Our bus from Puerto Madryn down to Rio Gallegos was supposed to leave at 5PM and take about 14 hours. Â Instead, it was delayed until 8:30 and took closer to 20 hours. Â Then we had to wait around Rio Gallegos for our bus to El Calafate. Â All in all, we spent about 30 hours in buses and bus stations before we arrived in the small, charming town of El Calafate, gateway to the glaciers. Â We found a nice, comortable, cheapish hostel straight away and rewarded our long journey with a couple of beers.
We spent the next day relaxing, trying to find decently priced food (more challenging than it should have been) and finally getting to watch Casino Royale, a movie that we’ve both seen a dozen times before, but that we’ve been talking about watching since we were in Colombia. Â It was very refreshing to have a day of doing nothing since, over the past 10 days or so, we’ve been moving at a fairly frantic pace.
The next morning, we woke early, had some breakfast and headed out to see Perito Moreno Glacier. Â When we got there, we took an hour long boat ride on Lake Argentina out to the front of the glacier. Â Never having seen a glacier up close, I was pretty well dumbfounded by it’s beauty. Â After the ride, we were taken up to the balconies overlooking the glacier. Â Walking along a few kilometers worth of platforms, we were treated to spectacular views of the glacier and the icebergs in the lake. We even got to see (and hear) a huge chunk of ice cleave off the glacier.
Robby had a flight booked the next day up to Buenos Aires, but I was eager to get a bit more of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. So, after a quick goodbye (we have plans to meet back up in BA), I headed up to the nearby town of El Chalten for some more lakes and mountains (a cheaper alternative to Chile’s Torres del Paine). I arrived in the mid-afternoon, rested up for a bit and decided to go on one of the short hikes near town, Mirador de los condores.
On the hike, I got some great views of the mountains to the north and west of town; the most notable being the peak of Fitz Roy mountain. True to the name of the hike, I was also treated to some great views of a giant condor flying overhead. I ran into some other hikers and got to talking with another American computer programmer named Nate. We decided to join up the next day for the famed Laguna de los Tres hike.
Early the next day, we caught a cab up to Hosteria El Pilar, north of town. Behind the building is a trail, which offers a nice alternative entry point to the Laguna hike (taking the usual way in is nice, but means that you walk back out the same way for a good 2.5 hours). When we set out, we had decent clear and cool weather. As we approached the steep climb up to the Laguna, the weather took a vast turn for the worse. Before we knew it, we were climbing through snow to look at a peak that was covered by pea soup thick fog and cloud.
We were about to head back down when the weather very suddenly started clearing. First the snow stopped, then the sun shined a bit brighter through the clouds, then the low fog over the mountains started to part. All within about 10 minutes, it went from winter wonderland to partly sunny and warm. Fitz Roy still stayed covered, however, and I had a bus to catch, so we started the hike back to town. All the way down, the weather continued to improve. Finally, by the time I was back in town, showered, dressed and waiting for the bus, I caught a nice peek of the peak that had been hidden all day. Absolutely beautiful.
My 6pm bus arrived in El Calafate at around 9, and so I ate, drank, read and internet cafe’d my way through the next 6 hours, caught a 3am bus to Rio Gallegos, where I connected to an 8am bus, which after excessive stops, border crossings (you have to cut through Chile to get to Tierra del Fuego), a rough ferry ride (the Straight of Magellan was very choppy, and being on the top deck of a double decker bus sitting on a ferry wasn’t the best feeling in the world), and two awful movies, finally arrived in Ushuaia around 11pm. An absolute nightmare journey, but hopefully the End of the World is worth it.