3 months late...

A quick summary seeing as this blog is three months late.

Flew into Buenos Aires on 26th December 2010 on a one way ticket for a climbing trip through South America for as long as I can afford.

Places I have climbed so far:
Ushuaia - Boring, no climbing, airport on an island.
Route 40 to El Chalten - flat, desolate, stupidly hot and windy, neverending road.
El Chalten - home of Fitz Roy, Cerro Torre and other crazy mountains. Even windier than Route 40, pleanty of trashed tents. Cragging fairly poor, crumbly rock.
Piedra padra - Cool big rock in the middle of nowhere, nice river to swim and wash in. Canyon way too hot to climb in the day. Mostly sport routes.

Frey - Incredible. Multipitch alpine trad climbing on perfect granite cracks. Sudafrican on Vieja is an awesome route, 150 meters (ish), 6a+ runout crack with fingers, hands, offwidth, roof, everything. Missed out on 'Lost fingers', a perfect, steep finger crack that tops out on Aguja Frey in front pf the Refugio. Next time... Big hike in from Bariloche with 25kg pack full of climbing gear for 13 nights, with 1.5 hour walk-ins to routes each day over boulder fields and scree slopes, sometimes 1000 meters of ascent just to get to the base of the route, all over scree and boulders. Completely knackering, but awesome place. Vino Toro cartons featured highly on snow/rain days.

Cochamo - Also incredible. Often called 'the undeveloped Yosemite'. Valley surrounded by huge 1000 meter granite bigwalls. Alot of flaring cracks. Could have done with doing a season in Yosemite first then coming here as a lot of the stuff was a bit above me. Could also have done with a set of micros and offset cams. Climbed my first big wall, 'EZ does it' - 5.10d/6b topping out on Trinidad after 11 hours of climbing. 400ish meters route. Hardest lead to date, completely draining 55 meter crack pitch. Also failed on the new German route 'the Gruntler' after getting to an overhung dihedral offwidth crack with no big cams to protect it on the 4th pitch. Two rescues and helicopter callouts in two days. One being Vicky after taking a falling rock in the back and braking 3 vertebrea. Hero. Pictures to follow...

Valle Los Condores. - Nice undeveloped singlepitch granite. Only spent 4 days here but could have spent a lot longer to clean some routes and put up some nome new stuff.

Pichelemu - Took a few days away from the truck to go and surf and chill out on the beach for a rest from climbingnat Pichelemu, Chile's top surf spot about 5 hours south of Santiago. Planning on bivvying on the beach for 3 nights after going out for beers in the town. Got off the bus at about 8.30pm ready for party time and the place was completely dead, absolutely nothing open. The town was abandoned and the beach shut and patrolled by the police because of Tsunami warning. Brilliant. Slept in a school set up as an emergency centre... Next day, hired boards and went surfing. Far too big for me, got crushed and thought I was going to drown and get swept to the Philipines.

Mendoza - Nice city, only spent a few nights here. Cities are boring and hard to find anything in if they are too big. Mendoza is the home of Argentinian red wine and steak though, so steak and red wine for dinner, followed by steak and red wine for lunch the next, then steak and red wine for dinner that night was an obvious choice. Then out to La Ola for more climbing. All sport unfortunately.

Other highlights - penguins at Punta Arenas, hippy comune at El Boson, town full of cowboys wearing spurs and chaps - Banos Morales, Cajon de Maipu.

Sorry if you are reading this and thinking its boring, my plan of writing a diary failed so this is the next best thing so I don't forget everything...