Mountains

After camping for one night then moving to a large fancy hostel for another, we moved for our final time in El Chalten by marching up the hill through pouring rain with our bags after a 20k walk. We are now in Hostel Kraiken which is a small house with only 3 four bed dorms, run by middle-older aged Miguel who can't understand what I'm saying when I speak Spanish.

It's lovely here because straight away it felt like being in a home. I definitely prefer the smaller hostels because everyone interacts and it's so much more comfortable and relaxed! In the larger ones people tend to ignore each other.

Two things that are particularly distinctive about El Chalten:

1) no vegetables in any of the supermarkets. It's abysmal. They have onions, potatoes and mouldy lettuce and the rest of the veg aisle is empty. There is one delivery a week and everyone descends on the supermarkets to buy their carrots and courgettes.

2) if shops don't have change for your money then they give you sweets instead of pesos. Tasty but just so not equivalent! I now have a collection of starburst-style sweets in my purse.

So we have done quite a few walks which is kind of the point of el Chalten. All the paths are well marked and really accessible.

Laguna Torres: about 7 hours of Carmen basically running and me trying to keep up, walking through beautiful forests with twisted broken trees. The path then opened up into a huge plain dotted with smaller, neater vegetation, framed by two mountains and a beautiful glacier creaking down towards us. We headed towards this glacier and eventually to a lagoon at its base, the high wind spitting up the pool's water into our faces. Bits of the glacier were bobbing about in the lagoon and melting in the sun. We sat and ate our ridiculous lunch of bread and a tin of tuna (scooping the tuna out with our hands), took a million photos and watched a little fox prowling for food scraps. We met a guy from Madrid, Fernando, with a bright yellow raincoat and spent a long time trying to hit a bobbing ice lump with stones.

Laguna de los tres: the longest trek of our trip, we left early in the morning and returned maybe 9 hours later. This walk had an amazing view of the most famous peak in the area, Mount Fitzroy- jagged like grey broken glass sticking up into the sky. The sun was hot and the clouds stayed away from the peak on our way to its base, allowing us to stare at it from various rocky outcrops on our way up. The wind blew my sunglasses into the eddy of an icy but beautifully clear and drinkable glacier stream, and after some tentative poking with trekking poles an American man risked frostbite and fetched them for me. The last kilometre of the 20k walk was extremely steep, like climbing stairs made of boulders, with a panoramic view opening up behind us of the river and valley below. At the top we were rewarded with a lovely lagoon at the base of another glacier, and a second lagoon, crater-like into the base of the mountain that could only be found with mild exploration. Small waterfalls ran off the glacier, skittering over the rock into the pool. We peered over the edge of an outcrop, trying not to be blown in and to our deaths by the ridiculous wind. On the way back we walked past a girl with a tiny kitten with a bell round its neck.

Chorillo de salta waterfall: we finally had a lie in and met with Atsuo, a 41 year old Japanese 'world tripper' from Rayuela who had also come to El Chalten, and walked the sunny 3km to the waterfall, picking dandelions and making chains along the way. I tried to explain to Atsuo the phrase 'makes sense' and failed. We had empanadas from Che Empanada (we are making them millionaires) on the grassy bank. We bumped into yellow raincoat again as he came down the path, and tried to not be too excitable about having a new fwend. That evening Carmen and I took a beer up the hill next to our hostel to look over the town and mountains as darkness fell.

Miradors Condorres and Las Aguilas: two easy walks up to viewpoints where we saw four soaring condors. Las Aguilas was particularly spectacular with a view of the mountains behind and the road out of El Chalten ahead, stretching out into the flat plains towards a large turquoise lake.

On our last night we met Ben, a Swiss engineering intern temporarily from Buenos Aires, at the hostel and bonded quickly over my shock at the fact he had vegetables in his meal (he brought them from El Calafate, go figure). We went for a beer and chips, followed by more beer and popcorn in Mitos, a little warm wooden bar decorated with Bob Marley pictures and rainbow paint. We discussed the craziest things we had ever done and realised we weren't very crazy (I knew this already)

Pic 2- Laguna Torres
Pic 4- view of Fitzroy on walk to Lago De Los tres
Pic 5- LDLT
6- our enormous shared steak dinner post LDLT.Read more