Our short encounter with ARGENTINA- El Calafate and El Chalten

The crossing into Argentina was fairly smooth, and after 7 hours we arrived in the town of el calafate. The accommodation prices meant that we had to suck it up and go for dorm rooms in a hostel- something we had managed to avoid so far. It wasnt the worst place by far but we were not used to being woken up by people entering and leaving the room late at night or early in the morning.

The tourists that visit Patagonia seem to be mainly either hardcore hikers with their tents and powdered mashed potato, or older people, most likely retired and able to spend money on nice hotels, tours and being fully kitted out with the best hiking attire, including hiking poles which are not actually needed for the short hikes their tours take them on. All the shops and restaurants were similar to UK prices if not higher, which meant we mainly resorted to cooking pasta with slight variations of vegetables at the hostel, which got boring fairly quickly. On the plus side, the wine was still extremely cheap- £1.50 a bottle. Shaaame.

Crazy birds doing crazy neck stretches 

Walking by the lake in El Calafate

Very Important Pup

The main place to visit in el calafate is the perrito morener glacier- about an hours drive from the town. We had seen glaciers before in New Zealand and glimpsed one in Chile, and from what we had seen they were just a big block of grey ice in the distance, so our expectations were not high. 

This glacier was definitely not the same. If you want your mind blown by a massive icy beast this is definitely the place to come. 

They said there would be ice, we paid to see ice....where is it?

Ah that might be it

The glacier and Jonno's hair, both competing for the title of Most Jagged and Unruly

Even the clouds are showing off

Metal walkways let you walk around the glacier, which is actually growing in size compared to all the others we have seen that are shrinking. It is 5km wide, and 74 metres tall. And as you watch it, you can hear the ice groaning and cracking, even seeing parts of it crumble and crash into the water. Seriously nature, you have done well here. We were also entertained by some of the other tourists and their attempts to get the perfect shot or video- one older lady wouldn't let her husband get a cereal bar out of her bag as she was so fixated on getting a video of the glacier breaking. We saw the same couple a few more times over the next few days, and were concerned that he was wasting away after the abuse we witnessed.

Ice ice baby

Videos of the ice breaking- we were not the only ones who were impressed! We hope Jerry got it too!

We also visited a museum of the history of Patagonia, starting from the dinosaurs who lived in the area including the Mylodon and Giganotosaurus, to the first civilisations and how they survived in the harsh and bleak area. At the beginning we were basically given a photocopied textbook of all the information, then had to sit and study it in front of a replica dinosaur.

Wouldn't trust this with a china tea set

We knew from our research that Argentina wasn't going to be a cheap place, but it was only when we had a free afternoon and sat down to plan out route that we realised that our original plan might drain our bank accounts more than we hoped. In the last few years, the economy has been very unstable and the prices of things have been massively inflated. We had wanted to travel back up the continent on the Argentina side, and visiting San Carlos De bariloche, Mendoza, Puerto madryn and Buenos Aires. However, after looking at the bus options, we discovered that each bus journey was going to be around £100 each (totaling around £1,000 for us both for the whole country), for what are apparently awful buses and would involve multiple journeys of 24 hours or more. We also checked flights, but the government puts a tourist tax on these and were also expensive. We spoke to people who had hitchhiked through the country, but we didn't feel this was something we wanted to do. After a frustrating few hours of trying to work a way around it, we came to the reluctant decision that maybe it was better for us to miss out the majority of Argentina for this trip, and to come back when either the exchange rate is more in our favour or when we can do it as a nice holiday rather than trying to work it on a backpacker budget. 

We checked flights and it was far cheaper for us to backtrack to Chile and then take a flight back up to Bolivia, so this is what we decided on. Before then, we could get the bus a little further to El Chalten and spend a few days here, making the most of our short time in Argentina.

Overlooking El Chalten

El Chalten was a 3 hour bus ride away, and is in a national park, which meant that the main activity was hiking.  Amazingly, they didn't charge an entry fee to the area, and also the hikes all started from the town, meaning we didn't have to stick to bus timetables to decide when we started our hikes. Again, we stayed in a dorm room in a hostel, which was overrun by earwig looking bugs, Jonno found one in his coffee and I found one in my bra as I was about to put it on. 

Seeing as we arrived at 11am, we decided to try 2 of the short easy hikes that day- one to a waterfall and the other to some viewpoints with some great views. As we had finished the second hike, I turned the corner and saw people taking pictures of something. Before I knew it an armadillo was heading straight for me- it bumped into my foot, hesitated apologetically for a second and then waddled away before I had a chance to introduce myself.

AHMAGAWD

Please stay and chat!

We had 2 days left and 2 hikes we wanted to do- an 18km 6 hour one to Laguna des Torres and a 20km 8 hour one to Laguna de Los Tres. We decided to start with the shorter one, and even though it was forecast for rain in the middle of the day, there was no clouds in the sky when we started, just a strong wind. After about 5km, we started feeling a few drops of rain but still there were hardly any clouds. By the time we had reached the Lagoon, the weather was do horrific we were struggling to stand upright and had to hide behind a rock with a guy who had been waiting an hour for the weather to improve. The clouds were so thick we couldn't really see the lagoon much. Defeated, we started heading back towards the town, and the further away from the lagoon we got the better the weather, and it was perfect sunshine for the last few kilometres. 

Looks allright..

...Okay maybe a little grey...

#Nofilter, a sight worth a 9km hike

The next day we decided to tackle the long hike. The first 9km were not so bad, until the last kilometre to get to the viewpoint of the Laguna de Los tres, which was a steep scramble up rocks but the views were pretty rewarding at the top.

Hello lagoon

To get back to Punto arenas for our flight to Bolivia, we had to go back the same route, bear hunt style. El chalten to el calafate, same hostel in el calafate, then back to Puerto Natales then back to Punto arenas. We stayed at the same lovely Airbnb for the 24 hours we had in Punto arenas, where the son of the family offered to take us and their other guest on a tour of the city.

Even though we only spent 9 days in Argentina, it seemed like a country worth exploring and we will definitely be planning a return trip to see more in the future! 

Punto Arenas and Puerto Natales

Our flight to Punta Arenas arrived late, and we’d previously informed our Airbnb hosts that we weren’t exactly sure when we’d be there. We did feel a little bad, as our plan was to leave Punta Arenas the following day for Puerto Natales, the gateway town to the Torres del Paine national park, so we’d barely get time to speak to them. Never-the-less, we turned up at night and were greeted exceptionally well by a son and his father who both spoke good English, and delighted in showing us around and getting us settled in, offering us anything we wanted. The stove was more like an Aga oven, constantly on and used to heat up the house from the kitchen outwards. This was great initially as Punta Arenas is much colder than we had been used to, however after a few minutes it was far too hot and impossible to cool down.

De dun de dun, de dun, de dun de dun de dun, de dun de duuuuuuuun, give me your traaash.

The next day we headed out into town to find out where to go book our bus, which would have been considerably easier had Google Maps decided to accurately reflect the location of the bus station. No matter, it had reported two different places, we'd got the wrong one first, we'd simply do a bus crawl of the city. Eventually we did find the correct location, and booked our bus for about 2 hours time. That sounded great until we realised we were about 40 minutes away from the house to go back and get our bags, and still needed to sort out a lunch. Cutting time just a little fine...

From a distance these looked like penguins. They aren't. They're just stupid birds.

This is going to blow your mind but they're not real buildings. I mean, they are but.. You know. 

Once we'd managed to buy stuff and headed back to the house, we immediately began the process of getting our bags down and ready whilst sorting out lunch, figuring if we hurried we should make it in reasonable time. The father however looked at us fairly bemused and offered to give us a lift, which would take about 3 minutes instead of 40, so we graciously accepted. Realising we now had plenty of time instead, he offered to take us around a quick tour of the city, which, as we hadn't had a lot of time, was also really useful. Of course, we quickly found out the city didn't actually have tons to offer, mostly just a couple of viewpoints, a park that freezes over in winter and people skate on it, and a particularly fancy cemetery that we wouldn't have time to visit. Oh well!

There's nothing to do but paint here I don't think

The bus journey was reasonably uneventful, apart from Diana falling asleep and me noticing how similar the landscape was to parts of New Zealand, with rolling hills of sheep along the way. This wouldn't be the last similarity in this region! Our next Airbnb here in Puerto Natales was about 15 minutes walk from the bus station, up and down hills, but eventually we arrived in the correct street in what should have been the correct place, For some reason I couldn't find the number we were looking for. Turned out, the numbers here aren't obviously even on one side and odd the other, just wherever they fancy, so after asking someone where the house we were looking for was I felt a tiny amount of embarrassment upon noticing we were stood just opposite.

The guy greeted us and took us to the back garden, where two small, two storey metal shacks were. Not much to look at from the outside, but our one was very cosy on the inside, and the addition of a washing machine elevated it to godly status. The entire upstairs was a mezzanine for the bedroom, so plenty of room to expand our bags to the full extent of the room. Unfortunately we didn't realise just how much we'd like it, and by the time we decided we'd like another night to relax, it wasn't available.

After settling in we headed down to the hire car company. We'd already prebooked the entire thing over WhatsApp, which is a very odd concept to me, but somewhat common in other countries where a lot of business is handled this way. I mean, it's not like you're going to sue anyone, so there's no need for formal measures, right? Anyway, we turned up and the lady (who fortunately spoke very good English because the small print of hiring a car is a little beyond my grasp of Spanish) confirmed everything was in order, and she'd drop off the car at our house the following morning, which was handy.

Sure enough, the following morning at 8am appeared a little red Nissan 'Tiida'. We were given a few words of advice:

• Always wear your seatbelts
• Pull over if a big car wants to overtake because they get over confident.
• Before turning on the air conditioning, open the windows. Because dust.
• If you see a puma, make yourself big

All great advice. The day before we'd been to a tourist office who advised us that practically all the useful roads were closed, but we could use one up to around 10am. Fair enough, we set off. Fortunately driving in this region of Chile couldn't be easier, there were practically no cars on the road outside of town (and even within were pretty sparse). The only difficulty was the annoying way roads were set up in most of South America, all in a grid system with one way roads. This was fine unless you had a specific road to get to, when you'd find you'd have to drive a few roads in the wrong direction just to be able to pick up a one way road going the way you need to go. Sat nav was most useful here...

Our little red car when it was still a little clean!

It turned out the road closure was a lot more permanent than had been implied, as it was clearly unavailable at 8.30am, let alone 10am, for every day we went past. The road usually would be a circular route, however with this road closed, we had no option but to go the longest way. As such, we planned our days so that our first day we drove as far into the park as we could, so as we didn't go back on ourselves too much the next days. The road surface was terrible, beyond the park entrance it was entirely unpaved, to the point I was a little concerned I was going to destroy the car with a combination of gravel, potholes and ditches. It's safe to say this was not a 4x4.

OH. MATE. YOUR ROAD IS SHIT.

... And even when it's not it's full of guanacos

Our first stop (officially anyway, the park was far too picturesque to find ourselves not stopping constantly) was Lago Gray, a lake, which, as you may imagine, was pretty grey. The star of the show was a glacier in the distance. Our day was a little too foggy to make anything out particularly, however the region had a surprise for us as we rounded a corner and found ourselves greeted by a particularly large ice cube.

You're spoiling the bloody view!

Said something silly like half a person at a time. Advice duly ignored.

See the blob at the back? Yep, you guessed it, glacier. You can get a boat to it and have some of the ice in some whiskey if you're a multisquillionaire.

Someone's smurf melted :(

This particular ninja did not care.

It definitely lived up to it's grey namesake

We took the rest of the day to slowly drive back, stopping and taking in some of the views. The following day we planned to do the hike (yay) to the Torres, an 8 hour round trip which would inevitably be great fun. The drive was about 1.5 hours each way, so I was looking at a good 11 hours driving and walking. I could hardly wait!

Bloody hell, flamin'-goes!

Coming in to land!

Fortunately I didn't have to wait too long. Soon enough we had begun the walk, parking up near a visitor center and looking into the distance, where the path went from perfectly flat to practically vertical. Along we way we spotted some sort of fox thing (I'm not a foxiologist so I can't say exactly what type) but what I can tell you is that it was possibly the itchiest thing we'd met so far, as it didn't take so much as a second out of it's busy scratching schedule to say hello. We carried on.

Rude, fox. Rude. This has been noted.

Hmm... We're going up there...

The walk started off perfectly flat, became extremely steep very quickly, flattened off again on approach to a base camp and then in the last kilometre or so became an almost straight up. As such, it was absolutely fine up as far as the first base camp. Here we saw a huge bird thing, which landed within just a few feet of us, however some guy didn't seem to realise this could be a shared experience and proceeded to get within a few millimeters of it to take a photo. It's safe to say the bird was a little miffed about this and quickly flew away, so uh, cheers for that? One day they'll develop a way to make cameras zoom in, but until that day we'll just have to get within sniffing distance I guess.

This is what the bird looked like before we had to surgically remove a human from it

We carried on, past one more base camp signalling our demise. Eventually though, we made it to the top, where we were greeted by a pond and three big stones. Woohoo!

Alright it was a little more impressive than that, but by now I was pretty knackered and the wind was so strong we found ourselves having to cower under a rock for lunch for fear of being blown away. It could have been a little more magical if there weren't 8.5 billion people here. Yes, that's right, the entire population of the earth (and a little bit borrowed from another planet) had congregated here by the time we arrived, so we made our exit, which was getting more and more difficult as there were now another 12.6 billion people trying to climb up. We figured it was because of how people usually do this national park - where we had decided to do three trips to and from Puerto Natales so we could have a nice comfy bed, heating, kitchen etc, the majority of people did the entire park over a 5-10 day walk, with tents and discomfort and waking up with icicles on their faces. As such, we'd arrived at the time the masses were migrating from their previous camps, but eventually we battled past all 3.14 trillion people to get back to the first camp, when it was pretty quiet again.

Where'd you all come from?!?

Funny native ostrich things

A wild doduo appeared!

Aching profusely (I don't even know if that means anything) we headed out again the following day for a slightly less involved day, picking up some of the shorter walks along the way (maximum of a couple of hours this time).

We're taking the hobbits to Isengard...!

I'm not ashamed to admit I took way too many photos around here....

Crazy vulture storm!

This gave us time to use the car to run some errands in the afternoon before we had to return it, picking up shopping and buying our bus tickets the following day to El Calafate in Argentina. We did ask them if they wanted the car cleaned before we returned it, as our little red car was now a light brown, but we got away with that. They also didn't do any close examination on the suspension thankfully, as I'm pretty sure there wasn't any left by the time we were done. Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of time left to relax as our bus the next morning was at 7am, so after a very groggy start we set off to our next country, Argentina.