Journey to Patagonia. Part 1.

I had been planning a trip to Patagonia for quite a long time, but due to its difficult organization and complicated logistics, I couldn't get around to it..

One of my unplanned meetings with Sanya Nikonov, the head of Rusmotravel, helped me fulfill another of my dreams.

- And we are planning a Patagonia trip next year, we did our first one this winter - it went great. Why don't you come with us? - he suddenly offered.

I very rarely go on tours organized by someone, and even with an unfamiliar company. But this time I agreed, I really didn't want to do all this planning, looking for a motorcycle, booking hotels, etc. myself. Moreover, you need to start all this a year before the trip, no later.

The year flew by quickly and now I'm sitting in an armchair, looking out the window of an airplane, under the silver wing of which snow-covered plains, mountains, seas, deserts and oceans are passing.

Four flights with a total duration of more than a day to Osorno, a small town in Chile, from where this adventure in Patagonia should begin. The finish line is in the very south of the Latin American continent in the city of Puento Arenas.

And on the way, I decided to stop for a day in one of the largest megacities in the world — Sao Paulo. This is Brazil, if anything.

This is my first time here, too, so I'll take a peek at a country "where there are a lot of wild monkeys."

A city I wouldn't want to live in.

I didn't like San Paolo, a huge metropolis with a population about the same as in Moscow.

All in all, it didn't make a particularly favorable impression on me. Some kind of urban jungle of glass and concrete.

Not always clean, not cozy, with huge numbers of homeless people and drug addicts sleeping on cardboards right on the sidewalks.

Sure, there are fashionable neighborhoods, wide avenues, and great restaurants, but that's in every metropolis on every континенте.

In one day, we walked 12 km with a wonderful guide Katya, rode the subway and bus, climbed a high-rise observation deck, walked along central avenues and slums, stepping over homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks, had lunch in a decent restaurant and visited two museums and one bar.

An eventful, interesting day!

Sao Paulo.

There are many interesting and unusual places in the glass-concrete jungle of Sao Paulo, which you will enjoy visiting..

One of them is the area of Vila Madalena, famous for its fantastic graffiti drawings on the walls of houses and fences. Actually, this kind of art is widespread throughout Latin America, but I have never seen such a scale anywhere.

Huge murals, hundreds of square meters in size, adorn skyscrapers throughout the city, but there are небольшие улицы, напоминающие скорее выставку достижений лучших художников этого стиля.

It feels like walking through an art gallery of modern art. Only these paintings can be touched, some of them can be used to sit or even lie down. And in between, to digest the impressions, you can go to any of the many bars and drink a mug of cold beer.

That's great!

Chile.

I flew into Santiago for only one day. I had one domestic flight left to Osorno, a small town a thousand kilometers south of the capital, and then my journey would continue by motorcycle.

There wasn't much time, but a walk around the center of the metropolis was a mandatory minimum.

Santiago is home to a third of Chile's population, over 6 million people, about the same as St. Petersburg.

Сложно составить полноценное представление о таком огромном городе за несколько часов пешей прогулки по It's hard to get a full picture of such a huge city in a few hours of walking around the center. But the first impression is quite positive. Santiago is not as dirty and criminal as Sao Paulo. There are homeless people, but they are much less. The development is chaotic, historical buildings are surrounded by skyscrapers, there is not much greenery, only in small parks.

There are wide pedestrian streets in the center, sellers of all sorts of useful and not so useful things have laid out their wares, street musicians and singers are also trying to earn a penny by entertaining the walking public to the best of their talent.

There are many different coffee shops and fast food outlets with an unassuming assortment of food. In general, it's a common picture for a big city, I didn't find anything so amazing and unusual here.

I'm flying south and I hope it will be more interesting.

Patagonia.

Our journey through Patagonia begins in the small town of Osorno.

Here we get motorcycles rented a year before the trip, on which we have to ride for 18 days about 4 thousand kilometers to the city of Ushuaia - another edge of the earth.

Why did I decide to go on this particular trip?

Firstly, because of the beautiful and mysterious name of this area, familiar to us from Jules Verne's book "The Children of Captain Grant" and the film of the same name.))

Just kidding.

Secondly, it is an opportunity to visit several countries at once, where I have not been yet.

Thirdly, just to enjoy a little adventure and enjoy the unusual and, hopefully, very beautiful views of nature, to see with your own eyes how people live on the opposite side of our planet.

Let's go!