+ de photos ! and catching up with the English part

Almost 2 weeks without writing in english and it seems that some memories are already lost along the way.
From Punta Arenas, I'll remember colourful houses (not quite like the flashy green walls of our room), our nice landlady and grumpy landlord, their to horrible and pestering little dogs (thanks god, I have earplugs to sleep at night), a great crab dish and a tasty lime and amaretto cocktail (not quite typical, but so enjoyable), a nice cemetery and all kind of very old cars Nora kept on taking pictures of.

Out there, I thought I'd be remembering the cold and strong winds, but it was only about to get far worse!

Next stop was in Puerto Natales, close to a national park where we decided to go trekking for four days. Very ambitious project for my first real camping experience, but the weather decided otherwise. After the first day, we were exhausted by terribly stong winds and a three hours high speed walk back to our starting point before it gets dark.

The meal (pasta's) we cooked under our tiny little tent sounded like a five stars treat. The rain began to pour and wouldn't stop the next morning.

Along the way, we had seen some icebergs with amazing flashy blue core, in a nice setting of lakes and mountains, and the aim of the trek was a glacier, gigantic tongue of ice stuck between two rocky walls, making its way down to a lake. But we would probably not have seen any further sights with such a bad weather. What's more, we found that our tent wasn't really waterproof and our sleeping bags were quite wet. So we decided to return to town. and cross the border back to Argentina.

We then went to see the glacier Perito Moreno. Much more impressive than the glacier Grey. Bigger. Alive with these loud sounds of crackling every now and then, when large blocks of ice are tearing apart from the huge white wall and diving into the water, then reappearing at the surface of the water to start living on their own their iceberg existence.

Check this out! Looking closer at the glacier, I found a troll just caught in the ice wall. Isn't he cute??

On our way back, there seemed to be a 'noisiest car ever' competition in the town center. but it was just a presentation of the competitors to a race that would take place the next day. At a glance one could tell that some of these wrecks wouldn't last for the entire race...

Wandering in the streets, we found that it's common for people to expose at the window items they wish to sell. How much did you say for this pair of blue suede shoes?

The day after, we moved on to El chalten, where the smog prevented us to see a very large and high mountain, the Fitz Roy, known as one of the hardest to climb in the world. Well I had no plans to undertake that anyway.

The walk to the sightseeing point was nice, the setting is ackwards: a large forrest of trees, where many are dead, grey, torn apart or fallen. Looks a bit spooky, yet the colours are amazing.

Back in town, we started tasting all different kinds of icecreams: an immense variety the famous 'dulce de leche' (milk caramel) flavour, lemon pie, passion fruit, tiramisu, chocolate and cookies, and my favorite: Ginger and cinnamon!
Planned to have an aperitive before dinner. Had a bottle of caïpiriñha and never made it to the restaurant that night...

Next day we visited a ecological reserve with tons of birds, and made various very unsuccesful attempts to take picture of them flying over the lake, though we were greatly helped by a dog that did spend the afternoon running and barking after them.

Also visited a center of interpretetation, a museum that has the honesty to admit that they don't know much, but the pretention to speak about it anyway. For example, they have evidence that big animals probably used to live on the continent but are apparently now extinct, and they have reasons to believe that this can possibly be due to several hypothetical causes, among which disease is considered as an highly likely one, but this would have to be further investigated. Thank you.

Last night in a fancy « chalet » like restaurant. It was about that for Nora and I to split as she needed to head North quite swiftly to catch her plane in Buenos Aires a week later. And we were about 1,700 miles away from the capital. I chose to head South to Ushuaïa, and we both found cheap flights that would spare us over an entire day in a bus.

As her flight actually stopped in Ushuaïa, she ended up paying less than I did to take the same flight as I did, and then her connection. The guy who sold us the tickets agreed it was unfair, but if I had said that I wanted to go north as well, and still stood in ushuaïa, my bakpack would be about 600 miles away from me by now...

Goodbyes in the airport's transit area were a bit harsh, as we were hurried by security guards, afraid of who knows what...