Visit the new "Travels in the Riel World"
This blog is a collection of older posts, mostly from a round-the-world trip. To see my current blog and its collection of travel and cross-cultural articles, please go to www.rielworld.com. See you there!
This blog began as a record of the experiences of Bob Riel and Lisa Higgins during a round-the-world journey from May to August of 2005. We were in the process of moving from Massachusetts to Arizona and were lucky enough to have several months of time off in between jobs. So we put our belongings into storage and embarked on an adventure... Of course, the travel bug never really goes away, and so we've since added to the blog with accounts of more recent travels.
This blog is a collection of older posts, mostly from a round-the-world trip. To see my current blog and its collection of travel and cross-cultural articles, please go to www.rielworld.com. See you there!
After our travels through Patagonia, Argentina, Lisa and I ended our trip with a short stay in Uruguay. There is much more to see in Argentina, of course, but we were trying to do an inexpensive trip and we discovered a South American Air Pass that provided significantly discounted flight tickets -- except that we had to visit at least two countries. Since Montevideo, Uruguay, is only a 40-minute flight from Buenos Aires, we decided to finish up with a few days in Uruguay in order to be able to use the airpass.
Ushuaia, Argentina, bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. It is virtually an island within an island, as it sits at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, trapped between the Andes Mountains and the sea. The Pan-American highway ends (or begins) here, at the edge of the South American continent, just 600-700 miles from Antarctica. And if one were to set sail east or west in a boat from Ushuaia, you could travel all the way around the globe and not hit another piece of land until you returned to your starting point.
Mornings in Ushuaia began in flat calm. Across the Beagle Channel you saw the jagged outline of Hoste Island opposite and the Murray Narrows, leading down to the Horn archipelago. By mid-day the water was boiling and slavering and the far shore blocked by a wall of vapor.On another day he wrote:
It was drizzling. Snow smears came down close to the shore. It was high summer. Behind the settlement the trees disappeared in the clouds.While in Ushuaia, we visited Tierra del Fuego National Park and cruised the Beagle Channel. During our afternoon boat trip there, one of the more interesting stops was at an island inhabited by penguins. Here is a photo of three of them strolling along the beach.
Argentina is too large of a country to explore in one trip, unless you have a couple of months, and so we decided to focus our efforts this time on Patagonia. The first place we visited after Buenos Aires was the town of El Calafate and nearby Glacier National Park.
The Patagonian desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. Unlike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience. Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible. In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these arid wastes had taken such firm possession of his mind.While in El Calafate, we experienced some of what Chatwin wrote about. On the Patagonian steppe, the land stretches vacantly for miles and the wind howls. The solitary homes of the local farms are all protected from the wind by rows of planted trees. Otherwise, there is little vegetation aside from grass. It’s an apt landscape for the southernmost region of the world.
It had been more than a year since we returned from our round-the-world journey. It was time for a vacation and we had frequent flyer miles to spare, so we decided to explore a bit of South America. In conjunction with our trip, I decided to revive this blog, keeping the account of our 2005 travels and adding to it with posts and photos from our newest adventure.
Once we got back in the U.S., Lisa spent two days in Boston, doing a whirlwind visit with friends, family, and old co-workers before heading to Tucson to prepare for a new job. I spent a few more days in the area, to spend more one-on-one time with my father, my sisters, and a few friends before making the move to Arizona.
The final stop on our trip was Paris, France. Paris and Singapore were the only two places we visited that we had been to before. Singapore was a break in the middle of our trip and a chance to spend time with an old friend. We chose Paris as the city in which to end our oddyssey because we wanted to finish someplace fun, someplace romantic, and because Lisa and I both have great memories of the city from a previous visit.