Travels to Middle Earth

Yesterday we departed El Calafate on the bus for El Chantel which is about a 1.5 hour bus ride away. El Chantel. Chantel is located in the Glacier Ntl park and it is a hiking, trekking, climbing centre due to its proximity to Cerro Torre and Mount Fitz Roy. Mount Fitz Roy is probably familiar to everyone as its silhouette is the emblem for Patagonia clothing. The buses here are all double Decker and as I had booked ahead in advance we had the front row seats on the top of the bus. It gave us a very good view of the countryside. I think Cheryl and I were the oldest people on the bus as it struck me as mainly young backpackers. The first part of the trip was through the Patagonia Steppe, think desert like grasslands with few trees mainly given over to large cattle and sheep farms. We did see some wildlife from the bus including guanacos and ostriches. Guanacos are a form of camilid like a llama. Very sparsely inhabited. We saw some bike packers biking against the wind. It looked like hard work. The other excitement provided by the trip was passing other buses. The highway was very narrow with almost no shoulder so when the buses passed they were extremely close. So close that at times we thought we were going to collide with the other bus. I include a video.

Initially the trip went north but then we turned westward and we caught our initial view of the Fitz Roy mountains. That's when I started to get the feeling of being Bilbo Baggins from Lord of the Rings. The mountains here look different than the Rockies as they have spires on them which gives them a foreign exotic feeling. Like mountains that you would see in Middle Earth and Lord of the Rings.

We were dropped off at the bus station and wheeled our rolling luggage through the small village of 4000 people to our Air BNB on the north part of town.Leggi altro