Click on any image for slideshow; read on below for text.

As I shall shortly be relocating to house #2 in northern Patagonia and planning a long trip south to visit weird and wonderful places I thought I’d get this blog up and running again. In case you were wondering where in the world house #2 (or even Patagonia is) here’s a map [above].

Here it is again in Google maps: just to give me a chance to play with a new plugin!

 

It’s not as if I don’t have a blog already, in fact I have installed and then stalled quite a few over the years – these occasionally remind me of their existence when some spammer decides to comment, but lately even the spammers have been giving them a cold shoulder. Perhaps they know something I don’t.

But as I have recently taken up both photography and birding –you have to do something when you reach retirement, and it gets me out of the house– an occasional blog used for ramblings, both of the literal and figurative kind, seemed timely. Other blogs have been dedicated to my writing, such as it is, and I have always been so traumatised regarding the quality of my output that these are anonymous and hidden away from the world. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but hey, I might just try publishing a little something here too under my own name, if the will, the energy and sufficient courage ever come into alignment at a propitious moment. We’ll see.

My planned trip will figure prominently here, and has been the main stimulus for reactivating a public blog. It will see me on the road (and off road too) for a good month as I head to the bottom of the South American continent tracing the original line of the famous Route 40 from home in San Martín de los Andes south to Ushuiaia (yes, I do know it stops in Cabo Virgenes but I’ll go all the way south) and then back up the Atlantic coast on the Route 3 as far as Trelew, whence I shall turn eastwards to Esquel and back home.

I’ve planned about 35 days but may take longer, and have hopes of doing a daily blog, internet connection permitting. My main interests during the trip, apart from birds and photography that is, will be the spectacular scenery, looking for traces of early explorers and scientists (Drake, Magellan, Darwin, etc.) and looking closely at the Welsh colonisation and what remains of the Welsh community today. Not to mention a whole bunch of wild life: it will be breeding season for whales and penguins, and there’s any number of other marine and land mammals to hunt with my camera. Incidentally, there is another part of the Route 40 to travel, up to the border with Bolivia, which I fully intend to do but that will have to wait until 2015.

All that is to come: I plan to start in November and hope to keep a daily record; until then, I’ll find other things to talk about here. So, if you have stumbled upon this page, welcome, and if you have an interest in any of these things mentioned here then please feel free to comment.