Aye no bother

Beyond the huge avenue is a recently redeveloped part of BA. Once full of old warehouses and dockyards on a canal made from the Rio Plata, it's now chic Puerto Madero.

I loathed it on first sight. It's just horrible, a long row of expensive cafes with large umbrellaed tables, uniform brick walls and mirrored glass windows - Yuck. Like the redevelopment of Covent Garden all the life has been sucked out of this overpriced, ugly waterside area.

What cheered me up was a parade of people, perspiring in the heat, dressed in kilts with bagpipes and Scottish flags. Whaat? They marched along the canal, crossed a bridge and stopped beside a motley collection of boats. Then, even better, they sung Flower of Scotland in thickly accented English, engaged in a strange whisky ceremony which involved 'smashing' plastic glasses to the ground and did a bit of country dancing. This are the ancestors - clearly utterly Argentine with their black hair and eyes - of the Scots who came down this very river to start a better life, hundreds of years ago. I bet they're glad they live in a warm exciting city with delicious wine and meat rather than the granite cities, grey skies and deep fried food of Scotland.

Sorry JD. But even you, which would you rather?

Big big big big big big big big big big big

Buenos Aires. Firstly it's big. Actually it's bloody huge. I had no idea that it was so big - big big BIGGER - but it became clear quickly.

I opened my Golden Map and decided to walk downtown. I took an easy route - several blocks from the Orangeness is one of the city's main throughfares, Avenida Corrientes. I walked and I walked and I walked. On and on and on I went. It was hot (apparently autumn is usually cool but this year 'we're' having a heatwave. It might just have been me but I was happy. Sunshine, sandals and blue skies - what's yer problem) and incredibly NOISY and never-ending.

Avenida Corrientes is like Broadway I decided. Slashing through the city with tall buildings. theatres and cinemas. Only it's a helluva lot longer than Broadway. I finally staggered to its end. And then there's a really big road - the widest in the world, apparently: Avenida de Mayo which runs along the southside of Buenos Aires and has, at its heart, the large obelisk which is the mental centre of the city. When an Argentine national or local football team wins everyone converges at the Obelisk to celebrate. God knows how many lanes Av Mayo has but there are lots. I started to feel that I was in Mexico City which has a lot of huge roads in it too.

The bank account gives a huge sigh of relief

My first few evenings in Buenos Aires I ate at one of several places on a crossroads round the corner from the orange hotel. I wasn't in a rush to eat up the city.

To my delight the menu everywhere was REASONABLY PRICED. Good value even. One night I had a half bottle of wine (easier to find on a menu than a glass - hands up to Argentina!) which cost 5 pesos ie £1. Hallelujah. I almost applauded.

The wine thing is excellent here. Begone nasty Spanish Rioja. I'm a slave now to Malbec. I would say, oh gawd, another new expensive habit but it's not. Expensive that is.

Camden Market, not even

I can't tell you how happy I was to be out of a theme park and back in a place. People all rushing by and pavements and noise.

I wandered around the city. My barrio, Palermo, is slighly north east of the city centre and is now where everyone who visits Buenos Aires wants to stay. Who knew? A couple I'd met in Patagonia had told me that there are lots of markets in the area at the weekend so I took out the Golden Map given to me by my taxi driver on my night in Argentina all those weeks ago (the fat one not the shark) and headed off for the central square.

Oh dear. It was like Camden Market. A series of stalls selling lots of crap - crocheted hats and leather jewellery - and large ugly bars open to the street with rock music blaring and waitresses in short uniforms racing about. I mentally put a line through cool Palermo, put away my map and promptly got lost.

Orange

My hotel was, in many ways, just what I had in mind. Small and old fashioned and on the very edge of a currently cool barrio. It had water mark lacquered floors and a communal area which was once a garage and a roof terrace. The showers and the loo were the same small room. My bedroom was like a cell, tiny. The dormitory next to me was inhabited by shrieking American girls. Still, I stayed there for three weeks - which will probably be the longest I'll stay in any one place until I leave South America.

It was also very orange.

With a bang not a whimper

I left Patagonia by plane. It was a journey that seemed right. The airport in El Calafate was a glamorous bruttish building with a great wall of glass, overlooking Lake Argentina. One last glance at nature in its splendour before arriving in the urban jungle.

In Buenos Aires I took a taxi with a sharky looking driver. He wore mirrored shades and 'forgot' to turn on his meter. I knew a row was brewing - when we arrived at my hotel he tried to charge me 3 times the proper fare. I lost my temper in noisy arm-waving fashion, thrust slightly less than the appropriate note at him and slammed car doors. He looked terrified before he legged it. Hopefully he'll think about the incident before ripping off the next customer. I did for you all.

Stupid tourist sap 1 Chancer taxi-driver 0.

Patagonia World

Clearly Patagonia is popular for a reason. Nature has settled the score decisively in Patagonia: Natural beauty 4 Man-made world 0.

But now, after millions of years of being left alone to be beautiful and gorgeous and wild and lonely and magnificent, Patagonia is crowded with human beings, chomping and chatting and tramping over precious lands. It's like a theme park, Patagonia World - thrilling rides and fancy food stands and trinky souvenirs. These days in the high season of summer you need to book everything - hotels, tours, transport - months in advance and only the bleakness of the winter stops the relentless march of visitors.

I'm glad I went. I wish I'd gone 25 years ago like the Aussie couple who'd returned and left a note in the hostel book: "When we first came there was no road and we had to hitch a ride in the postman's van. We walked all day and never saw a soul". It's not like that anymore and very very soon it'll be simply unbearable unless your idea of a walk is trudging single file through the woods, wedged between thousands of others. Asi es la vida, as veces.

Walking a take

And lo! On the third day the sun shone and gloomy Polly went for a walk. More of a real hike really - it took 6 hours though it wasn't tough going. Even if had been it would still count as one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

Words can't really do it justice - suffice to say I wandered through beech woods bursting into autumn colours and emerged by a little blue river with huge rocky snowy mountains towering above a lake with a frosty glaciar running over it.The scenery was so dramatic and exciting I could hardly breathe or stop the tears falling.

If I'd come all the way, 15 thousand kilometres, from Spain to Patagonia just to walk this walk it would have been worth the ride (two flights, three taxi rides, two buses and one ferry).

Reasons to love El Chalten

During two days of mooching due to bad weather I found some consolation in El Chalten. I had lunch in the front room of a very mournful man called Carlos who had a small restaurant which was just his front room, complete with various bits of stuff - childrens' toys, odd socks etc.. He had a limited menu but made me a delicious sandwich and came out of his kitchen to chat - there was just the two of us in Carlos' restaurant at the time - while I ate. He told me how cold it was in the winter and quiet. I'm not sure if Carlos was entirely sure he'd made the right decison in coming here from warm northern Argentina. Strangely I never found his place again.

I had a tasty couple of glasses of wine in a wine shop run by a very beautiful and cool couple (also not from El Chalten but clearly nobody is). I liked sitting surrounded by walls of wine. I had coffee in the coffee shop of a cheerful Chilean. I had a pricey bowl of soup/stew which worked a treat on my gloominess. I had a salad which amounted to more than watery lettuce, tomato and onion - hurrah! Not easy to find in Argentina.

The good things about the town aren't all food related. The patient woman, Celia, who worked in my hostel turned out to be a bit of a star. She was endlessly kind and helpful to even the most irritating of guests. And she wore a beret and looked like a proper park ranger - which maybe she was. I saw a couple of woolly llamas walking down the street. They were good.

And it's sweetly safe. I lost my passport and firstly the man in the phone shop where I thought I might have dropped it told me to listen to the local radio (?) where lost things found were advertised. I liked that. And then I went to the police station - clearly an underused facility - and there it was, handed in by a nice Frenchman who'd found it lying in the street. The policemen just laughed at me. No-one believed for a minute that I wouldn't be reunited with it - which seemed like a good thing.

But really, El Chalten IS the capital of trekking. It's in the middle of a national park, the Parque Nacional de los Glaciares, home to the FitzRoy massif and countless other huge mountains and glaciars - which means no park fees and thousands of acres of protected land. It's not just any old national park either - it's the mother of national parks, the big one, the real beauty, the diamond ring. It's one of the only places I've been where you can just walk out of town on a well marked seemingly ordinary trail into ONE OF THE MOST STAGGERING, AMAZINGLY, GOBSMACKINGLY BEAUTIFUL places IN THE WORLD. It's clearly not just my opinion. Everyone says so.

And for once eveyone is right.

Reasons not to like El Chalten

If I thought Ushuaia and then El Calafate were, increasingly, crammed to the pretty gills with clanking rustling travellers' trousers and their owners, ho hum - try El Chalten. It's a tiny place, a large village really, and down the dusty streets march a constant patrol of trekkers. Aint nothing going on but the hike. There are no little local bars, no clothes or stationary shops, no buses, no news stands or sweetie kiosks, nothing that glues together any ordinary town. If El Calafate didn't exist 10 years ago, El Chalten was barely a speck five years after that. It is for tourists and that's IT. I was told by one waitress that the place is only open between the end of October and Easter - she, like everyone else, goes back to Buenos Aires for the winter. If you arrive in May or August you're likely to find several feet of snow and a couple of miserable looking llama herders. In fact the weather is gnerally terrible - I found a vistor's book with tonnes of comments about having travelled all the way here to go walking and see the mountains and actually having to sit inside for days - I had two days of cold drizzle and grey skies. And the town is still being built - all over the place shoddy buildings are being banged up at a rate of knots. Every second structure is a hostel or an over-priced pizzeria or a micro-brewery. Oh and BTW both Ushuaia and El Calafate's ludicrously expensive beer was also all micro-brewed. Well frankly I don't believe a word of it. I never saw any evidence of any kind of brewing going on, cept the kind of 'brewing' that charges three times the acceptable price for a drink and laughs at the poor gringo who coughs up. And El Chalten isn''t landscaped or even paved - it's a series of dusty treeless tracks, pot marked by hiking tour companies, hiking equipment rental, hovering hiking guides. My hostel was blighted by an endless stream-of-consciousness conversation in the small living space about where to go/have been/how/timetables/trails. I could hear it from my room - it rocked me to sleep and woke me up every morning. The very patient woman who worked there spent ALL DAY standing in front of a map of the area advising guests where to go for a walk. AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAA AAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH. I finally took refuge in a nearby phone shop which had a very amusing (non-trekking) girl working in it - we had a NORMAL conversation involving non-hiking subject matter and then I rang my boyfriend and burst into tears.

Better busing

The bus ride from El Calafate to El Chalten was a huge improvement on my previous 22 hour border-crossing-river-riding marathon. Essentially this was because it only took 3.5 hours. But also because, in spite of the miles and miles of flat yellow scrub, it was a beautiful journey. The road ran long and straight through cowboy country with whirling dust and silence as our accompaniments. All I needed was for Clint and his poncho to ride up and make my day.

But the finale came as we approached El Chalten - suddenly, shimmering in the weak light like a mirage, huge dramatic mountains rose up in front of us. We appeared to be driving straight towards them, heading for an almighty head-on crunch with nature. Just as suddenly our bus turned right and we pulled up in the little town - Capital of Trekking said all the signs. That's quite a statement in Patagonia. There's a helluva lot of competition in these there parts, partner.

Big Ice

But I'm missing the point. El Calafate is the nearest place to Perito Moreno, a vast glaciar famous for its constant rupturas - or ruptures ie chunks of ice breaking from the mothership and crashing into the lake below. It's 18 km long, 684 metres high and moves 2 metres a day.

Clearly even I wasn't too humbug to want to see the sight. So I booked myself on the priciest of tours - a whole day out, maximum ice action. Big Ice, the trip was called.

First we drove to the National Park of the Glaciars. Right in the middle of the park there's a series of wooden walkways which run in front of the glaciar. All fairly tame stuff but, like many others, my first sight of the huge glaciar made me gasp. It's a massive frozen river of water, running down from the mountains above and coming to a halt with a huge jagged cliff. As we gazed in awe, there was a loud booming noise, like a roll of thunder, followed by the cracking sound of something splitting or ripping and then a large icy shard collapsed into Lake Argentina. Kerplunk. Satisfyingly this isn't a one-off event - it happens all the time.

Then, via boat, we crossed to a woodland clearing to meet our guides and start hiking to and on the glaciar. As we got closer we were fitted for crampons and in the distance I saw a tiny trail of walkers weaving over the ice. They were completely dwarfed. My heart began to thump.

It was really an amazing experience. True, Perito Moreno isn't glistening white - it is scarred by a layer of brown grime, like old city snow. But then the ice we were walking on is 300 years old. And walking with a large group of fellow tourists, chattering to each other and posing for endless photos means that it's not a genuine adventure anymore. However, striding for hours over the rough peaks and valleys of the huge icy expanse, with swirling gaps and wells down into the deep cerulean blue lake, with ice bridges and caves picked out in the sailing fields of the glaciar - I hate to say it but wow.

Our goat-like guides who ran and zig-zagged and slid over the ice as though it was an adventure playground showed us how to negotiate the monster and how to manage crampons. No delicate moves - stamping with force sticks. As a young American girl said, which made me laugh, "Trust the spike".

On the way home, we were given glasses of whisky with ice cubes hacked from the glaciar. Cool in every sense.

So, El Calafate

El Calafate, I was told several times, didn't exist 10 years ago. Now it's booming, busting its way through the wall of global recession - no-one looks as if their luck's run out here.

It's little more than a one street town which sits on the shores of Lago Argentino, dusty hills looming behind it. But still. Its one street has been elegantly designed - large pine trees run all the way down it and the shops and bars are clad in fancy lacquered wood. It's like a Swiss ski resort rather than a Romanian one (Ushuaia). Hot chocolate, designer woolly gear and blocks of swanky Italian restaurants are part of the scenery and in the quiet back streets several large expensive hotels sit smugly. Of course there are hostels too, all crammed - because yes! This is outdoors territory - hiking and riding and boats. Travellers' trousers ahoy.

Much more like it

I moved to a new hotel. It was BRILLIANT, the best place I've stayed so far. Owned by a charming homosexual of the old-fashioned kind, the lobby was filled with vases of blowsy roses and table lamps on side tables, turned on at dusk to cast pools of light. The walls of the television room were covered in old black and white photographs of grande dames and divas and opera poured out of a hidden sound system. The breakfast salon had a grand piano in it. The long dark corridors were heavily layered with cave wall stucco and the bathrooms had dribbly lukewarm showers. No WIFI, no hoards of morons reciting pages of the Lonely Planet, no information point or noticeboards. Brilliant brilliant brilliant.