El Chalten

Trekking in Chile has opened our appetite. We are ready for some more. El Chalten offers us a wide range of treks in another beautiful setting, different from what we have seen before. The trees in this national park are amazing! We are not so lucky with the weather; the clouds have decided to hide Mount Fitz Roy, at least for the beginning of the day. We climb up a step slope for about an hour to reach Laguna de los Tres. Turquoise water and more glaciers await us. Pity that there are so many clouds though, but here is a photo taken by Anja the following day so we can imagine how it looks bathed in sunlight… On our way down, the sky suddenly clears up and Fitz Roy appears, majestically towering over the whole area. We stop at a lake to bathe our sore feet before returning to El Chalten and a delicious meal in a microbrewery. They serve little soups in home-made ceramic cups and have a separate vegetarian menu.

We haven’t seen a glacier up close yet, so that is what we want to do on our second day in El Chalten. Glacier Viedma can be reached by bus, then by boat. A huge wave splashes over my camera, but fortunately it survives. My truthful companion during this whole trip has seen it all, and has been through worse than this. Our guide explains everything very carefully: how the glacier brings all the dust and small rocks with it while advancing, which gives the grayish color to the water and also makes the glacier look dirty. We see the marks left by the glacier on the rocks, from when it covered more of the land. Then we attach crampons to our shoes and we get to walk on the glacier itself. How amazing are all the different ice formations? Here we see a giant crack with little blue frozen drops everywhere; there we see a tunnel through the ice. Some places the glacier seems like a landscape from a different planet and then there is a slope that looks like a beach. The ice twinkles like little stars. As a reward our guides serves us Bailey’s… on ice of course!

photos El Chalten