Over the Andes by 4x4 to Lake Fagnano

 The Garibaldi Pass over the southern Andes.

 The original road before the highway!

 Coco, our guide, and John.

 A beaver dam and the damage it causes to the trees and environment.

 The logging 'road'.

 Driving into Lake Fagnano to wash off the mud.

 The eroded moraine cliffs.

The shore route.

 Peat bogs.

 The husky camp.

Our restaurant for lunch...

 and what we ate...

and with whom, the Argentine family, Coco and me.

Sunday, November 17^th.

Today we were picked up at 8:30 by Coco from Tours by Design. There was already a family of four in the 4x4. They were Argentinians from Buenos Aires, mom, dad and two teenage daughters. Very nice people as it turned out. As we drove Coco explained that Tierra Del Fuego is a large island at the base of South America and is divided by Argentina and Chile. Cape Horn is actually an island too just south of and not attached to the Tierra Del Fuego. The Beagle Channel and the lakes we were going to visit were all carved out by glaciers during the ice age.

We drove east out of Ushuaia past the turn off spot from yesterday and up to the top of the Paso Garibaldi which crosses the Andes Mountains at 450 metres above sea level. The Andes are the backbone of the continent and are the border between Argentina and Chile, but they make a right turn in Tierra Del Fuego. As a result of the geopolitical division of the island Ushuaia is the only Argentinian city on the south or ‘wrong’ side of the Andes. We stopped for a couple of photos before continuing on. We drove past Lake Escondido on highway 3 to a point where we turned off on a gravel road. He 3explained that this road was originally built by loggers and that there was a whole network of roads into the forest that they used to harvest the trees. He explained that the average temperature here in the winter is zero and the average in the summer is ten. Therefore, he said living on Tierra Del Fuego is like living in a fridge. Only a couple of species of trees can survive here, one being the ‘lenga’. However, they grow very slowly and he said because of the temperatures they decompose very slowly. The bacteria doesn’t thrive here and the trees take 5 to 7 hundred years to rot away! Suddenly I understood why all the forests here are littered with dead trees. It also explains why this area, like the Falklands has huge areas of peat. As the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age, mosses grew and then died but didn’t rot away. New mosses grew on top of old ones over and over again. The moss grew one centimetre a year, so they can calculate the age of the deposits. Many are 7 to 8 metres deep, or 7000 to 8000 years old.

As we drove he also explained the names of Tierra Del Fuego which means Bay of Fires because the first explorer Magellan, saw the native’s fire along the coast. He did not investigate and discover the local natives because Europeans were afraid of them, because they were rumoured to be giant people, hence the name Patagonia, means land of bigfoot people. And finally, Antarctica means the opposite of the Arctic because the Greeks apparently knew that the world was round and that the Arctic was a frozen ocean. In their belief there had to be a large land mass at the south pole to balance all of the land in the northern hemisphere. I am not sure how they knew that. Maybe I need to research it.

After a while we turned off onto a very narrow two-wheel rut road that had been made especially muddy by the heavy rains of yesterday. This was the 4x4 part of the drive. The road was probably the worst I have ever ridden on, the only good thing was that unlike in Bhutan where the road was muddy we had to worry about slipping off the mountain. Here we were driving through a forest. It was incredibly hilly, muddy, wet and slippery. We bounced along very slowly and tried not to bang out heads on the windows as we were thrown back and forth. We stopped at an area where we could see a couple of beaver dams and the flooded area where the trees had all drown. Coco told us the sad story of man interfering with nature again. 47 pairs of beavers were imported here in 1947 after the prison was closed to build a fur industry, but because the temperatures don’t get as cold as Canada the animals don’t grow the thick high-quality pelts and the industry never took off.

Eventually we got to the shore of Lake Fagnano which is a huge lake where on the opposite side we could see beautiful snow topped mountains. Coco drove the 4x4 right into the water to wash off all of the mud before turning right and driving up onto a narrow gravel road along the shore. We all got out and walked along that road to stretch our legs. At one point the road is blocked and Coco had to drive the vehicle back into the water to get around it.

From there we continued on the loop back to the main road and to our lunch destination in the Tierra Major Valley. The restaurant was originally built by the first Argentinian to cross Antarctica to the pole. It is situated beside a large peat deposit where they hold cross country races. Nearby we saw a large pen of 200 huskies that are used for dogsledding during the winter. The women in our truck paid to visit and pet them. Lunch was all you can eat salad (the best I’ve seen here) and barbequed lamb. Another excellent Argentinian meal. We had a good time talking to the family before we were driven back to Ushuaia and dropped at our hotel.

Later in the evening we ventured out to the Mercado for one last time and had a quiche before heading back to relax and get ready for our departure.