Patagonia: El Chalten & El Calafate
In Buenos Aires, I met up with the people in my tour group (2 Aussies, 2 Americans, 1 Brit and, quite unexpectedly, one more Turk!) and our tour guide, Nico. Albeit some initial awkwardness, now, with the vantage point of 5 days later, it turned out to be a friendly and cohesive group. No one’s a sore thumb. Except if it’s me and they’re all talking about it in secret.
Our first destination in Patagonia was El Chalten, which is a very cute and tiny town (about 1500 people year-round) filled with trekkers and mountaineers of various abilities and ambitions. There are enough restaurants / bars / shops in town and enough trails surrounding it, that one could easily stay here and be very happy for a couple of weeks.
The drive to El Chalten (from El Calafate airport) takes you through the Patagonian steppe, which is a dry, rocky landscape with small brush - similar to a desert, but cold. (I had always associated the steppe only with Russia, but I was wrong.) All the weather in Patagonia comes from the Pacific Ocean in the west; it leaves most of its moisture on the west of the Andes mountain range on the Chilean side as rain; it then brings some leftover rain to Argentina immediately east of the Andes; and then it has nothing but wind to deliver further east of that in Argentina. Thus, the desert. And then the sudden green lush surrounds of El Chalten, with mounds of beautiful yellow flowers on the hills around.
We did two day hikes starting from El Chalten and both of them were just stunning, absolutely stunning. An 8-hour hike to Laguna Torre and a 9-hour hike to Laguna de Los Tres. I am not sure I can put up enough photographs to convey how gorgeous the scenery was - from forests to glaciers to lakes to mountain ranges. We were very lucky to have relatively sunny and clear weather - which we are told by the local guides is quite a rarity. At times, it still rained, snowed and seriously blew wind on us though. It seems that in Patagonia the weather is really fickle and you can go from one layer to three in a few minutes.
After El Chalten, we changed our base of operations to El Calafate, a bigger, tad-too touristy but still cute town with bushes of lavenders in full blossom at this time of year. Plenty of parillas displaying whole Patagonic lambs on grills. (Patagonic being a mistranslation of the adjective for Patagonian from Spanish to English.)
The main attraction near El Chalten is the Perito Moreno Glacier. It is 30 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide. When you see its very end in Lago Argentino, you can’t see its beginning. It just goes on and on as far as the eye can see, deep into a valley. A seventy meter high wall of ice, its top shaped like a giant merengue pie. The scale and its heft are very hard to explain, yet it is a magnificent site. For quite a while I just sat and stared at it.
And on top of it all, I got to hike on it with crampons! 🤩
