From Argentina to Chile

May 15, 2024April 29, 2024 / Maria / Leave a comment

We returned to El Calafate after an epic 3 days hiking the Sendero al Fitz Roy in El Chalten. We only had a two-day break before starting our second major hike – 5 days in Torres del Paine National Park. I must admit, these two days were a bit miserable for me. I had caught a cold a few days before and it peaked on our time off. Honestly, it was better than dealing with a cold on the trail, but I was a bit irritable in between.

It’s a 1.5-hour drive from El Calafate to Perito Moreno glacier, which is one of the biggest attractions in the town. Interestingly, both the Sendero al Fitz Roy and Perito Moreno Glacier are located in Los Glaciares National Park, which extends along the border throughout the mountains. Both attractions are extremely popular destinations for tourists, but while Fitz Roy is free to camp and hike, Perito Moreno has a 10,000ARS ($10USD) entrance fee.

Perito Moreno is very well developed as a tourist attraction, with a large visitor centre and several kilometres of extremely well maintained boardwalk extending along the hillside to provide viewing balconies for the glacier. It really bothered me to pay for Perito Moreno and not Fitz Roy. The facilities on the Sendero al Fitz Roy are in terrible condition (I’m mostly talking about the outhouses), and I really wish the government would charge campers $10 a night to upgrade some of the park facilities along the trail. The environment really needs it!

Our driver dropped us at the trailhead for the glacier balconies and we spent several hours walking the boardwalk and viewing the glacier. The weather was drizzling, but it wasn’t full on raining and it started and stopped a lot. The trail was quite empty when we arrived, which was surprising, but I think we were ahead of all the big tour buses, as it did get more crowded later, although it was never overwhelming.

Perito Moreno glacier is unlike any glacier I’ve ever seen. It’s a massive ice sheet that comes down through the mountains from the larger Southern Patagonia Icefield. The glacier extends all the way to the lake, where it discharges into Lago Roca and Lago Argentino (which is right next to El Calafate). The ice extends almost to the walkways, so you’re incredibly close to it! Until 2020, the glacier had remained constant for 100 years, meaning it was neither growing or receding, but it has started to recede since 2020. It has a large impact on the water level in the lakes and can cause flooding in years where there is a high melt.

We spent a few hours walking the boardwalks and watching icebergs calve off from the sheet. You can pay to take a boat out into the lake to get slightly closer to the ice, but you’re so close already, I don’t regret saving our money and lazing around at the balconies. There is a visitor centre with food, but there’s no food available along the boardwalk, so we had brought lunch with us and enjoyed it along some of the benches.

We spent about 3 hours at the balconies in total and then got picked up by our driver. I slept on the way back to town again, while Seth continued to count rhea and guanaco through the window. I decided that I wanted to eat guanaco before leaving the desert and Seth found us a “hip” restaurant with guanaco burgers that turned out to be a dingy pub. Unfortunately, the burger was very disappointing, but I blame the restaurant more than the animal. It was decidedly not hip, but at least I got to try something new on our final day in Argentina.

The next day we had to take a 6-hour bus across the border to Chile. In classic Maria fashion, I didn’t sleep well because I was up all night worrying about missing our bus. This resulted in us getting up early and waiting around for a bus that obviously left late. I was a little bit nervous about crossing into Chile because I had read online that their border control is very strict. We’d dehydrated all our own food for the trip, which was a pleasure to eat on the trail, so I really didn’t want to get it confiscated at the border. Argentina didn’t care at all about what we brought in, but because Chile has a big agricultural industry, they ask you to declare all food. If you don’t, you may not get caught, but if you do, you could be facing large fines. So if in doubt, declare.

To make my dehydrated food look more legit, I actually heat sealed everything into those little foil lined bags used for loose leaf tea, and created fancy labels for each packet. The vibe I was going for was “farmer’s market, but commercially sealed”. It ended up being overkill as no one even bothered to look at it. I wonder if the border guards may have been interested if I entered through an airport, but they don’t even make you take your luggage off the bus when you cross by road.

We did have to get off the bus and put all our day bags through screening, and a border agent inspected the inside of the bus, but no one checked any of the luggage (although the hold may have gotten a sniff test from a border dog). We still declared what we had, but when I said it was “dried hiking food”, they didn’t ask any more questions. I could have saved myself a ton of time on the packaging and just used Ziploc bags like I normally do. They seem to mostly be interested in confiscating any fresh fruit or vegetables. Several people did have fruit in their bag that they did not declare, which got taken, but no one on our bus got fined. It seemed like very normal border control to me, and not scary like what I’d read online.

We arrived in Puerto Natales in the late afternoon, which is the jumping off point for anyone visiting Torres del Paine National Park. It’s an interesting town. It was similar in size to El Calafate, but it had a much different vibe. El Calafate had the feel of a town that was built around tourism, whereas Puerto Natales felt like a town that tourism happened to. We selected our guesthouses based on proximity to the bus depot, so in both instances, it was a walk to get to town, but somehow it felt a lot further in Puerto Natales. The town didn’t feel quite as welcoming to me, although there were a lot less stray dogs (I’ve never seen more stray dogs anywhere than in El Calafate)!

Our guesthouse in Puerto Natales was top notch and had the comfiest king sized bed! After dropping off our gear, we had a lot of errands to run. We’d eaten all of our food from Argentina (to avoid crossing the border with it), so we had to stock up on snacks and breakfast food for our Torres del Paine trek. I’d read online before the trip that it’s easy to find hiking food locally and to not bother bringing your own, but I’m so glad we did! It was so hard finding breakfast and snack food that was filling, enjoyable to eat, and lightweight; I was so glad I didn’t also have to find 5 days’ worth of lunches and suppers! We spent a long time at the grocery store trying to find enough snacks for our week long hike, and it was chaotic because we didn’t have a coin for the shopping cart, so we were forced to run around the store with armloads of food.

Eventually I piled enough food into Seth’s arms that I figured we wouldn’t starve on the trail (obviously we ended up buying way more than we needed) and we went in search of dinner. Everyone eats late in Argentina and Chile and a lot of the restaurants don’t open until 7pm. I wanted to be asleep by 9pm and we still had to re-pack, so we walked around until we found a nice little spot that was open. It was a good meal, but the staff didn’t speak any Spanish so I ended up with something very different than what I thought I’d ordered. I thought I was getting grilled white fish (which is a comfort food for me and I was still sick), but I ended up with the most ridiculous mixed seafood platter. On any other day, I would have been pumped to eat it, but it wasn’t really a “eat mystery seafood” kind of day for me. Fortunately, it was tasty and it ended up being fine.

Seth on the other hand, had ceviche. It was a delicious meal and he savoured every minute of it, but it was many a little too ambitious for his travelling stomach on the day before a major hike. He ended up regretting it the following day (if you catch my meaning). Fortunately, there was no issue that evening and we returned to our guesthouse to repack all our food and bags to start our 5-day trek on the W-circuit the following morning! Check back next week to read about the trek!

Sendero al Fitz Roy Backpacking Trip Part III

May 8, 2024May 8, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

Continued from Part II. On day 3, we set our alarms for 5am to start our sunrise hike up to Lago de los Tres. However, the campground was extremely crowded and other hikers started getting up as early as 3am to prepare for their sunrise hike (and they were not quiet)! I mentioned in my previous post that I really didn’t like Poicenot Campground. People were noisy and partying late into the night and just generally disrespectful. We ended up starting our hike at 4:45am because we were awake anyways.

Unfortunately, the clouds had rolled in overnight and it was even drizzling a little bit when we started walking. The clouds were pretty high, so you could still see all the lower elevation mountains, but the top of Mount Fitz Roy was hidden. It’s an interesting experience to hike to the top for sunrise because you have to do pretty much the entire trek in the dark. It’s only 2km of hiking, but there’s 400 metres in elevation gain, so it’s very steep. You walk for a couple hundred metres on flat ground and you can see a steady trail of light criss-crossing the rockwall ahead of you where people are climbing. It’s not for the faint of heart!

Like usual, I think I was running half on adrenaline. The rain didn’t really last and we ended up layering down once we started the climb. Eventually, I layered down to just a t-shirt, but I had to add every single layer back the second we got to the top because it was so cold! We ate some protein bars and took a lot of breaks on the way up, but Seth struggled with the steep climb. I felt like we were going really slow, but our pace was fine and we got to the top around 6:45am (with sunrise shortly after 7am). So it was ~2 hours of hiking for just 2km.

The top of Mount Fitz was in the clouds, but you could see everything else. It is quite a beautiful view and the sky was just starting to get light when we summited. But like I said, it was absolutely freezing! We quickly layered up into all our clothes and Seth made us hot oatmeal for breakfast. I mentioned in my last post about how Lago de los Tres and Laguna Torre are so iconic at sunrise because the sun comes up on the opposite horizon, turning Mount Fitz Roy orange at dawn. I experienced this at Laguna Torre, but we didn’t get the full ‘orange mountain’ thing at Lago de los Tres because the sun rose directly into the clouds. It peeked out for a few minutes now and then and would light up the mountain a little bit. So if we’d reversed the trip and done Lago de los Tres on the first morning, I think we would have nailed it, but weather is fickle and we still had excellent conditions, all things considered.

The lake is packed with people at sunrise, but as soon as it’s over, the crowds disperse really quickly because of the cold. We still had to hike all the way back to town to catch a bus to El Calafate, but I didn’t want to rush our visit at the lake too much, so we hung around for about an hour exploring the lake. There’s a second viewpoint next to the lake that you can hike up (only takes about 10 minutes), and that lookout had a fantastic view of Laguna Sucia. So we got to see what we’d missed the previous evening and Seth was adamant that the trail looked like it would have been a struggle (which I think he is right about if you attempt this one in the future).

As tough as it was hiking up the mountain, it’s worse hiking down. I think we left around 9am and returned to the campsite to pack up the rest of our equipment. The hike down was pretty hard on my knees and irritated them for the rest of the day. However, the remainder of the hike seemed to pass in a bit of a blur. I believe there was a bus at 2:30pm and 3pm, and then no more until 6pm, so we really wanted to catch the 3pm bus at the latest. Which meant we had to hustle for the rest of the hike.

Once you leave the campground, the trail is pretty flat for ~5km to Laguna Capri. Our walking pace was really fast, but it was still slow going because the trail is SO crowded with day hikers. It can be narrow in some parts and you have to wait for people to pass often, so that slowed us down. The weather cleared up throughout the day and it was quite nice, but the clouds never did clear from around Mount Fitz. We stopped at Laguna Capri for lunch, which is the last big lake on the trek, but opted not to swim in the interest of time.

The rest of the hike from Laguna Capri was much more beautiful than I was expecting. Overall, the entire 3 days of hiking was very scenic. I thought it would just be forested, but the last 5km of the trail follows the canyon back to El Chalten and has sweeping views down the valley, so it was a very different vibe than the rest of the park. You feel like you’re coming out of the mountains towards the desert; it was a cool vibe and I enjoyed the walk down, even if my legs were killing me.

By far, the worst part of the trek was the 1.5km of hiking through town at the end. The bus station is located on the complete opposite end of town from where the trail starts, so it was brutal having to pound down the asphalt after 14km of hiking. We had to rush and made it to the bus station just in time to get a ticket! I pretty much passed out on the bus for the entire 3 hour ride back to El Calafate, but Seth had a fun time trying to count how many rheas’ he could spot running through the desert (a big bird like an emu)!

We returned to the same guesthouse and had a bit of a chaotic welcome back when we realized that our guesthouse did not have the advertised laundry services we were depending on and that my credit card had bounced our tour to Perito Moreno Glacier the following day and so they had cancelled our tour. To top it off, I had clearly started developing a cold while on the trek. The entire hike I tried to convince myself my throat was just dry from the desert air, but I had to finally admit I was getting sick.

Thank god for teamwork. I showered while Seth figured out an alternative option for doing laundry (which was desperately needed), and then while he showered, I found a replacement tour for the following day. I think things actually turned out better in the end. Our new tour was private (we basically just paid a guy to drive us to the glacier and wait for us), which had the benefit of a later start time, allowing us to catch up on sleep. Seth found a drop-off laundromat, and we dropped off everything on our way to town for dinner, with a pick-up time for the following day. We treated ourselves to a nice meal in El Calafate and enjoyed the Calafate berry ice cream for dessert! The town is obviously named for the berry, which is common in this region. If you eat a calafate berry, legend is that you are destined to return to Patagonia! I feel pretty confident I’ll be back, with or without eating the berry, but the ice cream was tasty! We tracked down some cough drops and tissues for me to manage my cold, and then hit the sack for the night! Check back next week to read about our visit to Perito Moreno!

Sendero al Fitz Roy Backpacking Trip Part I

April 24, 2024May 1, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

While it was super fun to visit Buenos Aires and Ushuaia, let’s be real – I came to Patagonia to hike. There are lots of options for hiking in both Argentina and Chile, but there are really two quintessential trips that everyone wants to cross off their bucket list and most of the tourists we met were all doing some variation of the same trip. Those hikes are Torres del Paine in Chile and Sendero al Fitz Roy in Argentina.

Since we started in Argentina, Mount Fitz Roy was the first hike on my list and I was ecstatic to finally go backpacking. Unlike Torres del Paine, which has two circuits that most people follow, Mount Fitz Roy is really more of a collection of hikes that you can make your own custom itinerary for. Mount Fitz Roy is located in the Andean foothills near the Argentina-Chile border in Los Glaciares National Park. Most people don’t climb the mountain itself as that is a major mountaineering objective, but it can be viewed from many different trails within the park. Most trails are accessible from El Chalten, which is a tiny mountain town that pretty much exclusively caters to hikers visiting the mountain.

The hike to Lago de los Tres is THE hike to do if you want to get the best view of Mount Fitz Roy. It’s roughly 11km each way to hike to the lake, so it’s usually done either as a big day hike (with accommodations in El Chalten), or as part of a backpacking trip (camping in the park). There are several other hikes in the park that can be combined with this hike to extend your trip, with the second most popular being the trail to Laguna Torre. While I easily could have spent an entire week hiking around El Chalten, I decided on a 2 night, 3 day trek to visit both Lago de los Tres and Laguna Torre.

The convenient part of our itinerary was that we didn’t need to book any accommodations. Unlike Torres del Paine, which has a mandatory reservation system that fills up months in advance, you can camp for free in Los Glaciares National Park with no pre-planning. This has some pretty big cons, which I’ll get into later in the post, but it’s definitely convenient. Accommodations in El Chalten are pretty limited, but it’s only a 3 hour bus ride from El Calafate, so we planned our entire visit around the bus schedule and didn’t stay in El Chalten at all.

We left El Calafate on the 8am bus and had a very scenic ride through the desert to El Chalten. We saw lots of guanaco along the ride and even some rhea (which is a big bird like an ostrich or emu). We arrived in El Chalten at 11am and immediately started hiking. Laguna Torre and Lago de los Tres can be done as a loop trail measuring ~45km in total. You can go in either direction; the two campsites you’ll stay at are Agostini and Poicenot. Agostini is located right next to Laguna Torre, while Poicenot is 2km before Lago de los Tres and has 400m in elevation gain (so it’s a considerable climb from the campground).

My planned itinerary was to hike to Laguna Torre on day 1, hike to Lago de los Tres on day 2, and back down to El Chalten on day 3. I hadn’t planned for any sunrise hikes, which is why I planned to start with Laguna Torre. We ended up hiking to both lakes for sunrise, which means I had to do the climb up to Lago de los Tres on my final day (making for a long day and fast hiking to catch our bus), so if I had my time back, I would have done the hike in the opposite direction. But we still had a fantastic time!

Like I said, we got off the bus and pretty much immediately started hiking. It was ~10km from the bus to Agostini Campsite. We were super lucky with the weather and quickly switched to shorts and t-shirt after we started hiking. We could only get away with this because it was a blue sky day and the presence of the sun makes a huge difference in the air temperature. The trek starts with a hike up through the canyon to Mirador Cascada Margarita and then on to Mirador Cerro Torre, which is approximately halfway to the campground. It’s a steady uphill hike until you reach Cerro Torre, but it’s pretty flat after that, so we decided to stop at the viewpoint for lunch.

This was where we had our first experience with the park outhouses. Normally I don’t have a lot to say about outhouses – they’re generally never nice – but the latrines in Los Glaciares National Park were probably the worst I’ve ever used. They’re pit toilets, which I don’t have a problem with, but they were all in extremely poor condition. Some of them were almost full to the top with waste, the structures were rotting away, and the metal plate that separates the structure from the pit looked in danger of collapsing in some of them.

The park, and this trail in particular, receives thousands of visitors a year, so they really need to invest in replacing the outhouses. They’re so gross that most people were not using them and just going in the woods. That’s fine when people properly bury their waste, but the park receives so many visitors (and so many inexperienced backpackers) that it’s not sustainable for the well-being of the park to be without usable toilets. It’s amazing that you can hike and camp in the Park for free, but I would happily pay $10 a night for a permit if it meant the latrine situation could be improved. It was shameful in my opinion. That’s my rant – I’ll shut up about it now!

After lunch, we continued to the campsite. The second half of the hike was much easier than the first half and you have a pretty incredible view of the back of Mount Fitz Roy the entire time. The one tip I would give to other hikers is to make sure you fill up your water carriers at the river ~1km from the campsite. The Rio Fitz Roy runs right past the campsite, but it’s extremely silty and will easily clog up your filter, but there’s a great drinking water source at the bridge crossing the creek 1km before the campsite. Most people weren’t filtering their water, but we filtered everything we drank, especially once we discovered the outhouse problem and that people are just shitting next to the river at the campsite without digging catholes.

The campsites are pretty bare bones. They’re nice in that there is lots of room for tents, but there is very limited privacy. The Poicenot Campground is a nightmare because of the volume of people and the limited amount of camping experience the average visitor has, but I didn’t mind the Agostini Campground at Laguna Torre. It was reasonably busy, but it didn’t feel too crowded. I felt that most of the people there had previous backpacking experience and were considerate and respectful of the other campers and LNT practices. This was not the case at Poicenot Campground, but more on that later.

We found a nice site for our tent and then packed our bags for day hiking and set off to Laguna Torre. It’s only a 5-10 minute walk from the campsite to the lake. It was still sunny when we arrived at the lake, so I immediately decided to go for a swim. No one else was swimming and I knew it would be cold, but I have a lot of cold water pride as a Canadian, so I couldn’t resist going in the water. It was cold, but no colder than the glacial lakes in BC. Swimming isn’t permitted in Torres del Paine, so I’m glad I took the opportunity to swim at Los Glaciares!

The lake is extremely silty, so it’s kind of an ugly grey colour, but it has an incredible view of Mount Fitz Roy and the glacier. Plus, it has a ton of glacial ice floating in the lake, so it was really cool to swim with the bergy bits (something I’ve only actually done one other time in BC). After my swim, I was determined to continue hiking to Mirador Maestri. The lake is surrounded by a large moraine that was deposited by the glacier in the past, so you can hike up to the top of the moraine and then circle around to the back of the lake where you get a better view of the glacier.

I think Seth would have happily skipped this part, but he was a good sport and accompanied me up the moraine. It’s ~5km round trip to the viewpoint, but because you can see the full trail the entire time you’re hiking, it seems closer than it is. It’s also a steady uphill, so eventually Seth lost interest and decided to hang out on the rocks and look at wildflowers while I finished the hike up to the viewpoint. I didn’t quite make it to the end of the hike, but I made it up to a natural crest in the topography and got a fantastic view of the back of the glacier! It took me ~1 hour to get there (2 hours round trip), but I definitely hustled. I would give yourself a solid 2.5-3 hours to do the full hike and properly enjoy it.

We raced the sun back to the lake and it set behind the mountains shortly after we got to the lake. As soon as the sun went down, it immediately got a lot colder and we quickly bundled up in all our layers, including our puffy jackets. But we still enjoyed eating our dinner at the lake before returning to the campground to go to sleep. Like I said, I hadn’t planned on doing any sunrise hiking, but the campground is so close to the lake that I knew I had to at least hike up to Laguna Torre for sunrise (but was still undecided whether I would do it for Lago de los Tres). So we went to bed pretty early and I set my alarm in time to get up for sunrise the following morning. It was cold overnight, so you should definitely come prepared for that, but I was warm in my -7 degree quilt and puffy jacket.

Check back next week for Part II!