El Chalten

Day 68 – Go for a walk today, please

Our bus from El Calafate to El Chalten left around lunch time and stopped halfway at Hotel La Leona, an old tea house and lodging crouched behind a stand of trees (the only trees for miles around). According to the news clippings on the wall, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out here after they robbed the bank in Rio Gallegos.

Bus window scenery - dry earth and blue lakes with the Andes far in the distance.

Like the roof says – Hotel La Leona.

Put simply, a long way from everywhere.

Parque Nacional los Glaciares – Cerro Torre (L) and Cerro Fitzroy (R)

When the bus arrived in El Chalten we stopped at the park office and were split into groups by language. One of the rangers then gave us an introduction to the park, explaining the main walks and campgrounds, details about endangered animals and important rules and requests. As a parting comment she mentioned that it was the fist time in more than a month that they had been able to see Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitzroy from town (as pictured above) and ended her talk with a plea: “Go, for-a-walk, today, PLEASE” urging us to take advantage of the weather and squeeze a walk in before it got dark.

We took her advice, quickly checking in to our hostel and heading straight back out to the Cerro Torre lookout. The walk was supposed to be one and a half hours each way which would get us back about an hour before dark. In reality it took us nowhere near that long and we got back with heaps of light to spare.

The mountains from the park headquarters (they take exchange rangers Mum but the weather would make the Otways look like Fraser Island).

El Chalten trying to hide from the wind in a little valley.

Cerro Torre again, this time from a bit closer.

T-shirt weather, first time in three weeks!

Back in town we headed out for dinner to the brewpub near to the hostel. Again the beer was good and this time the grub and atmosphere were on the mark too. In addition to the main course and beers we ordered, we were given peanuts, popcorn, nibbles with a spicy carrot dip and a little cup of vegetable soup, quite good value in the end. And to top if off we got a tour of the microbrewery!

I want one!

Day 69 – Ever changing plans

In the morning I sat down to write an email to our parents explaining that we were about to head bush again and would be out of contact for a little while. In doing so I tried to put together a little plan of what we would be doing and in the process stumbled upon a town festival in a town we were due to pass through in the coming days. The only problem was that the internet wouldn’t give me the precise dates (and El Chalten shares one satellite link making the internet about as speedy as the nearby glaciers), so I had to go make some phone calls to assorted places in nearby southern Chile to determine the dates.

After a seemingly never-ending series of changed numbers, disconnected lines and uninformed people, I eventually managed to determine that festival was over the coming weekend. By the time I got back to the hostel from the phone place the wind was howling and mountains had disappeared behind heavy cloud and it had started to spit. So we decided to skip a couple of day of walking through cloud and wind in favour of leaving El Chalten in time to get to Villa Cerro Castillo in time for the weekends festival.

Our plan was to leave town by hitchhiking 40km north of town to the end of the road (there are two buses a day but we’d missed them), walk around Lago del Desierto (there’s a ferry but it’s expensive and we’re cheap, and it meets the buses we’d already missed), camp on the north shore of the lake where we could get an Argentinean exit stamp, hike over the border the next day to the shore of Lago O’Higgins where we could get a Chilean entry stamp and finally catch a severely overpriced ferry the final 40km to Villa O’Higgins at the southern end of the road in Chile. So with that plan in time we hit one of El Chalten’s pitifully understocked supermarkets to get provisions.

By the time we got out of the supermarket it was pouring rain (sideways because of the wind). So huddled in the hostel with everyone else who didn’t fancy being outdoors, we contemplated the prospect of going to stand by the road trying to thumb a ride on one of the remotest roads in the country, and in the afternoon. Hence change in plan number two, we’d wait until the morning, we had a bit of time up our sleeves because the ferry on Chilean side of the border is apparently not running to the published schedule anyway.

Unfortunately the nice hostel we were in was booked out for the night, but they found us somewhere to move to, which turned out to be one of the town’s climbers’ hangouts. The hostel was surrounded by tents, there was a slackline down the side, an impromptu band had formed under the shelter of the front porch and the modestly sized kitchen and living areas were packed with climbers and hikers waiting for the weather to clear. Like the climbers at Campamento Britanico they’d been waiting a while.

To Erin’s delight the hostel also had a tough looking pet bulldog named ‘Tango’. Now that I look through the photos from our remaining time in El Chalten about 90% of the photos are of Tango. He walked and looked like we was about 15 years old, but he turned out to be only two. Whenever he had his rope in his mouth he growled just like Mutley, but most of the time he just occupied prime position in front of the heater.

Where the mountains should be (from Park HQ again -compare above!).

Tango inside guarding the fireplace.

Then some outside guard dog work.

That night we made friends with a group of young Israelis on their big trip after military service and had some fun learning some new card and drinking games!

In the middle of the night, Erin woke up with a sore lip and cheek, which by morning had puffed up so badly she had Angelina Jolie lips! It turns out her night was rather sleepless after perhaps a spider bite to her face and other assorted bite marks on her arms and back. I slept through it all.

Day 70 – A diminishing tolerance for wind and rain and an increasing prevalence of same…

Erin with a puffy face and now breaking out in a rash and the weather still uninspiring, another change of plans was at foot. We’d discovered the existence of a bus that would take us 600km toward our destination for half the price of the aforementioned 40km ferry trip. The only problem was that it wasn’t until the night after next. So we set about killing some time.

That afternoon we went to park headquarters and watched a film about the ascent of one of the peaks from the nearby Hielo Sur (Southern Icecap, part of the world’s third largest continental icecap after Antarctica and Greenland). Then I found a biography of radio and television pioneer David Starnoff which I set about trying to finish before the bus. Thrilling stuff I know, but El Chalten is one of Argentina’s newest settlements and there aren’t many options except for climbing and hiking. The town was actually founded during the 90’s to solidify Argentina’s claim to one of the last bits of territory disputed with nearby Chile. But it’s quickly become an outdoor hub, Andrew said it reminded him of Natimuk, and according to some of the other climbers at the hostel some pretty famous climbers were seeing out the northern hemisphere winter in marginally less wintery El Chalten.

A boat and a chapel of course.

Day 71 – How do people live here?

The weather had not really improved any, the wind especially relentless. It would drive me insane living here, at least when the weather in Melbourne is bad you can look forward to nice days over spring and summer. Here it’s freezing cold all winter and then even when there is a nice day in summer, which doesn’t seem to happen that often, the wind is relentless and puddles quick to turn to dust.

Weather aside, our day was pretty uneventful, we watched another film, this time about the fist ascent of Cerro Fitz Roy. Just before midnight our bus set off across the barren Argentinean antiplano, and we spent the night tyring to get some sleep while the bus slowly crawled up the corrugated and potholed Ruta 40.

Tango playing with puppy friend Rocky.