Another small town I went to in Patagonia was El Chalten. It is the youngest town in Argentina and is the gateway to some mountain trecks.
When I arrived on the bus it was raining and very windy. I was not sure if I was going to be able to do much in this town because the weather was so bad. I made my way to the hostal and checked in.
I was staying at the same hostal as Pierre and Elio who had been on my glacier tour the day before. We sat around and played games all afternoon while we watched the weather go from bad to worse. We met alot of the other people staying at the hostal as well.
We decided to brave the weather and go out for dinner that night. We went to a local Paradilla. They do BBQ´s but inside. I decided to have a steak and it was huge. It came with a big lump of mash potato on the side. I was very happy as the chef new how to cook it medium/rare (he had worked in Australia)... most places in Argentina just cook well done.
They served wine in funny porcelain penguins. I just had to take a picture of that!
The next day we woke up to find it was not raining and there was some blue in the sky. Mother nature had decided to be nice to us and put on a good day.
We all hurried to get ready and head off. We walked into the national park over a small hill, which was still getting battered by strong winds.
We passed through a small forest and walked about an hour to the first look out. It was still cloudy around the mountain tops, but we could see the hillsides and the valleys. It was very pretty as it was autumn and all the leaves on the trees were changing colour to beautiful reds, yellows and oranges.
We continued on for another hour to a fork in the path. One of the girls in our group had sore feet from the hiking boots she had hired. We had two options. One was to go another five hours in a circuit or we could go back.
Three of us wanted to keep going, so she went back the way we had come and we continued on. There was plenty of other people out on the trails that day so she said she didn´t mind going back alone.
So on we went over another mountain pass that was a bit challenging as I haven´t been doing much exercise before I came on my trip.
But the effort was rewarded as we came into another beautiful valley.
This valley had two amazing lakes in it called Madre & Hija (mother and daughter).
The only problem was the wind that swept over the snow capped mountains and down through the valley. It was so strong that it blew one of the girls over onto her bottom. We were leaning at 45degree angles against the wind and not falling over.
Everytime we went around a corner on the path we kept seeing even more beautiful scenery. We couldn´t quite see themain attraction clearly as the clouds kept hiding the mountains, but I took some pictures anyway.
These mountains are quite amazing and one of them had a glacier coming down the side of it.
It was a very long walk, very tiring. I thoroughly enjoyed it and just before we got to the end we got to see two woodpeckers... funny birds that peck into the trees to find warms and bugs. They were black with bright red heads.
So after two nights in El Chalten it was time to start heading north again. But the bus along Ruta 40 was no longer running. So I had to go back to El Calafate (4hrs), spend 2 hours there and then catch a bus for 28hrs to Bariloche. This would be my longest bus journey yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment