell asleep. Whenever I woke up during the next few hours I saw a mass of stars through the slit in the curtains.

I must have slept for quite a while after that, because the sky was a deep, flaming red when I woke up next. It was close to 5:30 in the morning, and we had turned onto a very bumpy stretch of road and eventually came to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Far and wide the plains stretched in the pre-dawn light, hills in the distance a black ink drawing against the slowly brightening sky, a river, band of shining silver, meandering through a shallow  valley.

This was a scene I will remember for a long time:

A small house – a kind of truck stop, it turned out - in the midst of all that empty vastness, our bus, almost as big as the house, parked beside it, the gravel road getting lost in some invisible distance. The warm glow of light shining through the windows like an invitation, and the group of about 40 tired tourists, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, lined up for bathrooms and a breakfast of coffee, tea, mate, cake and media luna, croissants.

The restaurant owner, a tall, neatly dressed Argentinean with a grey ponytail, looked well rested at this early hour and handled the many orders calmly, patiently repeating the cost of an order for those who weren’t well versed in Spanish, and I, too, got a good, strong cafe sin leche.

To heighten the sense of surrealism a TV screen showed Beatles videos. How strange to watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to listen to “Imagine”, in these surroundings! The hallway leading to the baños (bathrooms) ended in a fair sized room filled with shelves of books, couches, arm chairs, labelled “Public Library”. What was this place? Had we landed in some Hitchcock movie?

There was nothing to worry about, however:  a good half hour later we were on our way again. The sun had just appeared on the eastern horizon, and it was light enough to see that we were now driving through a landscape that would be called bleak by many who love the verdant green of moister climes. I, too, would have counted myself among them, but again and again I am surprised to find that this barrenness has its own appeal for me.


It is so enormous, and in all its dryness so variable, ever changing colours and structure, rocks smoothed and ground to small pebbles by the force of the ice of long-ago glaciers; hills upon hills, valleys wide and narrow, some with a hint of green because of a bit of water, sometimes not even visible anymore, and above it all the endless sky, deep, deep blue; sometimes a cloud ship sailing by, casting a shadow on the bare hills below.


Guanacos and sheep live here, never many in one spot except in those green valleys, and every once in awhile a carcass is stretched out over the tightly strung fence: a misjudgement of height, maybe, or the result of a panicked flight from a predator or a vehicle. Bleached bones, too, are loosely scattered in the ditch from time to time, no longer showing what animal’s skin and meat once covered them.

It is an unforgiving country, harsh in its beauty, glaring sun and lack of moisture, creating an environment not suitable for the weak – but boring? No, boring it is not!