South-West Gets Scholziger

Huch! I totally forgot about you all, to write my “Welcome back to Germany” post. To summarise all, I can say that I really did not want to leave nice Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America. Deep inside I cried but in the end it wasn’t that bad at all when I arrived in Düsselsorf. My last nights I spent with Daniel in Mauro’s Couchsurfing home because I had to leave my previous couch unexpectedly. It was the right decision because Mauro turned out to be a god of mate. Never met anyone else before who can teach you the philosophy of drinking Argentinian mate with such a passion. You want to study, to live Argentina? Take your first lesson with Mauro, though for me it was the last.

I bought an extra bag only to take around 13 kg of mate home to Germany. There were not the slightest problems declaring my customs. I simply did not declare anything. But as I read somewhere there are no strong restrictions importing tea in huge amounts into the EU, it only may not exceed the value of 430 Euro which it did not.

The first thing you notice when coming back from the dry Patagonian desert into the German fresh spring is some kind of ubiquitous green slime, filled with never ending background concerts of local winged somethings. Wow. This Münsterland here has a special charm you won’t find anywhere else. Light greenly glowing fields merge into full juicy deep green forests when you cruise around outside of the wannabe-cities. Mmmmhm … jummy jummy

The past few weeks back in Germany I spent with finishing my Venezuelan project, migrating all collected geodata into a clean database, building some maps for online publishing purposes and finally playing around frustratedly with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to get the things accessible from the World Wide Web. I stepped deep into server administration which was rather new to me but I hate it. All these necessary rights managements to get things to work … it’s boring. Either the firewall or some user accounts steal days and days of your free time, you forget to eat, to sleep, … Blöäh!

The final web application will be updated and bug-fixed from time to time. I still have to adjust the look and feel of the maps but for every publishing step I have to recalculate all the small image tiles which are used by the server to produce the map output. Recreating this cache keeps my laptop busy for three days each time, so I definitely will not do it frequently If you are interested in accessing the WebGIS, post a comment and I’ll mail you the login information. Some day the access will be free.

My attached photos will show my very few impressions of Buenos Aires. In future this blog will be silent. May be there are following others about coming trips, or a pure photo blog in cooperation with my dear friend Kono. But one of my visions is to recapture my best past trips and produce something like a retrospect, underlined with amazing photos and sharp short stories I underwent. Time consuming mind breaking ideas I have …

1234►

I arrived in Monte Hermoso to visit Edgardo, the guy who took Daniel and me from Ushuaia in his Lady Benz. There are trees around, and green grass, woah! Pampa seams to be over soon. He lives in a self-made nice house with 8 big dogs, 5 new small ones and around 8 cats, 4 fresh ones. We had some great asado out of other animals and I created a new e-mail account for him

This night I took a luxurious bus to Buenos Aires where I’m waiting now for my couch host to wake up because she still seems to be asleep after Saturday’s hard night. Here some photos of last days in Puerto Madryn with Daniel and Monte Hermoso.

12►

Hihi. I left Daniel! Hahaa! We just separated yesterday when I took a night bus to Bahia Blanca and he stayed for one or two days more in Puerto Madryn. Our roadtrip through Peninsula Valdés was cool! We saw magallan penguins, orcas and sea elephants but yesterdays Kayak tour alongside the coast was even better. Bitter cold in the morning with the low sun, clear sky and tranquil sea without wind. The water was transparent but at the same time deep blue and gave a great contrast to the yellowish cliffs. When we passed a seal colony some of the younger ones jumped into the water and came to us, diving below our kayak and spraying salty water into our faces. Cool!

There is a new confluence point report from Seniorscholz online.

Eeeeep! Hmm. Hitchhiking. Yes. Works pretty well here in south Argentina as well. We started in Ushuaia and did the whole way north to Puerto Madryn in 3,5 days with one guy, Edgardo. He is the coolest of all! 47, fought in the Falklands War in ’82, eight days ago divorced the second time and breeding Labradors. He went down  to sell some dogs on the way and enjoyed the time with us heading back near Buenos Aires. He had bad luck in Ushuaia because someone stole his car papers and he had to fly back to Buenos Aires to get some new ones because without he was not able to cross the Chilean border. Then they phoned them, having found his papers somewhere. He headed back but had to return and go back again, I forgot the reason for all of this, but it was crazy. So he picked us up and we cruised through the Pampa, saw Guanacos, also many dead ones and enjoyed the fresh coffee at every gas station. Here you get good coffee again! The first night we had to hurry to get the ferry back from Tierra del Fuego to the main land, so we drove into the night. This is not recommended in whole Patagonia, at least on unpaved roads. So, this night we crushed the front of his old ’94 Mercedes Benz van as we approached and crossed a small hill. We were just going like 40 or 50 kilometres per hour and on top of this hill in the curve the unpaved road was a small lake. Funny, not? The hell knows why, but some new river decided to cross the road, though it had not rained for days. Just add some aquaplaning to this small formula and you get what we got. This spot approached so suddenly that there was no time to break and we funnily slipped around on this small water hole. Some force smashed us to the right, we nearly tilt over to the left, we already were on the two outer wheels and then stopped in the ditch. Some half wheel deep water around us, the front of the car buried in mud. Hihi. So, the whole front was for the fishes, but good old lady Benz still worked as it should. Luckily there came some other 4×4 cars to pull us on the main puddle and we continued. Next stops were Puerto San Julián, Trelew and we reached Puerto Madryn. For tomorrow we rent a car to take a ride to the Peninsula Valdés.

Consume more horses! Cook them, grill them, fry them, whatever them, at least please eat them! Our two day hike north of Ushuaia through some deep valleys could have been even more beautiful if you had eaten more horses. There exisit some people who prefer horse back riding through rough landscapes instead of hiking on their bare feet. This would be no problem and I would not have such a problem if these people used special paths with their horses, but not the same paths as hikers do. The result in this humid region is that all hiking paths are mud pools and our hike was rather a mud war than a chilling adventure. Horses turn a narrow trail into a highway of mud. Tartar will be our best friend!

Consume more dogs! Fry them, grill them, cook them, whatever them, at least please eat them! Wild dogs can get a really annoying natural phenomenon. When you think about leaving the city down here and exploring the outer region on your own, make sure to carry some pepper spray or a big axe with you. The further you get out of the city, the less conscious the people get with their dogs. Why do all giant dogs have to run around freely, barking and jumping on every foreigner passing by, the improvised fences not holding back even a cow …?

Tonight we had our coldest night in the tent. First time that I had to close my sleeping bag completely. Must have been around -3 degree Celsius. Sell your synthetic fibre sleeping bag, buy a down one. The only reason buying this plastic stuff is its lower price. All arguments that down bags have problems with humidity are nonsense unless you sleep without any cover in the pouring rain. One rainy week of hiking is no problem, two are no difference. Sleeping in the cold night outside is no problem, the morning dew stays outside and gets not inside of the bag, it dries away fast. Once the wind carried my sleeping bag into a river and even this was no problem because the outer material is water repellent and within these few seconds nothing has happened. For five years now I had not a single day having humidity problems. Goose down rocks!!

Nice it was down here! Patagonia is very cool! Especially the Chilean islands, national park Los Glaciares, Torres del Paine, La Pampa and the vast distances. Tierra de fuego is something comparable to some northern European stuff but on midday you’ll find the sun in the north instead of the south. Tomorrow we have to head north again, poco a poco I have to reach Buenos Aires. There are only two weeks left, ohjeh!

Now, I miss my guitar. Yeah. We left Punta Arenas for Ushuaia. It was worth it! Many people say that Punta Arenas is one of the more beautiful cities in the south. Actually there are not many cities down here and the only nice thing in Arenas are is the old cementary and the nice old trees everywhere. Special types gown old because Punta Arenas is one of the oldest cities in Chile. But, baby, go to Ushuaia in Argentina! It is worth everything! Smaller, tinier, sweeter and the big bonus of a crazy landscape around. So, imagine you are going south for thounsands of kilometres through Pampa, Pampa … Pampa, boring but beautiful (it is like this) Pampa. Then, suddenly you find yourself within a nice mountain region. High mountains up to 2000 m directly at sea level, round ones, sharp ones. Welcome to Ushuaia. Great bay, at this time of the year no penguins left. Some went to Antarctica, some to southern Brazil. But more seals and cormorants.

Mhm. It is difficult to describe. You step out and feel fresh, dry, cold air. Like a nice winters day, but it’s every day, still without any snow. The landscape could be described as something you can encounter in northern Sweden and Norway. For some of my friends I would say that it is like Taernaby in Sweden. Soft, round mountains, colors from dark green over orange to dark red at higher altitudes. This Lenga trees are doing their best to create a perfect autumn feeling here. So, I left Germany after a perfect summer in August 2009. Spent an even more perfect summer in Venezuela. Came through mild Peru to mild and sunny, summery Bolivia. Walked through dry and hot Atacama sunny desert and encountered an awesome late summer in midt Chile. Now in end of April I am going back to the new and fresh German summer but have still the opportunity to get the hint of probably world’s most autumnly autumn down here in Argentina. There are no whishes left. Hmm. But on the other hand I realise that I will never ever be able to live near equatorial regions. I neeeeed this change in seasons. I need a winter, a strong one, with this typical dry, fridged and sunny air. I need the summer and in my opinion the autumn is way underestimated. These clourful woods, stepping out grey and snow topped mountains. Sunshine. Hahahaa, there is just no better view, feeling, colour, smell. Here the sune rises a long time, stays loooooooow the whole day, like in a 35 to 45 degree angle. The whole day you can take great photos! Who the hell need spring? But for those of you who dream of visiting Patagonia, thinking that it is the best on eart … just go up north and visit Norway, Sweden, Finland. It is nearly the same! And way cheaper to get there from Europe … Go there in late summer, in the off season, something around end of August, September. Stay at least one or two months up there. You will not miss any Patagonia or whatever it is called. My opinion.

Other stuff: Last weeks apart from surfing some couches we stayed in many different hostels. There are families sharing their houses with foreigners, building everything to accomplish internations needs and call themselfes official hostel. I asked them what they do on Christmas, New Year … they just grinned, shined and answered that they spend all this together with the tourists in their house. This is cool. There are 12 or 20 people in your house. Every day. Every night. You meet them in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the living room, they are every where. Sounds strange? No! It’s their life! So every German, deeply closed, ass punching family, WAKE UP! There is coming someone strange into your street? Do not close you curtains and phone your neighbours. Open the door, give him food, bed, everything, you’ll never regret it. Blow off your strictly ordered life, burn your fuck’in calendar, you will see that it is still possible to live. People I met here earn money, are rich but still have time for everything at any time. What do YOU Germans do wrong? Sometimes, many times I feel the deep whish to kick your asses. I will do so once I’m back. So, begin to close your curtains, good old Scholz is heading back.

Hmm, travelling is cool. On the one hand you can try many different beers, very crazy ones. On the other hand you meet cool people. Then, think of combining these things. Hihi. I will not tell no stories anymore, you would envy and hate me. Still, meeting people is the greatest on earth! Sell you car, your house (,your wife). Buy a tent. That’s it, there you go. Good night everybody.

Scholzification in progress … Punta Arenas being Scholzified … Yesterday I prepared a great portion of Scholzy Bratkartoffeln and later in the evening the legendary Scholzy Kartoffelsalat. The best one. Do not even think about starting to cry stuff like “Ah, but my mom’s is better” or “But my grandma rocks you off with her Toffelsalat”. There is just no “but”, don’t try. Scholz’sche Kartoffelsalat tratition has its roots far back in ancient times and was unbeatable until today. A try would be like trying to move faster than light or like trying to turn Bourbon into Scotch. Imagine, it’s not possible. Don’t waste your time. Anibal spent a long time in Muenster (no, we do not produce any cheese in Muenster), he has been there three times while hanging around with a German girl. He accompanied my salad with hot freshly made Rotkohl with smoked pork ribs. Ohjeh, after nearly 8 months real food for the first time. In just a few minutes I will start preparing Apfelpfannkuchen or rather ”Apfelplaetzchen” like many adoring fans tend to call them. This is gonna blow Punta Arenas off to Antarctica or even far beyond … Scholzification has just begun …

Hahaaa! Down to Torres del Paine national park was our next plan. I won’t go into detail because I think it is quite boring for you to read all scientifically details about every single of the nine days we spent in the park. It just was awesome! We did the whole circle with all the small extra paths and walked all in all around 125 km. The backpacks were not that heavy with all the food because we could leave some unnecessary stuff back. I have to emphasise our perfect planning because of not being here in high season. Our path is the longer one and not many people walk this whole route but in high season they told us, there are like 80 campers on one camp site. What?!?! Impossible. There are only small spots where you can put a few tents. I can not imagine so many people rushing these tiny spots. We had luck and even walked a few days without meeting anybody but once we met someone it was even better! The few people we met were just supercool. First of all we started with Fabian, a German teacher, somewhat 29 or something. Later on we met small groups of people from USA and Canada and I have to say that this changed my view of northern American guys completely! They all were so kind and nice, lovely and funny, seldom met so nice North Americans! Now I have all necessary contacts to start a huge USA road trip Especially with Sam, Michael and Jacob it was really cool as we spent the last four days of the hike when we arrived at the southern part of the park. They are young exchange students in Valparaiso, came here three weeks ago and gave us fresh garlic for every diner!!! Wahoooooo, this is love baby!

Daniel is a small fool sometimes, or even many times … he forgot to bring a book to his trip and is totally dependent from his mobile phone which he uses to listen to audio books. Ok, now imagine what this means on a 9 day trip … the battery does not last that long and he can get really boring without anything to spend time on, really annoyingly boring. I listen to audio books as well BUT I have a tiny solar charger for my phone AND the coolest Bill Bryson’s backup book ever. By the way, Hatty Potter V is amazing! So, it was nice all in all, there are some pictures listed with this post. We arrived in Puerto Natales which has nothing to show to you and continued directly to Punta Arenas where we found Anibal, a supermegacool couch hoster. Yeah, this Couchsurfing thing again … it is soooo great! We are here together with an Italian guy, cook together, walk through the city, watch videos and have a nice time. Anibal is 39, has his own hardware oriented computer business and currently builds up a new tourist business. He organises motorbike tours through Patagonia. You can come here and get a fully equipped new BMW motorbike and ride your soul off with some friends in the vast nowhere for some weeks. There is a short promotion video on Youtube and I recommend watching it! This video covers a lot what I spoke about in my last post. Beautiful pictures of southern Patagonia, filmed somewhere between El Chaltén and Punta Arenas in the Argentinean an Chilean Pampa, Torres del Paine and other nice spots and at least the sound track is worth watching it! So go ahead in full screen and high quality mode.

12345►

I miss Venezuela! It is a living country whereas Chile is more modern, like Europe. There is no chaos in the streets here, no people selling food on every corner, no musical overkill and salsa music in a café is somewhat foreign because it totally does not fit to the county’s atmosphere, it is artificial. 

So, there happened a lot during the last weeks. I had simply no time to write anything because we were on the road hitchhiking basically in unpopulated land. Where did I stop last time? Isla Chiloé? I think so. Chiloé is different from the rest of Chile. It is a funny cultural mixture and more than only tranquil. I have to underline that we are travelling quite late and aside of the main season. The summer is officially over and after mid of March nearly all touristy places are swept out. This counts especially for Chiloé where we did not meet any other tourist-looking individual. All restaurants are closed, though if you find anything open you are only able to order beer because “The cook is not working” or “The cook is out” or “Come back in high season.” … this is it. They have their own architectural style of small warm wooden pretty houses, you just love them. In the western part we spent some days in the new national park and walked some 20 kilometres alongside the lonely beach and over green hills, camped at lonely beaches with stormy Scottish-like weather and observed many Campephilus magellanicus. The astonishing thing so far about the southern fauna is that it is really, really trusting. Nearly all birds you can approach so closely, I have never seen this before. They do not fly away; they just look at you and always keep a steady distance but do not flee. Like if they had nothing to be scared about from humans.

After having spent nearly a week on Isla Chiloé we took a 36 h boat trip from Quellón to Puerto Chacabuco near Puerto Aisén, now in the northern middle of Patagonia. The cruise was worse than expected because the weather played a different song than we wanted. 36 h of rain and deep clouds, we barely saw all the small nice Patagonian islands because everything above 50 m was covered by clouds :-/ But while arriving to Chacabuco we could see some snow fields reaching down to the ocean water. This was strange because a few days earlier we hat hot sun up in the north without having to bother about wind, rain and even snow. Strange geography here. You want hot dry summer and cold snowy winter in one holiday trip? Come to Chile baby! Mhm. 

The adventure started from Coyhaique down south where we hitchhiked the whole way until El Calafate in Argentina. First we went down to Puerto Traquilo at Lago Carrera (Lago Buenos Aires). Hitchhiker’s paradise!!! Never waited more than 20 or 30 minutes for a car to take us; sometimes the first car picked us. The last 200 km we rode in the back of a cattle truck and visited the marble caves in Puerto Tranquilo. It was nice but just cruising through this gorgeous landscape is enough, you really do not need to visit any tourist attractions here, just take a look around you and you are sufficiently satisfied! Sharp mountain peaks with snow and ice fields, low sun with deep blue and green lakes … oh dear. 

We lost our guide book ‘cause we forgot it in a car. Then my allegedly unbreakable water bottle broke in two pieces after falling out of my backpack (Meanwhile I contacted the support, they send me a new one for free!!). Hmm, Titanic bottle. Between Chile Chico and Los Antiguos we crossed the border and could see some real Argentineans. Cool. Chicas muy muy lindas in every corner, this is really hard to bear! So, my hard rocking amigos, the coolest trip followed from shortly behind the border on the back of a Pick-Up down south some 600 km over unpaved road (Ruta 40). Catalina and her dad from Argentina made a road trip south to Ushuaia and took us this day until El Chaltén. We had to share like one square metre with a bike, our big backpacks, fat stones and a spear wheel. My heart bled as we continued with them the next morning to El Calafate because Chaltén is such a nice place to hike around. Awesome mountains with the famous peek Fitz Roy .. but Daniel wanted rather to use our opportunity to get further south for free. Hmm, it is a bit difficult because he always complains about not having any money. But the truth is that you can not travel without money so in some parts you _have_ to pay to get around. I do not accept to miss half of the coolest things on this trip which might be my only time in my life here, just because Daniel has problems with his money. In future this is going to be a big problem between us … we will see. The northern part of Patagonia is like you know it from everywhere, especially the Chilean side. But on Argentinean side it is just Pampa, Pampa, Pampa. This Pampa is very similar to parts of the Atacama Desert. Just flat nothing with flat grass or bush land, Guanacos, Ñandus, for thousands (really) kilometres. From time to time there appears a hard, sharp, snow topped mountain ridge, the next moment it disappears again. Pampa. But extremely cool!

1234►

Ha! Hahaaaaa! Yep. Funny it was when we arrived in Pucón and wanted to start a hike into the Villarrica national park. Conaf, the national park administration, told us that all national parks down to Valdivia were closed due to earthquake warnings and problems. This national park covers three volcanoes, one of them being an active one, the volcano Villarrica. So this was a quite thrilling situation but we did not want to climb this hill for nearly 80 Euro … too much. After kidding around a while we could enter the park on our own risk, they told us where to start the best route for a hike of around three days.

TravelAid is a small tourist info in Pucón run by a Swiss guy who gave us great information and fed my Garmin eTrex Vista HCX GPS with some possible hiking paths and the local contour lines. Nice service! We arranged to get to the park entrance “Quetrupillán” the same day and camped in the forest at the junction of two small rivers making a big bonfire.

Then our first day of real hiking was a nice but hard one. In the end we finished around 20 km together with 1700 height metres and Daniel was near to death. The first part was a steep ascent from 1000 m through a thick forest full of Nothofagus until we reached lighter regions with many Araucaria (in my opinion after Platanus the coolest trees ever), finally stepping out of the forest in around 1700 m with a beautiful view on the snow-topped and smoking volcano Villarrica. Most of the time then we were walking up and down on a plateau consisting of small grains of volcano ash, picked with little colourful flowers. Of course accompanied by bright sunshine, like everywhere where we go … Already at night, at around 9 pm, we had to descend to Laguna Azul a steep way from 1900 m crossing snow fields unexpectedly. This is funny because we just stood there parallysed wondering of this snow. A few days before we have been in the endless dry desert just “a few” kilometres further north … and now everything juicy green and snowy … hmm Chile is geographically crazy.

We started after sleeping enough and had to cross an old lava field which was created during an eruption around 100 years ago. So impressive!!! From further above it really looked like if somebody poured black glassy stones into the valley for kilometres! Everything still looks “fresh”, the stones still shiny but eroded significantly showing the typical conchoidal fracture. The rest of the day we again spent walking on basaltic ash and circled an old volcano crater. After kilometre 12 we had to climb up some hundred metres to pass the mountain ridge and it followed a nice descent through wide swamps into the Nothofagus-forest again, where we arrived at Laguna Los Patos after around 17 km. We had the whole lagoon for us alone; the black beach was untouched and the water warmer as assumed, probably because of the black sand. I never saw so clear water and had to dive in directly after putting down my backpack. Yeeehaaaaaw, together with the 6pm sun and without wind it was the best refreshment ever. We camped at the beach using only the inner tent.

The last day of this trip we spent walking 10 km only through forest full of yellow flowers called Alstroemeria aure. Mmhhhm! Before reaching the main street between Chile and Argentina we had a beautiful view into the valley of Río Trancura with high and sharp mountain ridges in the background.

The next two days we spent in Valdivia visiting the parents of Alonso who I met in Santiago some days before. On the Sunday market we tried some sea food including sea urchin tongues … oh baby, this is THE WORST on earth, it tastes like death, it smells like death and it looks like guts. You get it cold and raw in a sauce of death. After trying one you have to fight vomiting. Usually I am very open to food and I try _everything_ what I don’t know, I like everything … at least I thought this until this last Sunday. No way. After that I had to eat my Chilean blue mussels, which were times better!

The old fortress in Niebla was closed because the earthquake destroyed some walls … it gets boring after a while, this whole earthquake stuff. We went to the local and famous brewery Kunstmann but a brewery tour was not possible, so we only tried some beer and I had a big steak sandwich. The beer is nice, they have many different kinds with Lager and Ale as the mayor ones but also offering a Wheat beer and one with Honey and some more. I t is a bit poor for a “German” brewery that they do not have any great Pils but I don’t care, one reason more to return to Germany hehe. The funniest thing is that the founder of this Brewery in 19th century was a guy from Dresden but the whole atmosphere in the brewery is Bavarian style. Bloody marketing fuck shit, all Chilean take photos next to Almmaedchen with Dirndl and now all Chilean (in general whole South America) thinks that Germany is like small ancient parts of Bavaria. But Daniel and I were the only two real Germans … no one noticed that because at least I look like a Bolivian tennis player, Daniel more like a Gringo with his beard and hat, he also wears his sunglasses at night.

Ha! Now we are on Chiloé and in a few minutes we are going to search some possibilities to hike around on this island. On the way from Puerto Montt to Ancud we had to cross with a ferry and were escorted by some dolphins. Hihi.

1234...678►