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Published: March 23rd 2007
Perito Moreno Glaciar
Does exactly what it says on the tin! We arrived in El Calafate in style in a flying baked bean tin (a LADE plane... imagine Ryanair and then remove all the luxuries)! We arrived in the morning and despite a rather chronic case of cantbearseditis we spent a frantic day organising our lives! We then went to a bird sanctuary, which was more of a mud sanctuary with a couple of token birds than anything else! We´re being a bit harsh... they did have flamingos - which we rather cheekily crept very close to (with my bright pink jacket i think they thought i was one of them). We were looking forward to some proper twitching in hides (or ´blinds´as the ´english´ translation called them)... what we actually got was genuinely a few logs (hilarious pictures of me hiding behind them to follow)!
Our second day in El Calafate was a big day of crazy touristy fun complete with over-enthusiastic tour guide! On the way to see the Perito Moreno Glaciar, which is an amazing 30km long, we stopped off at a little shack to have coffee and Simon and I got very excited about some goats and a baby Guanaco (like llamas). In a big gay
tour group we went for a walk to the glaciar before taking an equally touristy boat trip right up to the front. The glaciar is the only one in the world (apparently) which is stable (not receding - gotta love global warming) and huge chunks regularly fall off - we thought we were special when we saw some of the wall collapse but no!! Still... it has to be one of the most impressive things we´ve seen yet. Over dinner that night we got talking t some Ozzies and decided to definitely skip Torres del Paine (which meant backtracking) and head straight for El Chaltén and the Fitz Roy mountain range. We had to cancel a night at our hostel, which went down like a ton of bricks and then to top it all off we asked the poor woman to book us a hostel in El Chaltén... bloody gringos!
When we arrived at 11pm in El Chaltén we realised exactly how small this one man trick pony horse band show town is! The winds are unbelieveably strong and what with all the dust it felt like a town straight out of an old western! Our hostel had an
amazing little fire and on our first night there we let a random stray cat in, which knocked the bin over and gave Simon his first allergic reaction to cats... oooops!! (No panic anyone, it was a small reaction easily handled by a couple of Piriton)!
We decided to get adventurous and hired a tent and roll mats to do a two day trek on the mountain. We set off at about 2pm to do the short 2 and a half hour trek to the campsite in the mountains. At about 2:30pm the rain started. Despite energetic games of Eye Spy and the name game we realised that our trousers were still soaked through! When we finally arrived at base camp after 3 hrs of walking (two and half in the pissing rain) it felt really good to be able to get in our tent and get in some dry warm clothes - Simon had told me that spare trousers were a luxury... hurray for luxuries)! (I should point out at this point that muggins here (Si) had to carry these ´luxuries´ on my back in all the rain, but I was just as happy to get dry). It
Somewhere there is Fitz Roy!
The view of Fitz Roy when the rain came in! wasn´t the most comfortable night´s sleep we´ve ever had and the driving rain and howling wind certainly didn´t help but we still managed to get up at about 8:30 the next day. We missed the sunrise (although Simon saw a bit from the tent) but i for one wasn´t too bothered seeing that i was warm and dry tucked up in my sleeping bag (which is lovely by the way Santa)! Once we were up we set off for a quick stroll up the last bit of the trail, all 450 vertical metres of it! It took about an hour and a half and we were both knackered by the time we made it to the top, but we were the only ones there and it was well worth all the effort. Fitz Roy is really beautiful as you´ll see from the photos when we find somewhere else with USB and we drank from the glacial melt water, which tested my Sensodyne to its limits.
The weather looked like it was turning as it had the day before so, determined not to get soaking wet again, we missioned back to the town. We made the 3hr bit of the
Huddled in the tent
Freezing our balls off (well... Simon was) but glad to be dry at last! trail in 1hr 45mins and then stopped for waffles, ice cream, hot chocolate and a raspberry smoothie on the way home (mmmmmmmmmm)!
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Aldo43
non-member comment
waffles, ice cream, hot chocolate and a raspberry smoothie?
YOU FAT BUGGERS! lol. making up all that time and then wasting the saved time on filling ur faces? Honestly. Glad to see Simon has started sniffing cats now, good lad. Soon you'll be sniffing our bottoms as instinct to get us to like you, oh dear. Sounds like its all fun tho. (I mean that generally, not the sniffing cat bottoms thing.) Al