El Chalten is the hiking capital of Patagonia, about three hours away from El Calafate, and where we spent two days hiking some incredible landscapes. We Couchsurfed again, and this time Florencia, a mother of three boys accepted my couch request. Our Spanish is a little rusty because almost everyone speaks English in the places we have been in the past three weeks. What happens is that we begin in our broken Spanish and when they notice that we struggle with it, they switch to English. So it was nice to be able to speak to Florencia in our broken Spanish and practice a little. We spent the night at her home, having a delicious dinner of home-made empanadas and afterwards watching the zombie movie her son Fernando made for a school project, which was pretty funny!
The
day we arrived, we spent about five hours doing a few short trails. A
highlight was the condor viewpoint at the top of a hill where you can
see the entire village and often see condors gliding through the sky.
Andean condors are large birds that are black and white and you can
often see them flying around the mountain peaks of Patagonia. We saw
several from the Perito Moreno glacier from far away and here we saw
three condors gracefully gliding through the sky with so little
effort. We immediately regretted not bringing the 100-400 mm lens
because we could have taken some great photos. Being there and seeing
them was enough!
The
next day we woke up early and left at 8am to see the peaks of Mount
Fitzroy. The most famous photographs of the Los Glaciares National
Park are of these peaks. El Chalten is a tiny village engulfed by
mountains named after Robert Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle, the
famous ship that surveyed the coast of Patagonia. There are many
beautiful trails to hike here and many climbers come to attempt to
climb the challenging peaks of Fitzroy. During the hike, we stopped
at several amazing look-out points, saw the Magellanic Woodpecker (I
wish we had the large lens again but we left it in Calafate) and
drank refreshing, cold glacier water from the stream. The last hour
of the trail was challenging and finally we got to the end, the top
of the Lago de los Tres trail where we saw a frozen lagoon, which was
a little bit of a let down. In summer, the lagoon is cobalt blue and
is supposed to be stunning to look at but that is the drawback of
coming in the Spring. Our plan was to eat lunch at the top but it was
pretty cold and icy so we headed back to a warmer spot to eat and
then started the walk back. When we finished the trail it was 4:30
pm, giving us just enough time to catch the 6 o'clock bus to
Calafate. El Chalten is definitely a special place for me (as most
of you know I am crazy about hiking) and one that I want to come back
to in the summer.
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