Mr. Owl's Swoop Defense is supurb

We're in Mendoza, again. It's Christmas Day. Everything is shut down, so I'm on the hotel computer writing this blog while my dad works on our computer and the girls are in their rooms taking a nap. Interesting. I don't know that this was entirely on the agenda, but it works for me. It's nice to have some time to sit down and reflect on the trip so far.

First of all, it's Christmas. We arrived into Mendoza late last night after a full day of traveling up from Punta Arenas to Santiago, then driving across the border to Mendoza. Arriving at 8pm and exhausted, we went out for a quick bit. Or so we thought. Not much was open at that time, since most restaurants were closed and those that were open hadn't gotten going yet, or we couldn't find them. So we ended up at a small cerveceria, or beer-shop, with plates of beef or chicken slapped in front of us. This, of course, is only after multiple attempts at getting the server's attention. The manager was too busy chain-smoking outside to get much done, and the servers were not in much rush to do anything. The wine was decent, the food was decent, but the company was great. We returned to the hotel around 11pm, where my parents stayed while Erin and I decided that we wanted nothing more than to grab a bottle of champagne and toast each other while sitting in our hotel room watching TV. Lame? I suppose it is a bit, but we truly enjoyed the quiet downtime as we entered into our 3rd Christmas together. We weren't too excited to join the traditional Argentine celebration of fireworks and alcohol, starting at 2am or so. The quiet, calm night was perfect.

Today, we woke up at our leisurely rate, wandered off to breakfast to meet my parents and discuss the upcoming day. Pretty open schedule, actually. Breakfast, open the presents, lunch, dinner, and that's about it. It turned out that the hotel had a small christmas tree in the lounge area that we took hostage. Under a 5 ft plastic tree, we put our presents, which had come with us from long ago and far away Peru and Bolivia. It was perfect. We opened a bottle of Chardonnay and proceeded to share our gifts with each other. Some gifts had come from my sister in Idaho, who understood that we would need new socks.

Thank you, Lisa, that is incredible foresight to know that our 4 pairs of socks (which had been through the jungles, volcanos, mountains and rivers of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia, etc, worn everyday for months) might be more than a little threadbare. We called our family after that, managing to reach most of the people we were really hoping to reach. It's great to have the technology to be able to communicate with everyone, even though we're far away in another hemisphere. After that we went to a wonderful light lunch. Now we are biding our time to wait for our big Christmas dinner tonight. Should be fantastic, if everything works out.

But, in between Puerto Montt, where Erin has described our fly fishing experience, to Mendoza, there was this little place called Patagonia. Not sure if you've heard about it, but there is a clothing company that stole it's name from the area of southern Chile and Argentina, north of Tierra de Fuego. Was it amazing? Did it live up to the nearly impossible expectations? Yes. Absolutely. Truly a fantastic place that will remain etched in my memory as some of the most beautiful mountains ever.

We flew from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas, which is an old port town at the very southern end of the world, pretty much. There were huge number of sheep traders, and later miners, who came to the bitterly cold town to make their fortunes. We arrived into town in the morning, giving us enough time to visit some of the sights of the city. The highlight of the sights is one of three things: first possibility is the Sara Bauer's Museum, quite an excellent old house impressively preserved; second option is the brand new casino/hotel complex Dreams, mostly for the 11th story sky bar overlooking the area; third and, for me, front runner, was the monument to the sheep herders, complete with a bronze herd of sheep and shepard walking into the wind. I don't know, it's a toss-up.

Next morning we were slated to leave at 8:00am for our trip up to Torres del Paine National Park, a trip that was supposed to take 5 hours or so. We got in the car at 8:15 or so, but then we had the wonderful once-in-a-lifetime chance to be driven around Punta Arenas for an hour before we left. We weren't picking up passangers or anything, just driving around, waiting for a shipment of "something" to arrive at the port so the driver could transport it somewhere.

I'm pretty sure it was a shady side business, because once we started calling the office after an hour, we suddenly started on toward our destination. Crazy, eh? But hey, we made it. They did radio the driver when we were in range, asking if we were going to be taking an excursion with the lodge. We said, "Don't you dare leave without us!" And luckily, they didn't. We arrived at the hotel, quickly checked into our rooms, then headed back into the exact same van to go on a hike, our first through the park. The Patagon excursion was an easy stroll through the steppe of the park, watching guanacos (cousin of the llama)

and rheas walk around. It was our first glimpse of the park and it was fantastic, even though the low-laying clouds were covering up most of the mountains. But luckily, on the return drive, we got a good glimpse of the towers, the gem of the park and cover of so many magazines. Just incredible. Luckily we took a picture because we wouldn't see them again until we were on our way out of the park.

The next day we had heard of a hike called Puma Tracks, which just sounds so cool that you have to do it. Unless it's windy and cloudy and you're smart enough to realize that it probably won't give up "the best view in Los Torres del Paine" so easily.

If you're lucky, all you have to do is climb up, look around and take some pictures. If you're us, you'll hike up the side of a shale slope in whipping winds, freezing rain and biting snow to look over a whiteout. The guide did assure us that, yes, this was the place where you could get an incredible view of the mountains. If he hadn't pulled out a thermos full of hot coffee to de-thaw my frozen fingers, I might have been a little upset. But, as Erin pointed out, it's not christmas without snow, so as she hit me with a snowball I was singing "I'm dreaming of a white christmas" in my head. Dead summer in Chile, snow on the mountain, no view, but a fantastic hike nonetheless. What else were we going to do? Sit in the lodge and drink at the open bar? Oh yes, we did that, too, right after we got them to start up a toasty fireplace to put our wet shoes on. Rough life.

Tuesday the 22nd, we all split up. Erin and I took a boat to the Grey Glacier and hiked back while my dad hiked the French Valley and mom rode horses. Erin had never seen a glacier up close and personal, and I have a great love of glaciers in general, so we loved our trek.

A bit of a boat ride, a bit of a hike, nothing too crazy after the previous day's debacle, and we met up with my dad for the catamaran ride back to the van. We found my mom next to a fire, happily reading her book after a full day of riding. Wonderful day, in spite of the clouds still drizzling rain and snow on the towers.

Our last day at the lodge was the weather we had been hoping for all along. Crystal clear, pretty much. My parents went for a pre-breakfast hike to get a few of the towers, which was unfortunately a failure. I went on a morning hike to the climbing wall to check it out.

We had talked about climbing it if the weather was good, and the weather was good, so I decided to scout it out. Unfortunately, there was a red fox guarding a cubby den of 3 or 4 baby foxes. Mr. Fox was not happy to see me. He didn't even say hello, in fact, he was quite rude. But the baby foxes were pretty curious. The morning was beautiful, I climbed around to the top of the boulder to sit and watch the incredible view play out over the steppe. Just fantastic. Erin slept in.

So my parents went on a horseride to nearby lake Nordenskjöld while Erin and I made fools of ourselves in front of Mr. Fox and Mr. Owl. It was a pretty complete disaster. We walked up to the top of the rock, noticing an owl swoop out of the rock face we were going to be climbing. It scared the bejeebus out of us. Especially the fact that it just stared at us, not moving. Now, I've always though of owls as nocturnal, enjoying the night just like bats, spiders, werewolves and vampire do. So to see it in the day was unusual, I thought. But then again, we're in nature, right, so it's bound to be normal. So we keep climbing up to the top, get the rope all situated, hook it into a top rope anchor, then toss the rope over the edge. We hike back down and around. The rope didn't reach the bottom of the rock face, it got caught up in the shrubs.

So I hike back up, try to untangle the rope and can't. I hike back down to get my harness, because I'm just going to rappel down the rockface to undo the tangle of ropes. I hike back up the boulder, harness in, start rappelling down the face, untangling the rope as I go. I get about halfway down and notice that there are five magellanic horned owls looking up at me. I'm guessing it was Mr. Owl, Mrs. Owl, and their three baby owlettes, Teddy, Gina, and Norma, whom they are very protective of. But at this point, I don't stop to ask names. I'm just thinking, wow, there are five huge flying beasts about 15 feet away from me. When they attack, will they go for my eyes or try to scrap my arm or something? I'm pretty much thinking up defense moves I could use in case the worse happens. Mr. Owl flies away, so I can't see him. I tell Erin to let me know if he's coming in for a swoop. She yells about 3 seconds later, "Swooping!" I'm cursing, trying to get down as fast as possible, all the while Teddy, Gina and Norma are getting a lesson on how to defend a nest using the deadly swoop technique. I get past the nest to the lower portion of the rock face, about 3 feet off the ground after an 80 foot rappel, and a huge knot comes in the rope.

Ugh. Swoop. Untangle. Swoop. Untangle. Get me out of here, I'm done. Of course, at the end, I had to hike back up the boulder to retrieve all the top anchor gear. For not doing any climbing yet, I was pretty exhausted. Luckily, Erin and I could laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. One wall defended by an owl, another wall defended by foxes? You couldn't write this stuff without it being true. We went to a small third wall and actually attempted to climb. It was an failure, to say the least, since neither of us actually made it up the wall. But hey, we certainly walked out of that morning with an experience.

The afternoon drive was also pretty interesting. We arrived at Cerro Negro, an old sheep estancia outside Puerto Natales. Nice little lunch, some good lamb and whatnot, when suddenly this guy from Aruba says, there's smoke outside. We're thinking, well hey, we're on a farm, they burn stuff all the time, maybe it's a smoker or some rubbish pile. Then the Aruba guy goes outside, comes back in and says, the building next door is on fire. Well this certainly requires some investigation. We fill up our glasses of wine and walk outside to see that, yes indeed, the building is on fire. Not just kind of on fire, but REALLY on fire, in the Jerry Bruckheimer or Backdraft style.

There are flames shooting 10 feet out from the windows, going 20 ft high, putting out heat we could feel from a long ways away. The staff said it was the kitchen, raging in a gas fire. They weren't able to turn off the gas to the stoves and ovens before the fire got going, so there was an industrial sized gas container with a massive flame surrounding it. This is not a good situation. We said we're sorry, is there anything we can do? Anything at all? They basically asked us to leave since they had burned down their kitchen cooking us lunch. It was an incredibly sad sight to see, since they were so far out and rural that there wasn't even a firetruck to call. Certainly left with heavy hearts after that.

We reached Punta Arenas, grabbed a quick drink at the sky bar, then crashed hard for the night, waking up at 5am for the flight up to Santiago, which brings us up to now! Whew, that was a long blog! But so much has happened that I had to write about it all. And, of course, there's one final thing to say today.

Merry Christmas!