In 17 days I made the trip down to the southern most tip of the south American continent and back, a trip that would be, by air, roughly equal to traveling from Austin, Texas, to the northern border of Saskatchewan Province, Canada, and back, but, because of the generally lack of abundance of decisions when it comes to choosing a route southern through the mostly uninhabited Patagonia, the trip nearly ended up booking a mileage comparable to driving Austin, Texas to the northern most coast of all of Canada and back.
Needless to say, that's a lot of terrain to cover, and in that time I saw changes in extremes, from the more or less hot and arid plains of Córdoba to snow falling on the pine and juniper covered slopes of the Andes mountains that anchored the Perito Moreno glacier in place, and eventually to the cold but swampy marshes that lay at the foot of the Andes in Tierra del Fuego national park at the end of the Pan-American highway.
From Córdoba, we kicked off our trip with a strong start on a double-decker bus, booked nearly 40 hours of straight driving, and headed south about 11°60' of latitude - a change almost equal to that between Austin and the northern tip of Lake Michigan. The thing about driving in Patagonia, as I've found, is that a double-decker bus goes considerably slower on gravel roads, and at many times we would head for hours at a time at just 30 or 40 km an hour until coming to an improved road.
I slept that first night on the floor of the bus, because somehow a friend and I couldn't find an open seat. Plus I had thought that sleeping flat on the floor would be more significantly comfortable than sleeping upright in a chair, though I was proved wrong when I found that it required quite some maneuvering just to turn over and then woke up with gum in my hair (which I had to cut out). Regardless, waking up that morning I caught one of the most stunning terrain changes that I'd ever seen. No doubt, it was so amazing only because it took place within the first 24 hours of the trip, as after 17 days on a bus incredible terrain changes between mountains and glaciers and thousand meter high lakes become more or less normal and you being to stop making note, but that morning I woke up to some of the most barren land I have ever seen, topped only by West Texas. For as far as could be seen there was not a single tree nor a single hill, only 1 or two foot tall greenish brown scrub popping out of the yellow mossy-looking grass. Land that empty somehow surpassed being 'boring' and went full circle to 'interesting' again, because its sheer lack of content just seemed unbelievable. The most exciting changes in scenery during that drive were the few times when a herd of wild llamas happened to be galloping (that word totally overstates the manner in which llamas run) near the route.
Eventually we arrived in Puerto Pirámides, where we had to scramble to board our whale-watching boat after learning that the port would be closed the next day, our original planed time for the activity. The waters on which we traveled were all in themselves different than anything I had ever seen. Quite distinct from both the brownish-sometimes-bluish waters of Texas coast, the light blue of the Florida Keys, or the solid grayish blue of the Californian coast, this water was nearly a dark and solid black with a hint of a dark dark blue, and just by looking you could tell that it was god-awful cold. The sky was just a perpetual grey, and didn't really contrast much with the grayish brown cliffs, totally void of trees, or the dark colorless water. The whales themselves were cool, but weren't as willing to show themselves as I would have liked. We saw many tails and blowholes, but never the entire body of the whale propelled out of the water as I sort of had expected.
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