| Well, better late than never, right? I'm finally going
to write a trip report about our Patagonian adventure this winter. It
may be next winter before I finish it, but there you go. For the
record, I'm starting this on June 16, 2006. The actual trip was
February 17 - March 2, 2006. The scary thing is that it has been so
long that I had to look
those dates up on my blog to make sure they were right. The first thing people always asked me when I told them I was going to Patagonia was "Where's that?" Many seemed to think that I was boasting about an exciting trip to a clothing factory. For the record, Patagonia is the name of the southern tip of South America, parts of both Argentina and Chile. It is famous for spectacular landscapes, glaciers, and penguins. Our particular trip focused on two national parks. In Argentina, we went to Los Glaciares. In Chile, we went to Torres del Paine. Our friend Sarah read an article about Torres del Paine, and felt a calling. Of course, we happily latched on to the most exotic trip being planned by any of our acquaintances at the time. Karen, who we were now old travel buddies with from our Peruvian adventures in 2004, suggested visiting Los Glaciares as well, since we were traveling all the way to the southern end of the earth. Mucho bueno - vamanos! |
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Buenos Aires, Argentina |
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We adopted a circuit strategy for our plane flights.
Houston --> Buenos Aires --> El Calafate on the outbound leg. Then
ground transportation from El Calafate across the border into Chile.
After visiting Torres del Paine, another ground transfer to the nearest
airport in Punta Arenas. Then back by air via Punta Arenas -->
Santiago --> Houston. I'd recommend this plan to anyone trying to
visit both Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia on one trip. It saves a
lot of backtracking. So, our first stop was Buenos Aires. I'm not much for city travel myself, but Buenos Aires was definitely worth a visit. We were only there for a day, so we didn't get to see all that much. If one likes visiting cities, round trip tickets to BA can be had from Houston for <$600. Such was not our purpose, though. We had a pleasant day hitting a few high points. Casa Rosada, Recoleta Cemetary where Eva Peron's grave is, a tango show, and an "early" steak dinner at 10:00PM. We stayed in Milhouse hostel (http://www.milhousehostel.com/) in Buenos Aires. It was very nice, if a little loud. Gavin and I sprung for a private room, which was on a nice courtyard and had windows on both sides to provide nice ventilation since there was no A/C. Of course, having those windows open wasn't so nice when some other couple decided to let the whole world know what a great time they were having - for like an hour - while we were trying to nap! Despite that, I'd recommend this hostel. |
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El Chalten, Argentina (Los Glaciares) |
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slept in the next morning and then headed to the airport. After all,
we weren't really there to see the cities. Patagonia is really,
really, really south. The flight from Buenos Aires to El Calafate, is
about 3 hours. It was our plan to stay the first night in El Chalten,
so we'd arranged with our hotel to have a car meet us at the airport.
The drive is about 4 hours. There are busses that will take you from
El Calafate to El Chalten, but we were worried about missing the last one of
the day since we weren't getting to town until 4pm or so. This was a
lucky plan, because we ended up letting Martin drive us around Argentina for
the next four days, which I believe saved us way more in headaches than it
cost for the personal attention. The drive is beautiful. Some of
the trip reports we read had bad things to say about the road to El Chalten,
but the road, while unpaved, was in very good condition. We arrived in
El Chalten just in time to see the sun set on Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre. |
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The next day was our hike to Lago de los Tres underneath
Mount Fitz Roy. Taking Martin's advice, we had him drive us up to the
Rio Frio trailhead. This is great for a few reasons.
First, you walk in a different way than you walk out. Second, the
trail following the river takes a nice gentle rise up to the final climb to
Lago de los Tres, whereas the trail that leaves from El Chalten has to climb
steeply over a ridge and then drops a bit down into the river valley.
Also, there is a nice glacier view on the way in that you won't see if you take the out-and-back from El Chalten, Glaciar Piedras Blancas. We were on a trail across the river from this glacier. There is a trail on the same side as the glacier, and a side hike up to the tarn below the glacier is avialable from that trail. The view is great from the other side of the river, though, and we were actually up at the same altitude as the tarn across the valley. |
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The views just keep coming on this hike. We took it pretty easy on the way in, stopping often to take pictures. About 4 1/2 miles from the trailhead, we decended back to the river. Staring at us on the ridge was the steep final climb up to Lago de los Tres. It's always more intimidating when you can see it coming like that.. There's a campground in the river valley just before the final ridge. It was crowded and noisy. I was just as happy to be staying in our nice lodge in town. All the locals swore to us that we would be fine drinking water coming off the glacier here, and although I would tend to believe them that the water isn't contaminated so close to the source, we still tended toward caution and filtered all our water from the tap water in our hotel. The trail up the ridge started steeply, got steeper, and finished by teasing you with false hope that the top is always less than 50 feet above you. Despite that, it's not terribly difficult. |
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And you are rewarded at the top with this view.
We sat up here quite a while looking around. We watched several people
climbing up the glacier dwindle into tiny dots by the time they disappeared
from sight. We oohed and aahed over the glacier falling over the cliff
in front of Poicenot. We took tons of pictures. We put our
layers back on that we shed coming up the ridge. The hike back out is just as beautiful. You just have to keep turning around to look back at the mountain. The trail is wide and well-maintained back into El Chalten. I was glad we were coming down the ridge above the town at the end of the day, though, rather than climbing up it at the beginning of the day. The whole route we took was probably about 12 miles. It was a lot of mileage, and the soles of my feet were telling me about it by the end. But I think this was the best hike of the week. That may have been somewhat due to the wonderful weather we had, but there's no arguing that Fitz Roy is spectacular. |
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Viedma Glacier (Los Glaciares) |
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The next day we drove back to El Calafate from
El Chalten. On the way, we went glacier trekking on the Viedma
Glacier. This adventure started with a lurching boat ride across the
lake. Apparently, the wind almost never blows from that direction.
The swells were easily 4-5 feet, and the boat was not big. Some of the
guides were joining about half the passengers in puking off the stern of the
boat.
The boat pulled up to the "natural harbor" where we were going to get off. I'm looking around, and all I see are cliffs. Meanwhile, the boat is still rocking 15-20 deg side-to-side. This did explain the tire tied to the bow of the boat, though. The boat tried to nose up to the cliff, but they couldn't get it stable. We ended up driving a way down the shoreline to find somewhere more sheltered. The guides then proceeded to hand off the passengers one by one. Gavin had been considering staying on the boat since he had a cold, but the waves convinced him otherwise. |
| Glacier hiking was pretty fun.
Unfortunately, Becca managed to severely twist her ankle on literally her
first step on the glacier. The picture to the right was taken just
moments before it happened. She stuck it out, though. The Viedma
Glacier is pretty dirty, but the blue colors were very striking.
Highlights of the trek included going through a small ice tunnel, going
under the edge of the glacier, and baileys and glacier ice. Fortunately, when we got back to the boat the waves had calmed quite a bit. Nobody was as uncomfortable going back across the lake. Martin was waiting for us, and we continued on to El Calafate. |
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Perdito Moreno and Estancia (Los Glaciares) |
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Our next day started at an estancia, where we
had a horseback riding tour set up. The ride was fairly short, but the
scenery was gorgeous. We saw a zorro (fox) along the way. One of
my favorite parts about this particular tour was hearing Becca squeal when
the guide got the horses to gallop the last bit back to the barn. Part of the tour was a lunch. Meals in Argentina seem to consist of meat, meat, and more meat. Good meat, true, but lots of it. We gorged on the different cuts on the sizzling grill set on the table. Then they brought another grill with more different cuts. Crazy! This was our "cultural" experience for the trip. The estancia used to be a working ranch, but it is now part of the national park. They keep enough cows and sheep to show visitors how traditional Argentinean gauchos lived (an old fashioned sheep shearing was demonstrated), but mostly they make money off tourism now. |
| Perito Moreno is one of the centerpieces of Los
Glaciares. It is one of the few glaciers in the world that is still
advancing. We are standing on a peninsula. There is a lake to
our left and a lake to our right. The glacier constantly advances
until it impinges on the peninsula. At that point the water is blocked
from flowing from one lake to the other on its way to the ocean. When
the blockage occurs, the water in the upstream lake starts rising, while the
water in the downstream lake recedes. Eventually, the water erodes a
hole in the glacier, which forms an arch of ice from the top of the glacier
to the land. The glacier, of course, is still advancing, compressing
that arch. Every few years, the pressure gets to be too much for that
arch to stand, and it explodes apart quite spectacularly. This
happened about a month after we were there. There wasn't even an arch
when we were there. Mother nature is powerful! We were really lucky, though, that we had a very clear day. Martin said that you can hardly ever see up to the top of the glacier in the mountains, but we could that day. |
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Las Torres (Torres del Paine) |
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| The next day, Martin drove us to the Chilean
border. We'd arranged to have a driver pick us up there and drive us
to Torres del Paine. There's a bus that does this, but you basically
have to go to Puerto Natales first, which is hours out of your way. We stopped along the way at a large waterfall, and at Lago Azul. The tops of the Torres were peeking out of the clouds periodically. That wasn't to happen when we hiked up there the next day, but that's OK as you'll see. We got to Hostel Los Torres late in the afternoon. This hostel is comfortable, but not fancy (just wait!). The fancy hotel is just up the road. We briefly entertained the idea of eating dinner up there one night, but quickly decided that we weren't interested in paying $50 US for dinner! The food at the hostel is good, if simple. |
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The next day was our hike to Las Torres. I
wasn't sure how hard this hike was going to be. I'd read a lot of trip
reports that made it sound very strenuous. The hike is strenuous, but
not any worse than the big hikes we've done in the Rockies. Everything
up to the last mile is a normal mountain hike. The last mile climbs
steeply up one of the tallest glacial moraines that I've ever seen. It
involves some boulder hopping. It's totally do-able, though. You'll notice Becca isn't in the picture. She had stopped before the last climb due to her ankle, which was still swollen to the size of a grapefruit. I have no doubt that she would have made it up if she'd been healthy, though. We were very lucky with the weather all week. I read a lot of accounts of people being pretty miserable where we're sitting here. Once we got up to the tarn and sat down to see if the clouds would part around the top of the towers, we got chilly enough to put all our outerwear on, but we were all in T-shirts on the way up. The clouds never let us see the top of the tallest Torre, which is actually the one furthest left in the picture. The whole place is on a much grander scale than I ever realized from the pictures. The cliff behind the tarn is huge - easily 1000 ft high. |
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Lago Pehoe and Lago Grey (Torres del Paine) |
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| The next day we traveled across the park to the
Refugio Paine Grande. As we didn't have the time or the equipment to
backpack the famous W circuit, we went across by bus and boat. The
trip across Lago Pehoe is via catamaran - a very sturdy catamaran, as it
turns out. (Before the trip, I had a few mental images of huddling
with my backpack on a canvas deck.) Lago Pehoe is a brilliantly
glacial blue lake situated under the famous Cuernos del Paine.
Unfortunately, the clouds were down during both the trip to Paine Grande and
back, so our pictures of the classic view of the Cuernos are all a bit grey
looking. Refugio Paine Grande is very nice. It's brand new, sits right on Lago Pehoe, and has great views of Paine Grande and the side of the Cuernos formation from the windows of the rooms. By this time of the trip, we were all getting a bit tired, and we were tempted to just hang out in our picturesque hotel for the day. However, the plan was to hike as far up toward Glacier Grey as possible, so off we went. |
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This was the easiest hike we did all week.
It seemed tough, though, because we were tired! The hike climbs up
onto the ridge above Lago Grey, and then follows the lake until you get this
stunning view of the glacier. There were some icebergs in the lake
(this lake is famous for that), but not as many as I expected. We must
not have been there at the right time. It was threatening to rain for much of the hike. When we got to the overlook where this picture was taken, we realized that to get to the base of the glacier, we would have to lose all the altitude we'd gained and then probably climb up and down for another two miles. The weather, our aching feet, and the nice hostel waiting for us was enough to convince all of us except Sarah that we were satisfied with turning around at this point. Sarah kept going, while the rest of us hung out on our windy overlook and took the photo. As it turns out, the threat of rain turned Sarah around before she got too much further. And, as it turns out, it was a good thing that we turned around and got back while the light was still good. The weather cleared just as we were getting back to the hostel, and we saw the side of the Cuernos in good light |
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Penguin Sanctuary |
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| The next day, the trip home began. We had
to get to Punta Arenas to catch the plane. On the way, we took a trip
to a penguin sanctuary. We didn't have time to go out to the one on
the islands in the Strait of Magellan, so we went to one on the northern
shore of the strait instead. The number of penguins was somewhat
disappointing. Also, it is quite a way out of the way, which made the
drive back to Punta Arenas take pretty much all day. I would say
either take the time to go to the big one, or skip this one if you're
pressed for time.
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Santiago (Chile) |
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We had one day in Santiago to explore before our
evening flight. I'm not as interested in cities as a tourist. I
sort of feel like different types of architecture and museums aren't what
I'm there to see. I guess it's not surprising that my favorite thing
was a city park that's entirely on a steep hill with an old fortification on
top. The view from the top would have been really nice, except that
Santiago is fairly polluted and all the mountains were obscured by haze.
The cathedral downtown is nice, though. Well, I'm finishing this in March 2007. More than a year since the trip. More than six months since I started writing it. Oh, well. Hope you enjoyed. If you want to see more pictures, see the following... |
