El Calafate and El Chalten: Glaciers, Patagonian Deserts, and Jagged Peaks

We've been around so many beautiful areas it's hard not to snap a lot of photos, but they'll have to wait because it's a very slow connection here in the middle of the Patagonian internet void! But they're great so feel free to look forward to them...

Our next stop in Patagonia after Ushuaia was a short 18-hour ride away to the town of El Calafate. We had to cross in and out of Chile so the 4 border checkpoints were not fun. Despite all our recent pictures of snow-capped mountains, most of Patagonia is desert and it's barren, flat, and grassy and incredibly sparse of life except for the occasional herds of llamas, sheep, and what appear to be small ostrich (maybe they're emu's??).

El Calafate is a bunch of hotels and shops plopped into the middle of this desert, mainly here for tourists to access the major attraction of the area, the Perito Moreno Glacier. The glacier is absolutely massive and is one of the few glaciers in the world that is not currently receding. We took the bus out one afternoon to see the glacier, taking a boat trip to see it up close and then spending several chilly hours walking along the viewing platforms that have been built on the land opposite the edge. From the platforms you can see the glacier from all sorts of different angles, and the blue hues of the ice formations are amazing. The highlight though are the gigantic pieces of ice that break off a couple times an hour and plunge into the icy lake with crashes that sound like thunder, amazing. The water from the glacial lakes and rivers is also incredibly clear and is drinkable without any filtration or processing, we refill our water bottles right in the river during hikes.

El Calafate also sits alongside Lago Argentina, a giant emerald-green lake. Next to the lake is a bird sanctuary where we spent an afternoon just walking among the flowers, lagoons, and crazy birds flying around (including Flamingo's!). Other than it's proximity to the glacier, there isn't much happening in El Calafate besides an over-priced tourist drag and the sublimely beautiful surroundings of the desolate southern desert.

After a couple of days we headed 4 hours north to the hiking respite of El Chalten. El Chalten didn't even exist until 1985 making it the newest municipality in all of Argentina, but it was built as a hiking, trekking, and rock-climbing Mecca. It sits right in the shadow of several incredible jagged peaks, the most famous of which are Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, which we were lucky enough to have clear views of our first day here. Tired from the bus, we took a short walk out to a lookout point and soaked in the amazing mountains and warm breeze.

Our hostel is full of professional rockclimbers who bide their time waiting for weather good enough to scale these incredible rock formations, and El Chalten is one of the best places in the world to rock climb. It's also one of the most challenging, so we spent our time taking it easy with a couple of 8-hour hikes! Our first day we walked out to a lagoon at the base of a glacier, through wind battered forest. We arrived at the lagoon and were lucky not to be completely blow off the edge of the Earth, the patagonian winds here are just unbelievable! And that's coming from two people who spent several hours walking through a tropical storm in Guatemala.

The incredible wind never ceases but we wouldn't be deterred, we took another walk yesterday to a freezing cold, windy, rainy lookout point but had amazing views of Fitz Roy and the other peaks as well as a crystal blue glacial lake. The walk was one of the most spectacular we've done as far as the number of vistas we were able to take in, with lookouts over valleys and of mountains and wide river beds. We walked through the woods and over crystal clear rivers... simply beautiful.

Giving our legs a rest for a day or two before tackling some more and continuing to chip away at the distance between here and Lima... long way to go!