Fitz Roy & Moreno glacier

After our Torres del Paine adventure, we continued on the hiking circuit and left Puerto Natales to El Calafate, Argentina. The town itself purely caters to tourists which makes it a little unattractive, not to mention all the new constructions going up with no codes whatsoever (you have swiss chalet type house next to brick houses next to ugly cement constructions....)....yet it was only a preview for the next town El Chalten, 4 hrs north from here...a town built in the last 10yrs and still in construction. The road to get there is not even finished so the last 1hr or so is just gravel. I´m getting ahead though.

From El Calafate, we went on a day tour to visit the Moreno Glacier...again, wao wao wao... the glacier just looks like a ´coulee de lave´, like lava just came down the mountain, except it´s all ice....from up close you can see all the crevasses and once and a while huge chunks crash into the water with a thundering noise... very cool.... we took a boat ride to go even closer and realize the sheer grandness of the glacier. We have so many pics... I´ll post them soon.

That evening we took the bus to El Chalten, the hiking mecca in the Argentinian Patagonia. As mentioned earlier, the town is still in construction...which makes the place look like a real mess....doesn´t seem to be a lot of order in how things are being built... demand is way too high...locals are renting every square meter to tourists...and everything is expensive since it has to be ´imported´ from El Calafate. The advantage of El Chalten is the hiking tracks start right in town, as opposed to Torres where you had to take a 3hr bus ride to get to it. J and I went on a day hike to see the famous Fitz Roy mountain, another set of granit pinacles and ´must hit´ spot for rock climbers (we saw so many going up with their equipment...their bags must have weighed 20kgs...wish i could´ve seen them rock climb!). The landscape here is much less interesting than in Torres....the weather is tough, windy and rainy most of the time, so only this steppe vegetation can survive. The last hour of the hike is another of those crazy hikes up vertical rocky hills (small rocks this time, almost harder than the boulders in Torres....or we were just really tired by then). The view from the top was again a postcard landscape, even though we hit some clouds. Wouldn´t you know it was blue sky the next day....but no way we were heading back. J and I figured that although some hiking was fun... it wasn´t our thing...we prefer hanging out at the beach with a margarita and going diving!!! So the second day, we moved our bus ticket up to head back to El Calafate and connect to our 3am bus for Ushuaia.

The second night in El Chalten, we ended up hanging out with 3 argentinians and 3 other foreigners staying at the hostal. The Argentinians tried to teach us how to play ´truco´, a card game that apparently every argentinian learns the minute they can walk...it´s so hard to grasp...the cards have swords and cups and coins... the whole point of the game is bluffing and lying...you can imagine how loud and intense it can gets in a latin kind of way... very fun.

That´s it for now... waiting for the 3 am bus...which gets in Ushuaia at 9pm... yes, we have good books with us...and just bought some snacks.... the movies better be decent...either way we´ll end up watching them!

Ushuaia, here we come!!!