Petrified

I am going back north and I am going fast.

I left Ushaia at 5 in the morning and in 4 consecutive bus rides I found myself, 29 hours later, in Sarmiento, a wind-swept little bore of a town in the middle of Patagonia. To make things clear, "Patagonia" is the collective name for roughly everything south of Argentina´s and Chile´s halfway line. It is truly huge. Almost 30 hours by bus brought me across half of it. Incidentally, the same trip down along the Andes to Ushaia took me almost a month :-D

Yes, I am going back north and I am going fast.

But I did want to stop and see the "petrified forests". I had as little clue as you probably have about what that actually is, but it sounds interesting, right ? Well, there wasn´t really a "forest" as such; more a number of petrified logs, but lying around a truly amazing landscape. The trees were petrified because of the immense volcanic activity that accompanied the forming of the Andes, 70 million years ago - and me thinking I saw a really old 3000 years old tree.

These ones were dead of course, but the whole site felt like something from millions of years in another time. A ferocious wind was blowing constantly across the multicoloured mountains with the logs lying around. I was expecting dinosaurs around the corner at any time, but I didn´t get that lucky.


I am already (after another 8 hours) in the next place, Trelew (pronounce tre-LAY-oo), finally enjoying a bit of warmth again. The cold of the south has been swapped in for a nice 22 degrees. Good weather to see some marine animals ... but more on that later. Don´t go away !