We returned from Torres del Paine (exhausted from 3 days of hiking; our 3 weeks in Antarctica were great but not very physically active) and spent the night in El Calafate. We caught the early bus (8am; anything before 10am in Argentina is considered early morning) to El Chalten, and even managed to sleep a little on the bus! When we arrived, the weather wasn’t great – it seemed like it was always on the edge of a storm. We found out later that El Chalten was right next to a storm front, and so the black clouds, 40mph+ gusts of wind, and occasional sideways rain were expected.
So we spent a day and half resting and getting organized. Then, on Tuesday, we hiked up to Laguna Torre. It was a beautiful day – just cool enough so that we weren’t drenched in sweat, just warm and sunny enough that it was really pleasant. It was so clear that we could see Cerro Torre the entire way to the lake.
Typically it’s covered in clouds, so this was a real treat. On Wednesday, our last full day in El Chalten, we took a catamaran across Lago Viedma to see and hike on the glacier there. Again we had a beautiful day (the day before the wind around the glacier had been too high to enjoy it). In fact, we managed to skip a pretty poor weather day in El Chalten at the same time. We saw several different ice formations, an a bunch of icebergs. The trekking was a lot of fun, too!
Iceberg photos:
Glacier photos:
After the glacier, we had dinner with two Australian doctors we had met on the trek. We went to our favorite restaurant in El Chalten – La Cervezeria. We had enjoyed it so much that we ate there every night of our stay – it was awesome!
Thursday morning, we headed to the bus stop early to catch our 8am bus back to El Calafate, where we hoped to ship some of our winter gear home and catch a flight to Bariloche.
Here are some shots of El Chalten:
