Immediate impressions of Argentina were all very good. At last, we could communicate again (after a fashion). The coffee was much, much better. Things were a lot cheaper (our Rio NYE didn`t really fit the backpacker budget). People seemed nicer (possibly because they understood us, after a fashion). Unfortunately, Argentina is also absolutely massive, bigger than India I think, and so we had to spend a lot of time on buses - doing a 38 hour stretch after leaving Iguaçu, broken by a 3 hour stop in Buenos Aires bus station, to get to our next stop which was Trelew in Patagonia. I didn`t know what to expect down south, having read simply that Patagonia is a very strange place and that such notable people as Darwin and Bruce Chatwin have been unable to explain what is so odd about it. We arrived early morning and having slept for a few hours, discovered that one of the things that is strange about Patagonia is that everything, but everything, shuts down between 12 and 4pm. It was a ghost town. Everywhere was deserted, apart from the one ATM that we found, which had 10 people queued up to use it and wouldn`t give us any more than 320 pesos which is about 50 pounds and would last us about 24 hours. After finding somewhere that would feed us we gave up and went back to the hostel for another siesta (I elicitly watched Sleepless in Seattle while G slept) and then we (G) watched the Arsenal-Tottenham game before heading out again to try and find a bit more life to the place.
The reason for visiting Trelew was threefold. 1 - to see the penguins on Punta Tombo, 2 - to see the seals on Peninsula Valdes and 3 - to have a Welsh tea in Gaiman. The Welsh settled in Patagonia sometime around the turn of the 19 - 20 century and established successful communities where the residents today still speak Welsh, sing in Welsh choirs, build Welsh style houses out of Welsh style bricks, call their children Welsh names, and serve huge Welsh teas to gullible tourists like me. I had overexcited about having scones and jam, not realising that a Welsh tea is very different from an English tea, so when our driver started describing to us how we would start with bread and cheese and little scones, then be served 8 different types of cake culminating in cream pie, I was initially disappointed then downright frightened about what was expected of me. We performed very well considering. Our guide Ro (short for Rogero which is the Argentinian for Roger) gave us a briefing before we were served about how we should proceed (pour the milk in first, the cheese was for the bread-and-butter and the jams were for the scones, eat the Welsh fruit cake first and the cream pie last etc etc) which was very sweet but a little `de trop` - had he any expectations of our pace he kept them to himself. Of course between us we polished off all 10 rounds on the plate and had 2 enormous pots of excellent tea, all served at our highly polished table with its white lacy cloth and monogrammed china, as we listened to Welsh hymns. It was gorgeous.

Ro was a charming guy who spoke slowly and very very clearly in Spanish so that even we could understand what he was saying. He was very proud of his ancestry, being a bit Welsh and a bit Spanish, and knew a lot about penguins. He described the annual cycle of the Magellanic penguin to us in great detail, including all the mating (no penetration, apparently) and how the children have diarrhea for the first few days they are alive which comes out in a long white gushy string from their behinds. I made a mental note to ask my newly parental girl friends whether they experienced the same thing with their young. We were sharing the tour with a Japanese couple and when we got out of the car and saw our first penguin, the woman went absolutely nuts, literally hopping from one foot to the other and squealing, before calming down sufficiently to squat 50cm from the penguin and start snapping pictures. I was worried that the penguin would take off, warn his mates and that would be that, but he was obviously used to such behaviour as he posed for a couple of minutes quite still and relaxed, then turned around and waddled back into his next. We walked for about 2km along a track made through the scrub above the beach, and there were penguins everywhere. The wind was incredibly raw and strong. The birds lived in nests which were burrowed under the scrub, and despite the cold most of them were out and about, heading down to the sea to go fishing or just standing around having their photos taken. The children were sufficiently old to be pottering about by themselves but they never ventured far from their parents, probably because they are the only source of food. Some of the children were pressed up close to their mothers mewing hungrily and flapping their wings in supplication - one poor female was bundled by her kids so violently that she was submerged for a few seconds under a heap of squirming grey fur before she managed to wrestle her way out. Given that the way that penguins feed their young is to regurgitate food into their open mouths, it made me wonder whether the children realised that by forcing their mother headfirst into the sand they were not giving themselves the best chance of being fed. The clamour reminded me of the wailing that goes on at any ice cream stall or sweet stand - `Muuuuuuuuum, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease` - and I distinctly remember giving my own mother the same grief when we went shopping. (We would be promised a `treat` if we were good, and our good behaviour lasted precisely until we reached the sweet stand whereupon we turned into banshees). The penguins were making quite a racket, constantly chirruping and mewing, and if any tourists got too close they would start up a loud honking in an attempt to make us back off.

The noise of the sealions the following day was even better - growling and barking and harrumphing as they lay about in their harems (yes, that is a technical term - each male sealion has 7 - 10 females in his harem, and they lie on the beach surrounded by their women who take it in turns to go and fish), occasionally making a snap at one of the other males who is moving too close to his group, but backing off almost immediately because the danger of overheating is so great given their bulk. In fact any movement was made in jerky spurts which lasted a few seconds, then they would flop to the ground to recover, panting and blowing. One female was trying to dig herself a little pit in the sand - she would scrape away with a flipper for 8 or 10 strokes, then stop, her flipper falling weakly to her side and her whole body relaxing as she tried to get her breath back and cool down. `Oh goodness me, oh goodness, oh I`m so hot - oh forget it`. The elephant seal males were even luckier on the woman front, having up to 30 in their harem. The two males we saw seemed exhausted (from servicing?) and did nothing but lie on the sand for the 20 minutes we were watching. They were far bigger than the sealions and seemed a little more adept at getting around, although in my humble, ill-informed opinion seals as a species have come off badly evolution-onto-land wise; their only way of getting about is to bodypop, (or `do the caterpiller` in breakdancing terms I believe) rolling onto their tummies and trying to move themselves forward with their flippers. Given their sheer weight and all the blubber it requires a lot of energy and so I suppose it isn`t surprising that they give up every few seconds. Although the blubber means they don`t get bruised hipbones, which is good.

Despite the lack of life and fun in Trelew there there was an excellent museum, exhibiting some huge dinosaur bones which were excavated in Patagonia, which according to the BBC Horizon documentary which we watched, is prime dinosaur-and-fossil territory and very, very exciting for archaeologists. So many bones have been given to the museum that they have been able to `rebuild` about 10 dinosaurs of considerable size, and they have a multitude of other bits and pieces such as fish and a huge ammonite. There was also a short film about the history of the world; when we had sat through 7 minutes of the big bang, history of the solar system, the information that the moon is 4.25 billion years old, the dark matter thing, and a description of the evolution of animal species from single-celled bacteria over thousands of millions of years, I felt that my concerns about going back to work, buying a house and turning 29 again were really too insignificant to worry about. In fact I felt a bit deflated.
Leaving Trelew (no thanks to the woman who sold us the tickets and wrote the wrong time on them - we hared across town in the afternoon heat with 10 minutes before the bus was due to leave, having lost track of time; grabbed our packs, speeded (which is that movement you do when carrything something that is too heavy for you to run so you take low and extra long strides) to the bus station, arriving disshevelled and hot at her window to ask which gate we needed, only for her to look at us and then the tickets in a swirl of cigarette-smoke confusion, realise she had made a cock-up, and say vaguely that the bus would be there in about an hour or so, turn back to her game of computer patience and her Marlboro red and leave us to wonder what we were going to do for the next hour) we embarked on the 25 hour trip to El Calafate, in the west, near the border with Chile. The bus journeys around Patagonia were long and tiring but they did give us the opportunity to look at the landscape which is so vast that it`s impossible to see it any other way unless you have serious amounts of time. Patagonia is basically a desert, a wilderness, covered in a couple of feet of tough wiry scrub which is brightened in patches by tiny yellow flowers like heather, but is otherwise very pale green-grey. It is totally flat. There are no trees because of the very strong winds. Strangely, although it is utterly monotonous in shape and colour, it is very absorbing and I spent hours simply looking out, trying to take in the expanse. The sunset was unbelievable - golden and huge.

That amount of time on a bus with so little variation in what you can see out of the window leaves you feeling disorientated and confused and numb when you get off at the other end, and this feeling didn`t wear off for a few days as we continued up the west side of Argentina. Because we were so far south the daylight hours were completely messed up - the sun would rise at about 6 but not go down until 10, and it wouldn`t actually get dark until nearly midnight. This meant we were staying up later than we were used to (and too late for the time we were getting up, although I realise I will get scant sympathy from the people at work!) and finding the services we needed (shops, restaurants, internet) closed when we needed them. But the skies were wide, wide and immense, and the light during the day was very clear and bright, so apart from being slightly bleary most of the time it was an interesting and very satisfying adventure.

The Perito Moreno glacier was the main draw from El Calafate, which was otherwise like a ski resort apart from the dearth of Oakley sunglasses, furry hoods and padded trousers. Having seen glaciers in New Zealand and Nepal - one of them the Khumbu icefall at the foot of Everest - I was ready to be underwhelmed. Turning the corner and glimpsing it for the first time however I had to admit that it `knocked the socks off` both (I didn`t say exactly that). It is absolutely huge and, from a distance, almost luminous - up close you can see the morain which stains it grey - and stretches across 2 rivers as it spills down from the mountains. The facts: 5km wide, 60m high, advances 2m a day, up to 700m deep. We were lucky enough to see a huge piece of ice fall from the terminus (front) and it made a terrifying crashing boom as it hit the water - the whole thing was cracking and groaning all the time we were there and from time to time we heard a piece that we couldn`t see, inside or behind the front wall, collapse and that too echoed around the mountains.

From El Calafate up the `notorious Ruta 40`, the `worst road in South America` (both quotations from the LP) which as far as G and I were concerned was one of the smoothest roads we have been on in our travels so we were very scornful. Che Guevera rode it on one of his motorcycle trips (the one he describes in The Motorcycle Diaries, which I read along the way) and is long and mostly dirt, with very few places to stop along the way (although one stop was the Hotel Leona where Butch, Sundance and Etta stopped for a month before heading to Chile, which delighted G). For me, the charm over the two days was watching the landscape change from the bare scrub of Patagonia to the lushness of the Lake District - mountains emerged, reddish-pink rocks, bright and dark turquoise rivers, lush greenery and cypress trees, and yellow flowers on the roadside. We stopped overnight in a tiny grid town where G and I were the only residents in a little bungalow hospedaje owned by an absent elderly lady - there were flowered bedspreads on the beds, lace edgings on the towels, and a host of family photos on the mantelpiece which we examined before our breakfast was served the following morning. Another full day on the bus ended in Bariloche, which was just like a Swiss lake town - snow-capped mountains, a huge lake, and streets lined with chocolate shops. We stayed in a place outside town, in the hills, and having arrived there at about 11pm made a delightful supper of ham, bread, cheese and red wine which we had brought up with us, to the relaxing thumps of the trance music favoured by the hostel owner. In the winter the village was a ski and snowboard resort - in the summer it was for relaxing and hiking, and the following day we set out to do just that.