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[DJ Tom is responsible for this post.]

I can’t remember the last time I put together a mixtape, or even felt the urge to make one. But, after 7 weeks on the road, there are certain songs that I know will always remind me of our summer travels in Argentina, so it only seemed right to compile them together all in one place.

Courtesy of Favtape, you can play along as you read the rest of the post.

1. Sheena Easton – “My Baby Takes The Morning Train”

   I swore this was a Juice Newton hit, but Michele insisted it was Sheena Easton. She was right, and she hasn’t let me forget it. (Clearly, I was mistaking if for “Angel in the Morning”.)

   This song’s chorus was impossible to get out of our heads. For weeks and weeks, one of us was always humming this tune. Zelda especially loved it, and if somehow the rest of us had collectively purged it from our minds for a short while, Zelda would come bopping along, singing “My baby takes the morning train…” and instantly reinfect us all.

   Admit it, you’re humming it right now, aren’t you?

2. Vampire Weekend – “I Stand Corrected”

   A lot of mixtapes segue from Sheena Easton to Vampire Weekend, no?

3. Coldplay – “Viva la Vida”

   The girls loved this song and desperately wanted to sing along with it, but could never get through it without asking a ton of questions. “Why is he rolling the dice?” “What are the bells ringing for?” “Who is St. Peter?” “…just what is this song about, anyway?”

4. The Ting Tings – “Shut Up And Let Me Go”

   How do you learn about new music these days?

   Well, I’m not sure how hipsters do it, but I learned about The Ting Tings because their song was the background music for a Sponge Bob Square Pants commercial that played incessantly during our Bariloche stay. That commercial was easily my favorite thing on TV.

   The rest of the family quickly became nauseated by my ability to work the phrase “I ain’t freakin’, I ain’t fakin’ it” into nearly every conversation.

5. The Decemberists – “Oceanside”

   By the time we hit Ushuaia, we had left our poppy, dance phase and had become a bit more contemplative and alternative. I’m not sure why I had to travel all the way to the end of the world before finally giving one of our hometown’s most acclaimed bands a listen.

6. Bob Marley & the Wailers – “Iron Lion Zion”

   Uncle Ian filled our daughters’ iPod Shuffles with his favorites, making sure to ground them in the classics (Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin) and cover all important genres. This was the family consensus pick from the Reggae lesson.

7. Madonna – “Give It 2 Me”

   We rented a car for a couple days in Bariloche. We spun the radio dial while we drove along the winding lakeside roads, searching for any song simple and catchy enough for the whole family to sing along to…and Madonna gave it 2 us.

8. Katy Perry – “I Kissed A Girl”

   Yes, we’ve already mentioned that we heard this song everywhere in Argentina.

   Somehow, we managed to avoid a parent-child discussion about what exactly Katy Perry was singing about, but if that conversation comes up in the future, I’m ready. Thanks to the Pastor at Havens Corners Church, I now know what I’ll say:

   

1. Chewing on glacier ice can bust out a loose tooth.
2. The tooth fairy is intrepid; she can find you even when onboard a boat in the Patagonian fjords.
3. How to read the airplane safety information card. (Zelda was the airline safety police, making Tom turn off his Kindle during take off and landing.)
4. Little girls can go to sleep even if they are sharing a big room with four other people.
5. How to hang out in a cafe for 7 hours. (If we had a particularly long layover in a city, we would inevitably find a cafe with WiFi and really sprawl. Zoe would be at her own table reading. Zelda might recline on a bench seat. Ian and I would set up at a table near an electrical outlet for our computers. Tom would be at the “food” table, where we would munch throughout the day!)
6. How to recognize oxidization in wine corks (they really keep an eye out for it now).
7. A ten mile hike is just a bit too long for them.
8. How to sing “Burn One Down” by Ben Harper. (Thanks a lot, Ian.)

On our first trip to El Calafate, Argentina, we arrived in the midst of a torrential downpour. When we asked around about how long the weather might last, we were greeted with a Gallic shrug and a loosely translated, “it depends upon what side of the bed the Chileans have risen.”

When approaching Cape Horn for an attempted landing, there was no mention of the weather forecast, because “you wait five minutes and the weather will change.”

So imagine our surprise when we arrived in El Chaltén and the bus driver, Gonzalo (the owner of the cabin we rented), the park ranger, and various restaurateurs gave us very complete weather forecasts…for the next 3 days, all of which included words like “barometer” and “high pressure.”

And you know what? The forecast was dead on! So it IS possible to predict the weather somewhere in southern Patagonia!

The first thing we noticed on our 3 hour bus ride to El Chaltén (north of El Calafate) is that we really didn’t blend with the demographic on the bus — that would be backpackers in their early twenties from Israel! When we arrived in this small mountain village, our demographic isolation continued because we weren’t serious rock climbers or well-off seniors on guided tours either! There was a notable lack of 40-something parents with kids in town…go figure!

El Chaltén sports a confluence of rivers and is an area where the steppes meet the forested reserves of Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and it is crazy beautiful (if rather windy)! There are tons of well-marked and maintained trails that lead directly from town to the standard insane vistas that we have come to expect, nay, demand.

Added note, El Chaltén just got it’s first ATM and there is one grocery store that will take credit cards, but it’s still mostly an all-cash town, so bring a lot of the stuff if you are visiting.

Tom: “Wanna visit a glacier?
Mich: “Nahhh, I’m kinda burned out on glaciers.”

Tom: “They have boat trips…”
Mich: “Are you serious, we just got off of a boat…?”

Tom: “There’s a chairlift to a glacier…”
Mich: “Glacier, done it. Chairlift up a mountain, done it.”

If we had come to Ushuaia without having gone anywhere else in Patagonia, I’m sure we would have been excited to avail ourselves of the various activities available in the area. As it was, we were a tough group to inspire.

We finally settled on a 3-4 hour hike in Tierra del Fuego National Park along Lapataia Bay, ending up at Lago Roca. We’re glad we were able to get our asses in gear because it was beautiful and we spotted an amazing array of birds. (On a side note, Tom and I have decided that if you want to become a birder, you should just travel to southern Patagonia and experience about 200 life birds…knock a bunch out in one trip and then call it a day!)

Tip: Arrange for very docile and friendly pets to lounge about your property if you want to attract and retain families in your establishments.

We spent a lovely 3 days in a Patagonia Villa cabin in Ushuaia, where we rarely saw the girls. They tarried away hours on the balcony with a cat sitting on their lap, purring happily; and they passed countless more hours on the front porch petting a neighborhood Golden Retriever. (By the way, we do think there was a direct correlation between the “loveliness” of our stay and the amount of time that the girls spent outside of the cabin!)

Mind you, at times, the weather was quite cold and windy, yet the girls would sit outside until they were blue-lipped, tending to their animal friends. Zelda said, “Zoe, the cat sat on me while you were downstairs and I think it was the best feeling in the whole world.”

Sheesh, they are really making me feel guilty about not allowing pets. I have relented and promised them a cat when we return to the US to live. Of course, they can’t be happy with that, they are now requesting two cats, one for each of them!

I now have enough data from our travels, as well as input from fellow sojourners, to definitively say (with wide sweeping brush strokes) that every hotel room in southern Patagonia seems to be set to “sauna” on the thermostat (which is often under the sole control of the hotelier)!

Sadly, it is not uncommon for me to writhe in bed to dreams of smothering heat, which is ridiculous considering it’s really cold and windy outside. In fact, it’s so windy that it is usually not practical to leave your window open for some relief. Thus far, the best stretch of sleep I’ve gotten here in glacier land occurred when I propped open a balcony door 3 feet from my bed so that the cold Antarctic winds could buffet me all night long.

The latter is a great example of just how effective radiant floor heating (which I now call “sweaty feet heat”) can be at warming up a room…or in this case, a cabin.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly the Love Boat, but our trip aboard the Via Australis (a 137 passenger boat run by Cruceros Australis) was a new, and mostly positive, experience for us all.

THE GOOD

• Nice hot showers.
• Access to beautiful and remote areas.
• Anyone can be a good photographer in these locales.
• You don’t have to think about your day in terms of food or excursions (this is particularly nice if you have kids).
• The trip was the right length, 5 days and 4 nights. Any longer and I would have had cabin fever on a boat that size.
• The open bar (a plus for Ian and Tom, anyway).
• Meeting mighty nice people. There were 14 countries represented on our boat. Two of our favorite passengers are pictured here: our tablemates Mary and Tommy, from Scotland. (We’re still speaking with our bad Scottish brogue thanks to them!) Tommy is the oldest Linux user (self-taught, no less) that we’ve ever met. Mary was a professor in elementary math education until she recently retired. (Her biggest triumph, though, may have been putting up with Tommy all of these years!)
• Surprisingly nice rooms.
• Whiskey and hot chocolate available at the end of land excursions. (Johnny Walker cooling in glacier ice pictured below.)

THE BAD

• They gave Tom and I two twin beds instead of the queen bed that we had reserved.
• The drains in the bathroom had some issues.
• A table of French passengers got angry at us for closing the curtains in the dining room on the first night (we were blocking the sun from shining in our eyes). Maybe it was our imagination, but they seemed to maintain their anger throughout the trip. (Couple that with their loss in the table trivia contest and we almost had an international incident.)
• The desserts looked good, but were really pretty sub standard. (Once they start putting corn in a signature dessert…well, need I say more?)

THE UGLY

• Really poor guiding. The lead English-speaking guide, who was nice enough, was spectacularly bad at his job. He prattled on endlessly in poor English and had no real information to impart. Ian had an order of magnitude more knowledge gained from his trip through the region 5 years ago than did our head guide. As a family, we made it a point to avoid all of his lectures and lagged behind during excursions so that we didn’t have to listen to him yammer about nothing. I would have expected a naturalist/historian/archaeologist type to be available on board, but this you will not find. We recommend self-study prior to taking the trip.

I, the albatross that awaits at the end of the world…
I am the forgotten soul of the sailors lost,
rounding Cape Horn from all the seas of the world.
But die they did not in the fierce waves,
for today towards eternity, in my wings they soar,
in the last crevice of the Antarctic winds.

— Sara Vial (Chilean author and poet)

No one was very happy about rising early to gear up for a 7:00 a.m. attempted landing at Cape Horn. On the last two cruises to the area, our ship encountered 100 km/hour winds and they were not able to beach the zodiacs. (For those of you that don’t know, Cape Horn is where the Atlantic and the Pacific ocean meet between Antarctica and South America, creating unique and intense atmospheric conditions — translation: roughest seas in the world.)

We were lucky and our dawn excursion was met with lovely weather (for the southern end of the world) and we were able to land, eradicating our early morning crabbiness! Pictured here from Cape Horn are the light house, two views of the memorial to dead sailors in the shape of an albatross, an old chapel, and few shots from the area where we landed the boats.

You can see from these photos how quickly the weather changes by looking at the sky!

Is it possible to suffer from glacier fatigue? (No smart-ass comments about glacier fatigue setting in as a result of blog viewing!)

As you can see in these pictures, every time we looked out of the window while on board our lovely cruiser gliding through the fjords, we were treated to a scenic tableau of the blue beasts flowing down mountains lapped by light green glacial melt capped with big skies. What this must have looked like for Darwin, Fitz Roy, and Magellan!! (And, by the way, those guys were nuts for bringing their primitive ass sailing technology down to the end of the world!)