The road towards El Chalten
El Chaltén is three and a half hours up the road and is probably what El Calafate used to be 10 years ago, a tiny village of only 600 people with a few shops and a supermarket. El Chaltén stands at the foot of both the Torres and Fitzroy mountain ranges, and provides some of the best hiking in the country over a series of trails ranging from 45 minutes to 6 days.
Only being there for two days we arranged a boat trip to go hiking on the local blue glacier. Rather than falling from the glacier face, the ice here mainly comes out from under the bottom of the glacier, producing bright blue icebergs*. It’s therefore worthwhile docking at the foot of the glacier, strapping on crampons and hiking up into the resulting ice caves. Our boat got close to the glacier but the lake was too rough to be able to dock so they rescheduled us for the following day.
* The colour is something to do with the age and density of the icebergs affecting the refractive index of the light thereby appearing either more blue or white. Feel free to enlighten me which is the newer/less dense.
Back in town for 1pm we set off on a 6hr hike to Lagos Torres, which provided a continually improving series of viewpoints of the Cerro Torres peaks, although after about an hour I was more interested in reducing the weight of the packed lunch I’d brought along.
When we got back to town we received a call from the ice climbing tour company, stating that the entire next day had been bought out by a tour group and we’d receive a refund instead. Not really what we wanted but on investigation it turned out the tour group was the one I’d left back in Buenos Aires, so I hunted round town for the familiar orange truck and located two of them outside off of the towns seedier hostels. Wandering in I saw a few familiar faces and they directed me to the bulk of the group in the town’s microbrewery, so after chiding them for cancelling our ice climbing we arranged to meet the next day for BBQ.
The next morning was cold and raining heavily, so the ice climbing would have been cancelled anyway and it seems we really weren’t destined to get to go in El Chaltén. We looked at a few of the shorter hikes in the hope that the weather would clear up, but it got to after 4pm and it still wasn’t much better so we went out for a wander round town and happened across what would appear to be the only barbers in town. The lady in there was lovely but judging by the men around town she only knows three haircuts; #1) the mullet, #2) the short back and sides and #3) the moptop. When I walked in and asked for a ‘machina numero dos’ I think she took it as the No.2 haircut, which fortunately wasn’t the mullet or the moptop. Either way, it’s not great, but it’s far easier to deal with than before.
We later met the others in town for the famous lamb BBQ, and after waiting a considerable amount of time received a huge hotplate full of various bits and pieces of a young and obviously male sheep. Amongst the tender roast fillets and BBQ’d legs were a variety of bits of offal including the brain, 2 kidneys and strangely 4 gently charred testicles. We munched out way through most of it, but on this occasion the dogs got the leftovers – they seemed content with the leg bones but baulked at the testicles and we were left with a hot plate with just a brain and 4 balls sizzling away on the table.
Pingback: Steve (@SteveWBT)