Atacama and Patagonia, part 3: Argentina.

On the bus to El Chaltén.

Few things are better than your first shower after a backpacking trip.  We returned to Puerto Natales from Torres del Paine with a sack full of irredeemably dirty laundry and flies buzzing around our ripe heads, and headed straight for our shower at Hotel Indigo.

My favorite thing about Hotel Indigo: it does away with the tiny bar soaps and mini toiletries, and instead equips its rainfall showers with full-size bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and liquid soap.  This setup could not have come at a better time.

The next day we boarded a six-and-a-half hour bus ride bound for El Calafate, Argentina.  The ride was long, stuffy, and smelly, and made even longer by two immigration stops at the Chile-Argentina border, so I entertained myself by watching pasture after pasture of sheep go by, seemingly without end, and preparing to do my part by eating some lamb.  My memory of that bus ride is endless sheep.

Rolling into El Calafate was a rude awakening.  I had pictured an idyllic little nothing town, but it almost felt like being in Berkeley.  There were pizza joints, rental car places, tour agencies, a North Face store, a Patagonia store, and an overpriced bookshop.  Places were packed and there was not a single Perito Moreno glacier tour or rental car to be had for the next day.  I missed the emptiness of Puerto Natales and dusty red compactness of San Pedro, but we made the best of our unplanned rest day with a cheap but excellent bottle of malbec, some kind of half-sweet dulce de leche spread on breakfast toast, and cordera patagonica served over coals at La Tablita, that tasted almost more like suckling pig or carnitas than lamb.

El Chaltén.

The following day we got on a double-decker bus to El Chaltén, snagging the top front row for premier views of the three-hour ride.  Unfortunately it was overcast and spitting rain on the drive in, so there wasn't much to see beyond the borders of the town.  El Chaltén was built in 1985 and calls itself the trekking capital of Argentina.  Sure enough, the town is tiny, only half-paved, and its main strip consists of services for hikers and climbers: gear shops, hostels, coin laundromats, and a sparsely-stocked supermercado containing primarily dry pasta.  We settled into the treehouse-like room on our hilltop hotel and hoped for good weather for our New Year's Eve hike to Cerro Torre.

The fat caracara.

I could hear rain pounding against our windows even before I opened my eyes the next morning.  Not a good sign for the last day of 2014.  We went to breakfast, hoping the rain would clear out.  It did, a bit, but as we walked the two hours to Laguna Torre, hoping for at least partial views of Cerro Torrre, it only got colder and rainier.  We arrived at the end of the trail to see a gray lake and a glacier in the distance obscured by shroud of mist.  A few other hikers sat around the lake, their rain shells zipped up to the chin, munching rather miserably on their snacks.  An unafraid white-throated caracara (a type of falcon), fat on hiker cracker crumbs, touched down among us.

Thwarted, we returned to town.  After a shower and a nap, we woke to a surprise: blinding sun which lit up, for the first time since we'd arrived in El Chaltén, the Fitz Roy range for which the town is named.  We went to the local cervezeria for empanadas and locro, a thick stew of hominy, beef, and bacon - and, fortified, then climbed up to the mirador just above the town.  Overlooking El Chaltén and Fitz Roy beyond it, we popped a bottle of cheap bubbly, toasted the end of 2014, and waited for the sun to set below the mountains before climbing back down.  We spent the hour before midnight in our bed, drowsily watching a South Park marathon in our darkened room.  I must have fallen asleep, because the sound of shouts and cheers outside woke me.  We exchanged New Year's wishes and a kiss, and fell back asleep.

View from Mirador Los Condores.

New Year's Day dawned even clearer and calmer than the evening before, with barely a wisp in the sky or a breath of wind.  Climbers who had been waiting for weeks to scale the face of Fitz Roy sprang into action, and the locals told us that a day like that came at most three or four times a month.  D and I set off towards Laguna de los Tres, the glacial lake at the foot of Fitz Roy, in what would be our longest trek day of this trip - seven and a half miles up, through forest, hugging hillsides, and straight up the last scramble; and seven and a half miles back down to town.  We got our first unobstructed view of Fitz Roy about an hour in.  It was huge, immediate, and didn't even look real.  The spires of the range thrust out of the ground arrogantly, without context, visible and unmistakable for miles around.

On the way to Laguna de los Tres.

After a hard (for me) scramble up to Laguna de los Tres, we stood at the edge of the lake and looked straight up at Fitz Roy's face.  No matter how close or far we stood from it, its hugeness seemed unchanged.  In both photos and in reality, it looked like a green screen.  The sun was intense up there, without shade or cloud cover to temper it, beating down insistently into my skin and eyes.  I thought happily about what I'd already accomplished in 2015, and smiled.

Feliz año.

Fitz Roy.

Related posts:
First birthday.
At the end of the world.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 1: The Atacama Desert.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 2: Torres del Paine.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 4: Our trip in lists.