Traveling on the Horizon

I’ve been kind of dormant lately in terms of traveling, but that will change soon. My status with the DNI is still unclear, and my tourist visa on my American passport is running close to its second month, giving me one more month to hop the border to Uruguay. While I could risk staying over the limit and paying a fine or trying to find the right government office and dealing with more red tape to simply get a visa extension, I think I might just suck it up and use it as an excuse to go to Montevideo for a weekend.

It will probably cost about the same amount as a visa extension or fine anyway, but will at least get me out of the city for a couple of days and traveling again. I haven’t been to Montevideo in almost two years, when I spent my senior year spring break volunteering by building houses in the slums outside the city. As I remember, it was similar to Buenos Aires, though much smaller. Another option would be a day trip to a small town in Uruguay called Carmelo, where you basically go to get away from the stress of Buenos Aires, much like with Tigre. Either way, I don’t feel like using another trip to Uruguay to go to Colonia.

Then in January I’ll really be hitting the road, though in a different way than I’m used to doing so. My parents will be visiting Argentina and I’m going to be traveling with them throughout Patagonia. Though we used to take family vacations, the majority of my travels have been with friends or alone, roughing it as a backpacker. With my parents, we’ll be staying in luxury estancias and renting a car to drive long distances. We’ll see if we don’t go crazy after 12 hours in the car with each other.

First there will be just a short night in Buenos Aires, and then we’ll fly to Trelew and Peninsula Valdes. We’ll start driving from there down the coast of Patagonia, hitting up penguin colonies along the way and passing through Bahía Bustamante, Monte Leon, and on down to Calafate with the glaciers. Continuing on to Chaltén, with Mount Fitz Roy as a backdrop, and then flying to Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego. Once we’ve reached the end of the world we’ll be flying back up to Buenos Aires.

This is a huge trip, encompassing so much of the country in a short amount of time. Even with that being said, we’ll be traveling about two weeks. So throughout that time I’ll be working on writing about what we’ve been doing, taking (hopefully) amazing photos of Patagonia, and producing videos as well which I’ll be uploading to YouTube and then this blog. So keep checking in to Travel Guy throughout January and into February for updates on where we are in Argentina.