El Chalten

Well I made it here to El Chalten on the fun bus... It left Bariloche at 9pm on Tuesday, but after five minutes the overhead lights stopped working, so we had to spend a delightful hour and a half at the depot while they sorted it out. Not that anyone would have cared anyway, beacause as soon as they got the lights working again and we were on our way, everyone switched them off again and went to sleep. We finally made it here at 6 o´clock this morning, Thursday, an epic 33 hours on the famous Ruta 40. It´s a long way, but really it takes so long because the road isn´t very good - even the ´sealed´ sections are incredibly bumpy, and at some points we were probably only doing about 20km per hour. The landscape was incredibly flat and barren for the majority of the way - nothing in the way of farmland, just desert scrub, and very little in the way of wildlife either - I saw a few guanacos (like llamas), a couple of hares, and a hawk-like bird, along with the rib-cages of a couple of dead animals.



The bus stopped every so often to pick up people in random locations - some of the little towns looked tiny. Then we had a couple of hours at the airport at Perito Moreno (the town, not the glacier of the same name) waiting for a connecting bus, before another trip to the local depot whilst they fixed something on this one too. We finally arrived in El Chalten at about 6 in the morning after a very long 33 hours, and woke up to wind and rain. No-one had a clue where in El Chalten we´d all been dropped, but managed to find a hostel whose door was open so all piled in there. Luckily it was the one I´d emailed anyway, so I had a bed reserved. It´s actually turned out nice this afternoon, but this morning was dismal weatherwise. It looks a bit like North Wales on a bad day - slate grey sky. the town itself is tiny, and has only recently got internet (very slow) and an ATM. After a long bus ride together at least I´ve not met up with some other people to do some of the walks with, although I´m trying to decide whether to camp, or just make the most of the fact that you can do walks wihtin a day, and return to the hostel at night.

Had a brilliant few days walking in Bariloche in the end... I set off on my own on Saturday and walked to Refugio Frey - a fairly easy walk along well-marked, sandy tracks. The refugio was set on the edge of a beautiful blue lake. You could camp there too, but I paid for a bed in the dorm, which was one room in the upstairs of the hut, stuffed full of mattresses not only on the floor, but on a whole other layer above the first layer too. I paid to have dinner and breakfast there too, so as not to have to carry loads of food with me, and all in all it cost about 100 pesos for food and accommodation, about 25 quid, so expensive by traveller standards, but not too bad.

The second day I walked onwards towards Refugio San Martin at Lago Jakob, but the walking was much more difficult - some really steep ascents where at points I had to push my rucksack up ahead of me as I didn´t have the strength to hoist myself up whilst wearing it. I didn´t mind the ascents too much, but the descents were terrifying - there were some fun bits which were very steep but sandy, and you could almost ski on the sand, but there were other bits where I was literally on my hands and knees coming down the rocks backwards. I´d set off early in the hope that if anything happened to me at least there´d be people behind to help, and some did catch me up on the last descent - an Irish guy, Steve, and a gorgeous German guy, Julian, who was only 22 but worked as a paramedic whilst waiting to start a degree in medicine. If I had to be rescued by anyone he was the perfect candidate! They were camping and had a pretty miserable night, as, after a beautiful day the weather turned miserable - rianing, and really windy. They polished off a huge amount of food between them - first a whole packet of spaghetti and sauce, then the remains of a giant bowl of ravioli topped with meat stew that I got given as my dinner but couldn´t finish, then the best part of a whole other pack of spaghetti with more sauce - the rest they took in a ziplock bag for lunch the next day. It still looked like bad weather in the morning, so we all set off together, but the day turned out ok in the end. The walking was really easy compared to the previous day, mainly following a river which was really clear and had some parts which would have made great places to swim had the weather been even warmer. The end bit involved a long stretch back to the main road to get a bus back to Bariloche, but we were really lucky, and just as we were getting totally fed up of the monotony, a couple in a pick-up pulled up and gave us a ride all the way back to the town centre. Great fun, we all had big grins on our faces at this point!

I enjoyed doing most of the walk on my own, but was equally nice to meet up and have some company, and we went for some celebratory food when we got back, which turned into some celebratory beers in their hostel, and ended up as a bit of a late one. When I went to bed there was no-one in my dorm, but woke up feeling a bit rough in the morning to the dulcet tones of the person on the bunk below snoring, and a bare hairy arse sticking out of the duvet on the bunk opposite. Am getting too old for this dormitory malarky! At some point must treat myself to a really nice room somewhere and some decent food. Food here in El Chalten is pretty limited - very litle fresh fruit and veg, and what there is, isn´t great quality, so am having to be inventive to say the least.