Days 28 & 29 - to 'Condom River' and Coyhaique.

Morning spent in search of provisions. Normally El Calafate is good for things like smoked trout and venison, but the best I can get is venison pate. I do manage to find some superb ice cream, though. What I don’t understand is why Argentina manages to consistently produce quality ice cream, whereas Chile for the most part only stocks Nestle crap. Trade the whiny ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ for some Russian science fiction, though I know how difficult it’ll be to trade a non-English book down the road. Catch up on correspondence.

Get prime seat on the double-decker bus: top floor, front row. Next to me are two English girls who are too post to wear the usual backpacker uniform of Gortex and hiking boots. One keeps talking to someone back home on her mobile: “No, I don’t want a job in Barcelona. I want to spend the year travelling.” I get nostalgic for my early backpacking days, when mobiles didn’t exist and when I didn’t travel with a laptop. Admittedly, I travel with it only because I have to work, and am noticing that more and more backpackers have laptops also, just for the heck of it. Of course it’s very convenient to be able to tap into wi-fi networks and be in constant communication with everyone you know, but I don’t like the fact that the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Give it a couple of years, and it’ll be cheap to use one’s mobile in any part of the world, and I can just imagine hordes of backpackers spending all the time not just Facebooking each other but also spending all their time chatting to people across the globe.

There’s practically no traffic at all on the road running through the pampas, but we keep getting stopped by the police. We pass three police checkpoints in as many hours and every time they get on board and check our IDs. I wonder what they’re looking for. Maybe there are some dangerous criminals on the run…The last time the police check the bus, they pinch a bottle of Coke from the cooler.

Everyone watches the ‘The Blind Side’, followed by a Russian pirate copy of the atrocious ‘Tooth Fairy’. I watch the sunset. I never get tired of the spectacular light show above the pampas.

We switch buses in Río Gallegos. Last time I was here, I remember leaving a half-finished book on a bus, so am guarding my belongings extra-jealously.

Infrequent stops in dark towns seemingly in the middle of nowhere. At one bus station, I spot a curious mural – a naked woman emerging from the waves, with the following inscription: “Conta hasta diez. No a aborto.” I get the bit against abortion, but I don’t understand at what point or why you would count to ten. Before having unprotected sex? Before deciding to have an abortion?

A German-sounding traveller chats to me. He’s travelling for a year with his girlfriend. When I tell him that I’m a travel writer, he responds: “So would I be the millionth person to tell you that you have a dream job?” I explain that he’s seeing the less glamorous side of it – my having to get off at 4am in one of Argentina’s least appealing cities only to catch my connection to one of Chile’s least appealing cities.

‘Condom River’ is an apt nickname for Comodoro Rivadavia, from what I manage to see at 4am. The bus station is grotty and full of assorted drunks and tramps because it’s warm and open all night. I check the schedule board and get a nasty sense of foreboding: only one company has departures for Coyhaique, and it doesn’t give a time, it just says: check at the office. The office is closed. I wonder if I’m doomed to be stuck in ‘Condom River’ and whether I should perhaps have checked that the Coyhaique connection is still running in May. Quickly come up with Plan B. I can’t afford to hang around, so if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll just catch the best bus towards Bariloche in the Argentine Lake District.

Luckily (or not, depending on how you look at it) the bus to Coyhaique is running. Another nine hours of pampas, lakes with flamingos, dirt-and-gravel roads with stones that ricochet off the bottom of the bus…I pass out for half of it because I haven’t slept much at night.

It’s snowing at the Chile border crossing, but after we cross the border and descend towards Coyhaique, the weather improves. The autumn colours are as lovely here as in Patagonia. It’s a shame that I happen to loathe Coyhaique, the Armpit of Chile, because the area around it is actually really beautiful.

Manage to find a room at a minute’s notice, and what’s even better, I now have a ticket out of town! My bus is due to depart for Futaleufú along the Carretera Austral on Saturday morning, so all I’ll have to do then is find onward transportation there and I should be on target to reach Arequipa, Peru, on the 13th. So far, so good.