Leaving Argentina for a while (and a week since my last post) makes now a good time for an update. I’m currently hanging out in my hostel in El Chalten, waiting for the overnight bus that will leave me in Los Antiguos tomorrow morning. From there I’ll walk or hitchhike across the border to Chile Chico. After that I’m not exactly sure – Chile Chico is apparently a cute, tranquil town, and somewhere close are the marble caves, which look spectacular. I’ll be trying to make my way there and then just working my way north along the famous carretera austral, which is supposed to have tremendous scenery most of the way, hitchhiking or taking buses as I go.

This past week I’ve been in two towns in Argentina, El Calafate and El Chalten. They’re close to each other, and each sits next to a gigantic lake. I first spent two nights in El Calafate, which is a little bigger than El Chalten but still a small town. It has one main street with restaurants and bars, a nice walk along the lake (although the wind can be murder), and is mostly known for being the place from which to go see the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the most beautiful glaciers around. Unfortunately, through bad scheduling and general stupidity, I spent my day and a half there walking around the lake, checking out the town, and fighting with ATMs (more on that later), and did not, in fact, make it out to see the glacier. So that was pretty dumb, but I’ve looked at pictures, and hey, you can’t win ’em all. From El Calafate I caught a bus a few hours up to El Chalten, which is a tiny town nestled in the shadow of the famous Mt Fitzroy. The main attraction here is hiking – there are several good day hikes and a few camping opportunities right around here, and they all end up with various views of the dramatic mountains right outside of town.

My first day I took it easy and went for one of the shorter, flatter hikes. It was ok but the weather ended up cloudy and drizzly so when I got to the end you couldn’t see the mountains at all, which was a bummer. The next day, on the advice of some friends I met in Ushuaia, I went ice climbing (!), which was fantastic. We took a boat across Lake Viedma to the Viedma glacier, where the first task was learning to walk with crampons. I’m no crampon expert but these were serious, murderous crampons, and it took a little getting used to, although after a while I felt pretty comfortable with them – they sure do give you grip on ice. After that we went to a kiddie wall and busted out the axes for our first lesson, before progressing to bigger and bigger walls. I had been a little bit afraid that we weren’t going to get to climb much since the refund policy (which was the first thing they talked to me about after I paid…) stated that they considered the activity complete if we did a single climb, but my misgivings turned out to be unfounded. The weather was gorgeous all day and we ended up getting in 2 or 3 climbs on each of 4 walls. I was more than satisfied, and really exhausted by the end. That night I was very, very tired and felt a little strange – I couldn’t decide if it was sunburn, dehydration, getting sick, or a little of everything.

The next day I hiked to the Laguna de Los Tres, which sits right up against Mt Fitzroy. It was a little cloudy in the morning and I was afraid it was going to be like my first hike, but by the afternoon the clouds were gone and I was treated to some really spectacular views. On the way back I was, again, extremely tired, and by the time I got back to the hostel I was totally exhausted and had a bit of a cough. So I think I caught something here in El Chalten, and I spent yesterday and today just sitting around the hostel resting. Yesterday I was still feeling very tired and headachey but today I feel a bit better, so hopefully that continues in spite of my overnight bus ride tonight. Either way I’ll be getting plenty of rest going forward and I’m sure I’ll be feeling better soon. So not to worry my dear, loving family – I proooobably will not die of some mutant super combination of Zika, Chikungunya, and Malaria. But seriously, I will be keeping a close eye on it and I’ll get myself checked out if things get worse. I’m pretty sure it’s just a quick flu though and I’ll be feeling normal in a few days.

My feelings about Patagonia thus far are mixed. On the one hand I’ve always been fascinated by the area and the landscapes truly are dramatic and beautiful. There are tons of outdoor activities (lots that I didn’t even try – 4 wheeling, kayaking, horseback riding) and the hiking is top notch. So for all of that it has really lived up to my expectations. What, in retrospect, I obviously should have realized beforehand is that an area this remote will also have its tradeoffs. Many of the towns don’t have a whole lot going on. Decent fruits and vegetables can be hard to get ahold of, and the food has been largely unremarkable, with the exception of some king crab in Ushuaia. There’s sort of a closed loop of tourism that goes Ushuaia – Torres del Paine – El Calafate – El Chalten, so you end up seeing a lot of the same people, or at least a lot of the same type of people, and it wasn’t really the type that I tend to connect with, so I mostly spent time by myself. And good lord, getting money in Argentina. Some of you may be familiar with the blue dollar, the alternative exchange rate that existed while the Argentinean government was artificially inflating the value of its currency. The new president (elected, I believe, only a month or two before I arrived) got rid of that and let the currency float, so the trick isn’t finding people to change money anymore, and going to ATMs isn’t a complete robbery. But it’s still really bad! The fees are some of the highest I’ve seen, about 6 bucks per transaction, but the transaction limit is the real crime – many ATMs only let you withdraw less than 70 dollars per transaction. So that’s a 10% fee, and it gets worse! It’s not at all uncommon for ATMs to simply be out of money, especially on weekends, so you end up hunting around town for one that still has money. And then, one particular network of ATMs has a bizarre problem – asking for too much money gets you a reply that you’re exceeding your limit, but then asking for an appropriate amount of money, one chosen from the options on the screen, gets you a message that you’ve entered an invalid amount. It’s not a huge deal but it’s an annoyance I hadn’t even thought about, and given that a lot of places in Argentina don’t take credit cards it’s enough to drive you insane.

Overall I’d have to say my quibbles are mostly small things adding up, and I’m very happy that I made it down here to see the end of the world, to backpack around for 8 days, and to see the wonderful landscapes. I’m ready to push on to a change of scenery but I wouldn’t hesitate to come back.

That’s about it for now! I’ll check back in soon, hopefully with some beautiful pictures of marble caves!

P.S. I’m posting this late because the entire town of El Chalten has internet on a satellite link, making it the slowest internet I have ever used. I could intermittently send messages on WhatsApp but loading webpages was out of the question. So I’m posting from Chile Chico and missing my deadline, but in my heart I’m still a winner.