El Chalten

We have arrived in a small place called El Chalten. It has around 600 inhabitants and 20'ooo visitors during high season, lying at 400 m above sea level (but feels like in the alpes). The main attraction apart from the lamas and guanacos standing on the main street, is the 3000 m high Fitz Roy massive for climbing, hiking and mounta¡neering activity. It is spring time now in Patagonia, meaning the warmest days can be around 10 degrees but due to the constant wind it does not feel at all like this.

The road to El Chalten is pretty spectacular as you can see from the picture. From El Calafate it takes around 4 hours to get here, half of the road unpaved tough.
The town is pretty sleepy, only a small supermercado available, some locutorios to do your phone calls and of course the usual number of hostels.

The past days I catched a cold in El Calafate. There were so many people sick in the hostel and sleeping in dormitories does not exactly help to prevent catching bacteria. We also found out about some of the usual Patagonian problems. El Calafate has some water supply problems, so it happened that we were cut from water during our stay. Of course living in the swedish forrest you get used to these things, but when we arrived in El Chalten electricity was cut for a couple of hours. We were really looking forward to our warm and clean double room (luxury for a backpacker!!!).
Shopping food is a challenge here as well. Basically you can buy what the truck delivers that day and this can be very, very different from day to day. Kerstin manages quite well on her own now in spanish (no one speaks english in the small shops here) but it took her yesterday 1/2 hour in the panaderia to make the people understand that we want our empanadas warmed. At the end, half of the village was involved in trying to translate from english to spanish.

The last two days Kerstin and I did only smaller tours to the mountains for 4 - 6 hours. Today she went on the "supertrekking" tour, approximately 12 hours, hiking, crossing glacier and ice climbing, leaving me to cook dinner and to recover from my cold.

The youth hostel here in El Chalten is a funny mixture between mountain hut, restaurant and hostel. Everyone meets here and exchanges tales about possible sightings of pumas ("you are lucky if you meet one"), the glaciers and the weather forecast. By 9 o'clock all those superactive people go to bed and the town is dead.

We will fly back to Buenos Aires on Tuesday, back to the warmer weather, meeting our new friends, the noise and the pollution...

Hasta luego
Tanja