18th April: Iguazu Falls

May14

During our time in Iguazu, we stayed at the Sheraton Hotel within the National Park. No real choice there for us because to stay in town would mean commuting several kilometres with the transport being erratic very early and late. One annoyance, though, was that the National Park was only open from I think 8am to 5pm so we were not able to be at a dramatic vantage point for sunrise or sunset.

The amount of water going over is indeed impressive.

Fancy a swim, anyone?

There is a narrow-guage train to ferry people to the various walks. While many people were waiting at one of the stations, several coatis (related to racoons) turned up in search of handouts. Here is one crossing the railway line.

Coati

With an hour to spare before we needed to catch a plane, I went for a walk with one lens intending to photograph some butterflies. That didn’t happen (too many people) but I hadn’t been to that section of the track and didn’t anticipate how good the view would be. With no time to go back for other alternatives, I shot over 100 images to combine them into the image below (and it’s also the 100th image posted for the trip on this blog).

If you click on the image below, it launches to a new tab where you can see the whole image. There will be three icons at the bottom right:

Click on the far right one for a full screen view
Use the first and second icon or the mouse wheel to zoom in and out – then hold down the left mouse button and move around the image.
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Inside the image you may find about sixty birds, one in flight, four platforms of people in Brazil (most of the image is in Argentina) and one butterfly.

Then time for more plane rides – Uguazu Falls to Buenos Aires and after some hours in the airport, Buenos Aires to Santiago. We arrived very late at night in Santiago to a warm impromptu welcome from some people passing in the street.

17th April: Iguazu Falls

May11

Iguazu Falls is in the north of Argentina with Brazil is on the other side of the river and Paraguay also nearby. It was about 30 degrees Celcius and very high humidity while we were there but fortunately it did not rain. At just below the tropic of Capricorn, it was quite a change from Antarctica.

Iguazu Falls is very wide, as you can see from the image below. Actually, this is not all of it; what looks like a cloud in the distance is spray from another section around the corner.

Iguazu Falls

The amount of water going over is very impressive.

Devil's Throat, Iguazu Falls

… and it can also be quite beautiful in its luxuriant tropical environment.

A section of Iguazu Falls

Google Maps location.

16th April: Iguazu Falls

May10

We were up early this morning to catch a plane from Buenos Aires to Iguazu Falls. We arrived with a few hours to spare in the afternoon so we decided to take a walk to a minor waterfall not connected to the main falls.

Walking along the path I heard a loud though distant rasping sound that somehow made me think of toucans. And there they were, two of them, high in the tall trees, some distance back from the path. This image is cropped right in to about 100%, even though taken from a 600mm focal length on a camera with a full frame sensor.

Toucan far up in the trees.

There were also some colourful butterflies about and here is one:

13th-15th April: At sea, Rio Del Plata, Buenos Aires

May10

On the 13th and 14th we were at sea and this offered an opportunity to prepare images and posts, though as it turned out it took some time to get the opportunity to post them.

On the 15th we arrived in Rio Del Plata and our sea voyage of 27 days to Antarctica, the Falklands and the Atlantic coast of Patagonia was at an end. A very special opportunity it was too, especially as a specifically photographic expedition with only 16 passengers. We felt in very safe hands with the Russian Captain and crew and all the excursions were very well organised. Anyone interested in similar expeditions may wish to check out the Aurora Expeditions website.

We had a few hours in Rio Del Plata which is a large modern city. The city centre had lots of shops as city centres do but it appeared to lack the anarchic charm of some of the Patagonian towns we had visited.

So then, on a bus and off to Buenos Aires. You may recall the view from the Hotel window in the first post from Buenos Aires and we were heading for the same Hotel. We arrived at 5pm in rush hour on a Friday night, coming up on the other side of the road. It was most impressive to see the bus driver come round the big roundabout and force his way across six “lanes” of traffic (no lane markings) to park outside the Hotel on just the other side of the roundabout.

11th April: Patagonia (Puerto Madryn)

Apr25

A free day at Puerto Madryn, originally a Welsh colony, because the ship arrived early and nothing was organized.

We had left the Falklands a few days before, which was very British and where there were many references to the war in the ’80s. Here was the counterpart in Argentina, a monument to the war in the Malvinas.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the day was the pair of sea lions (originally three, I’m told) that settled down on the fairly small flat surface of a buttress on the wharf while the tide slowly receded and left them more than 20 feet above it.

I’m not sure when low tide was and how high they would have been then. Late in the day, they dropped 20 feet to the sea in order to leave.

Unlike the photographer above, I wasn’t prepared to take the risk of overbalancing and landing on top of some combination of chains, sea lions and buttress, so I lay dow on the wharf to take the images above.

This gives some idea of how far out of the water the sea lions were. It also shows something of the size of the ship and how large the waves would have been in the Drake Passage when they were washing on deck at the stern of the ship.

9th April: Patagonia (Puerto Deseado and South Atlantic Ocean )

Apr25

After a few hours in Puerto Deseado in the morning, we spent the rest of the day at sea.

On the right is the pilot, disembarking back off the side of the ship onto a tugboat in the open sea. The sea was very calm at this time but I imagine it could be quite a tricky operation in a rough sea.

We sailed north along the coast of Patagonia and recieved a fine view of the lighthouse at Cabo Blanco as we passed close by.

The Capo Blanco lighthouse as we passed by, looking directly into the sun.

Here is another view, a bit further on.

8th April: Patagonia (Puerto Deseado and Mirador de Darwin)

Apr25

Early in the morning we arrived at Puerto Deseado on the Atlantic coast of Patagonia.

Today was a day for landscapes rather than wildlife. We piled into a bus and were driven through the sparse flat Patagonian semi-desert and then through private property until we ended up at a spectacular panoramic viewpoint. There was a twisting river in a broad valley and cracked mud on the valley floor. As it happens, the tide was out and though Puerto Deseado was 42 km away, the sea comes in at high tide. Where we were is called Mirador de Darwin (“Darwin’s Viewpoint” or maybe, vista) because Darwin came in this far in 1833, described and drew it.

Mirador de Darwin, looking up-river. What the purpose of the small huts at top left are I’m not sure.

Mirador de Darwin, looking down-river.

At the bottom of the valley

Patterns

The little triangular rock in middle right is one that Darwin sketched when he was here. Click on the image above for a much larger image you can explore. This opens in a new window. An icon on the bottom right gets full-screen, then you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel or other icons. Best to not quite zoom all the way in.

A loop in the river.

This is what most of Patagonia is like in between the sea and the mountains, a flat and featureless semi-desert. Not a place to get lost a couple of hundred years ago. Explains why it was left to the native inhabitants until the end of the nineteenth century, though the period after that was catastrophic for them.

On the way back from Mirador de Darwin,we stopped at Lourdes Votive Shrine. This is in a natural river canyon that was formed long ago when there was either rain in the area or water coming from the mountains. It now has a concrete floor and has become an open-air shrine, a kind of mixture of cathedral and mausoleum.

Graffiti is often an act of desecration, here it is rather an act of consecration because the words on the rock are the names of the dead.

The sign says “Please don’t light any candles”.

The remaining images are all in Puerto Deseado, taken from the ship as the sunset progresses.

…

…
A Rothko sunset, perhaps.

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A buff-necked ibis that landed on the ship after dark, illuminated by the lights of the ship.

20th March: Patagonia (Ushuaia and Beagle Passage)

Apr2

This is near dawn, at the Ushuaia waterfront, looking over the harbour, beyond the road to the airport, across the Beagle Channel to the mountains on the other side.

Another shot from the roof of out hotel.

A panorama of Ushuaia harbour in the early morning.

I had expected that in our time in Ushuaia we would get to the National Park and perhaps a trip to the Harberton Homestead. Neither happened. We had too many last-minute tasks to make sure we were prepared for the voyage.

We did get to see a couple of interesting museums. One was the Maritime Museum, a former prison, which graphically shows the savage conditions prisoners endured here in the nineteenth century, including tiny cells, shackles and leg irons.

Another was the Museo de Maquetas Mundo Yámana, with informative displays on the indian history of the region. Essentially the indians were all wiped out by settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most tribes are extinct and little of their culture remains.

I had been intrigued by a theory that there were early Australoid inhabitants of the Americas thousands of years before the Amerindians turned up (related to Australian Aborigines), and that their last refuge was in Tierra del Fuego up to the early years of the twentieth century. I didn’t find any evidence of that in Ushuaia and all the photographs of nineteenth century natives looked to be Amerindians of Mongoloid ancestry. If there were Australoids there, most likely they were a minority group in one or more tribes.

Clouds over the end of the Beagle Channel.

The big day. Off to Antarctica in a Russian icebreaker.

We left Ushuaia about 4pm and proceeded up the Beagle Channel until about midnight when we entered the Drake Passage. A school of whales passed us at one point but they weren’t there for long and I didn’t see them. I did spend some time photographing albatrosses and petrels with a long telephoto from the moving ship.

A small lighthouse in the Beagle Channel.

Another small lighthouse. The building behind is not an estancia and I think it must be a Customs Port or Monitoring Post.

Moonrise at the end of the Beagle Passage.

Google Maps link.

19th March: Patagonia (Ushuaia)

Apr2

Very little photographic activity today, lots to see and do down here but we haven’t had the time. We did manage to visit several museums and have a trip up the cable car to see the view. We also met some of the people we will be sharing the ship with at dinner.

The ship above with the blue hull is the Polar Pioneer, which is taking us to Antarctica.

At the right is part of Ushuaia and the mountains above.

Below are some houses a few streets back from the main street of town. All three images are from the roof of our hotel.

Argentinian towns can be quite different. Unlike El Calafate, where pedestrians seemed to be fair game, here drivers were remarkable courteous and considerate to pedestrians.

We walked all around town trying to find a dry bag for me. This was a late recommendation for Antarctica (on the zodiacs). We’d all but given up when we found one at a fishing place just a couple of doors from our hotel.

18th March: El Calafate to Ushuaia

Apr2

We dropped off the rental car today, having driven something like 2,000 kilometres over two weeks, and took the plane to Ushuaia.

No images today because we found we needed a few more items for Antarctica. Getting organized for the trip takes precedence.

We’ve had some great meals in Argentina and Chile, at Buenos Aires, Helsingfors, Los Notros and Estancia Mirador del Paine but nothing to compare with the meal we had tonight, a wonderful seafood meal by a very talented chef. If you’re ever in Ushaia, check out Kalma Restaurant at Antartida Argentina 57 (that’s the street address). Damien and Morgane from France pointed us to this restaurant some weeks ago in Helsingfors.

Murray Foote

Tag Archives: Argentina

18th April: Iguazu Falls

17th April: Iguazu Falls

16th April: Iguazu Falls

13th-15th April: At sea, Rio Del Plata, Buenos Aires

11th April: Patagonia (Puerto Madryn)

9th April: Patagonia (Puerto Deseado and South Atlantic Ocean )

8th April: Patagonia (Puerto Deseado and Mirador de Darwin)

20th March: Patagonia (Ushuaia and Beagle Passage)

19th March: Patagonia (Ushuaia)

18th March: El Calafate to Ushuaia