El Chalten - Disneyland for hikers

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Getting to El Chalten isn't that easy. You have to fly to El Calafate and get a bus. Sounds easy, but it isn't. We get picked up at the airport by a cool dude with long hair along with 6 others including an Aussie couple who tell us stories about having stuff stolen from their hotel safe in Columbia and the black market for money exchange in Venezuala - which makes us glad we didn’t visit either of those places. Also on the bus was a crazy Indian woman who wanted me to fix her broken watch, take a photo of a particular cloud and hounded the cool dude about whether lunch would be included on her tour.

We were dropped into town to explore for a couple of hours before our 6pm bus to El Chalten, a rough four hour bus trip due to the fact that the roads are not made and there are detours as the roads are slowly being paved. While it wasn’t cold in El Calafate, the 100km/h winds ripping up the dusty roads in our faces as we walked down the main street was less than pleasant. So we spent most of it sitting in a cafe. It was easy enough to get on the bus and the trip wasn’t that bad. We stop half way in the middle of nowhere (actually there is nothing most of the way), no houses, no towns, no life at all - this was barren Patagonia, almost uninhabitable. There is a cafe half way, deliberately placed to capture the tourist busses going back and forth from between the two distant towns and we oblige by paying $3.50 for a can of Pepsi. As we continue our drive the sun finally starts to set just before we arrive at 10pm, with a fascinating purple colour on the surrounding snow capped mountains.

El Chalten is a very small town but fast growing as evidenced by the extensive construction works that were taking place. Many locals are concerned that the town will lose its charm as a result. The main street is the only paved road so it is a dust bowl of a town built in a valley and sheltered by a very large cliff fact to the west. Our hotel is just 50m from the main street. Our room is small with no TV and very hot for some reason. We quickly realise that El Chalten is all about hiking.

We wake up to a beautiful morning, not a cloud in the sky and warm for Patagonia. We get lost finding the tourist office but eventually get there and get maps - we then get water and snacks for the very long walks that await us. We then proceed to get lost for about half an hour trying to find the start of the walk to Laguna Torre. I am cursing the lack of street signs and now hate El Chalten. We eventually find the start point and make our way to Laguna Torre at noon in the surprisingly hot sun.

The walk is beautiful as we follow the streams and nice plants towards the snow capped mountains. I soon realise why the supermarket doesn’t sell much water, the streams are all perfectly clean and very accessible to fill up water from - and best of all the water is refreshingly cold. We walked for the best part of 4 hours and for some reason everyone you pass says hi to you. Just before we reach the lagoon and glacier grande that runs into it, the track ends and there are no signs but we find our way to the brilliant blue lagoon with icebergs all the way to the edges. The glacier is impressive as are the jagged snow capped mountains glistening in the full sunlight. We stop and snack as kids throw rocks at icebergs and enjoy the serenity before the long trek back. Thank god for bug spray and sunscreen, we make it back very tired and enjoy a magical but very expensive dinner at the nicest restaurant in town. After hiking from noon to 7:30pm, we needed it. They brewed their own beer which I take a liking to and knocked off a couple of negras while we had the most awesome garlic and herb bread ever, followed by a great ravioli.

We start a little earlier today as we are more organised and despite being a little sore, we tackle the harder walk to Piedras Blancas, which means precious white in Spanish. It is basically the best place to view the stunning Fitz Roy mountain range without actually climbing it, which you need to camp overnight to do. This time we hike from 10 til 6 - 8 hours! And it was hot and hard work. The bushland leading up to the mountains was not overly exciting but the views as you close on the mountain range are great.

Tonight we have dinner in a very dodgy restaurant and we are the only ones in it. It is cheap which we needed as there are no ATMs in El Chalten - amazing considering they have an internet cafe! We organise to go glacier trekking tomorrow as we are sick of these damn hikes. The guy who we booked with was weird - loved Radiohead and was singing along in store as he booked us on the tour.
We got our hired boots and took off for Glacier Viedma at 8am. The bus drove us to the lakes edge where we bordered quite a large boat with large plasma screens and get measured up for our crampons. After 45 minutes on the smooth boat ride we hit the glacier, which is absolutely huge, white and blue ice cascading into the lake. The edge is vertically over 60m and stretches over 380km into Chile making it the longest in Patagonia. The water gets choppy as we start to hit waves caused by falling ice. We slowly make our way to the rock cliff to the side of the glacier. Our guide explains that he has been doing this exact tour since 1990, when it was just a 3 minute walk across the rocks before you hit the glacier - now it is 30 minutes! He said he doesn’t know what causes global warming but can confirm that it is real.
Our tour contains mostly Spanish speaking people but does have one guy who is a tour guide from Jordan. There are also a few Swiss people on board. I awkwardly put on my crampons on the rocks as we watch the water stream from the holes in the glaciers edge. The sound of crampons on rocks is like the scraping of fingernails down a blackboard and we scurry onto the ice, some with more elegance than others and if I wasn’t concentrating so hard I might have observed the foreigners sniggering at me as I learned how to walk on metal spikes.

The view is amazing looking at both the glaciers edge and up through the caves and crevasses to see how the glacier carves its way through the mountain. The ice in many parts is bright blue as it lacks oxygen, which much of the glacier carries dirt down from many kilometres away. Dirt cover stops the sun melting the glacier. Our guide explains that the trekking route is not set as the glacier surface is constantly changing, and 2 men go ahead to check if it safe for us as we walk along. I wonder what the staff turnover in that job is like! These men also carve steps for us uncoordinated trekkers and at times I still struggle with the steepness of the glacier although we soon reach the top of the glacier where it is flatter. We reach the end of a crevasse after about 45 minutes and have to turn back.

After about 2 hours of walking including going down to check out ice cave, the guides stop to start picking at ice into cubes and putting them in cups for us - then out comes the Baileys and we enjoy a drink while enjoying the sensational views from on top of the glacier. The sky is cloudless and there is no wind. Our guide explains there are probably 3 days in the whole year like this - and almost half the year the tour cannot go ahead due to high winds or rain/snow - so we should consider ourselves incredibly lucky! 3 hours after walking in crampons I am glad to get out of them and we have lunch on the very smooth rocks which the glacier has carved before boarding the boat again to return.

The boat returns but the bus is delayed so we lay around in the grass for half an hour before the bus takes us back to town at around 4pm. We return our boots and relax before heading to a beerhouse where I drink more negra beer and we have a nice dinner. We go on a sunset walk to a nearby lookout but can’t find the track and we are late and only see sunset from half way to the lookout but we still get to see the amazing purple colour of the snow capped mountain range as well as looking down on the tiny town of El Chalten in the valley.

We did a short 4km walk to the nearby waterfall which was nice, but small. We drank some more fresh glacier water and headed back to town on our bus ride, which was the same as the way we came. 3 days in El Chalten was enough if, like us, you aren't a hardcore hiker!

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