After Neuquén I spend a few days hiking in the lakes district around Bariloche. It was pretty chill, I did some nice, short hikes around the lakes. No real stories to tell, but I´ll post some pics to give an idea of what I was up to.
From Bariloche, I keep going south to El Chaltén in the northern sector of the National Glacier park. It´s a 32 hour bus from on a less than luxurious bus. I´ve gotten really spoiled by the long term buses here and was expecting a big double decker bus with cushioned, fully reclining seats, a single seat so I didn´t have to sit next to anyone, breakfast, lunch, dinner, a pillow and a blankey at night. This was no such bus. It was a dumpy old coach bus and I was stuck in a narrow seat that was broken and only reclined about 20 degrees. I had to sit next to someone, a nice British guy, but still I would have rather sat alone. The bus traveled down the unpaved, rather bumpy Ruta 40, like the Argentine equivalent of Route 66. Someone tells me that it´s the road Che Guevara rode down on his motorcycle. That´s cool.
I spent 2 pretty sleepless nights on the bus before arriving in El Chaltén at 3am on Christmas eve. The bus just sits there until just before 6am when it continues south and I have to get out and go into the freezing cold. I had an hour and a half to kill before my hostel opened, so I hung out in the bus office, tired and cold.
I spent the day orienting myself and planning. I had a Christmas eve dinner of pasta and bread with an Irish mountaineer that I meet at the hostel. We sat around and exchanged stories of traditional Irish and American Christmases. Basically they are the same, except when we´re sitting around watching A Christmas Story, they´re at the pub. Earlier that day, I bought some special chocolate to celebrate- one is flavored with Calafate, a local berry, and is red, while the other is mint flavored and green. I planned to keep these to myself and bust them out on the trail tomorrow for Christmas, but in the spirit of the day, I shared them and my new friend shared his Christmas eve beer with me.
My plan for the next day, Christmas, was to set out on a 2 day, overnight hike through the park to the bases of Mt. FitzRoy and Cerro Torre. You can´t actually climb the mountains (well, you can, but people have died trying so you have to be a hardcore mountaineer).
When I wake up Christmas morning, it´s windy, rainy, cold and nasty- absolutely no weather for an overnight hike. I´m so tired that I just turn my alarm off and go back to sleep. When I wake up later, it´s sunny, so I quick get all my gear together and run out the door. The weather in this area is notoriously unpredictable, so as I´m making the half hour walk to the trail head, it clouds over and starts to rain again. I´m already miserable and feeling weighed down by my huge backpack, so I decide to break the hike up into two day hikes instead of an overnight.
This means that I have to walk back to the hostel to ditch my tent, sleeping bag, etc, so by the time I finally hit the trail, it´s 11am. It´s an 8 hour hike (9 and a half if I want to go to the lakes area), so I´m already feeling pressed for time and cranky.
It takes about 2 and a half hours for me to relax and start to enjoy where I am. It starts to snow, even though it´s the middle of summer down here, and I´m happy to have a white Christmas. I´m hiking through a valley and as I turn the corner, I see a glacier off in the distance, just a patch of bright blue ice stuck to the side of the mountain.
I hike to a lookout point directly across from the glacier and feel completely amazed. It looks so strange- kind of dry and brittle, like the consistency of astronaut ice cream. It´s got this increible light blue aqua color and I´m sure that, if I could get up close enough, it´d taste like blue raspberry.
The next day, I do the second leg of the hike to the Laguna Torre at the base of Cerro Torre. It´s a 6 hour hike that brings you to a glacier and a glacial lake that are surrounded by the mountains. The glacier is amazing, spilling down the mountain and into the milky green lake. The lake is in like a crater and I´m standing on the surrounding banks, looking down into it. All around are snow covered mountains. It starts to snow again and I don´t feel like I´m on earth again. I´m in some other, enchanted land and I never want to leave.
