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Funny sign
I guess it would not be very pleasant if a bus full of backpackers who have just been hiking took their shoes off at once!Getting in to El Chaiten was so exciting. even though the town has been built solely to serve tourists, as the gateway to the famous Los Glacieres National park, it was still low key in feel. You could still walk from one end of town to the other end of town in 15 minutes, (even though Jono said it is about twice the size of when he was there ten years ago). There were no big huge in your face look at me motels... yet. Actually, I tell fibs, there were one or two being built. The roads had not been covered in tarmac yet, though by the look of the cement guttering going in, that is only a small time away as well. So, I am sure the town will get less and less low key feeling every year, but for now, it still manages to be cute. And, it is surrounded by cliffs and mountain views. We woke up to rain free sky. Not sunny, but not rainy.
We spent 4 days in the park all together and it was perfect weather. The park itself was declared a UNESCO world heritage area in 1981. The two days in
A good sign
It seems that Argentina cares a bit more about its parks than Chile does. the middle were particularly beautiful and sunny, without even a cloud in the sky. The first day we walked up to Cerro Torre, then we walked over to Fitzroy. We camped close to Fitzroy for two nights, spending the third day just doing a day walk up the valley a little to visit a hanging glacier, which was very cool. On the fourth day we walked out. On the fifth it rained! I really do feel like I owe the world a big favour now!
The landscape was amazing, and so different from Torres Del Paine, even though it is not so far away. The landscape was on fire with autumn colours, which contrasted dramatically with the ice and snow, reminding me a little of the Rockies when we travelled with Richard and Marilyn.
Watching the sun rise on the towers (Cerro Torre and Fitzroy) was amazing. Cerro Torre in the sunrise looked like a huge finger pointing into the sky, with its chipped nail suddenly painted in pink polish. Then stripped of it just as quickly as the sun rose higher. Fitzroy looked like it just caught on fire, including the snow capped mountains next to it,
for just a few seconds, before the fire fizzled out, leaving the mountains looking even colder than they did before.
The walk up to the small glacier further up the valley from Fitzroy was also pretty special. Though small, the glacier was very steep, so it appeared impressively tall, and a few bits fell off while we sat under it eating lunch. The lake underneath it was full of floating ice sculptures and islands that had fallen off I guess, over the past months. I wished that I could have walked out to one of them and used it like a boat, or had a picnic lunch ontop of one, but I decided I was too young to die from hyperthermia. It was fun to just watch them though, and see different characters in them all, like you do when you watch the clouds.
Even though both parks (Torres Del Paine and Los Glacieres) were spectacular, we both enjoyed Los Glacieres more, mainly because there were no huge private refugios and there were less people. I guess these trips lacked the adrenalin for Jono that his previous visits to the parks probably had, but atleast this time he
had time to smell the flowers, sleep, and eat well... and not freeze.
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