Gourds, Fare Evasion and a Useless Snorkel

11th – 20th November, 2024

What would be the normal way to wind down after a 9 day hike through Patagonia? Would it be relaxing in cafes with coffee and cakes, catching up with family over WhatsApp that you haven’t spoken to in a while? Or perhaps it would be flying north to a pristine, caribbean paradise and putting your feet up while sipping rum out of a coconut and watching the dolphins cruise on by. What wouldn’t be normal would be catching an 8 hour bus and then walking another 50km over the next two days, but that’s precisely what we decided to do. 

We bussed it from Puerto Natales back into Argentina, and to a pretty crappy town called El Calafate, where we only stopped for a few hours while waiting for another bus to take us further north. We left our bags with a shopkeeper at the bus terminal and went for a short stroll around town to get some lunch and see what was going on. Without anything of interest happening, we started to make our way back towards the bus terminal when I saw an incredibly majestic dog walking around in a playground. The last words out of my mouth were “Look how majestic-” before I completely axed myself, walking face first into a steel pole on the footpath and knocking the sunglasses from my face. I connected with it so well that it still hurt my temple to open my jaw for months afterwards, and now I only admire dogs from a standstill. With an aching and tender face, we jumped back on the bus to go another few hours up the road to El Chalten.

As completely overhiked as we were, it was impossible not to enjoy the trails and absolutely insane landscapes on offer in El Chalten. An infamous hiker’s paradise, this part of Argentine Patagonia is truly breathtaking, and the town itself has a magic about it that makes it a very comfortable and enjoyable stop on the long road north. We also ate some really good pizza at Laborum, a pizzeria that was recommended by the hostel staff, which was probably the best food we’d eaten since arriving in South America. 

We stayed in a Hostel that dished out an incredibly sugar dense breakfast every morning, which we made sure to sneak into our collapsible containers for later on, and we got some handy tips from one of the staff on how to bypass the newly introduced fees at the trailheads. That’s right, all national parks all over Argentina started implementing entry fees around two weeks before we turned up, and they’re not cheap. For Rachael and I to get entry for ONE DAY into the Mount Fitz Roy walk we were looking at spending $75AUD, which obviously was not going to happen. Instead, we were shown a sneaky path around the ticket office which later linked up with the main trail. Apparently now they even check peoples’ tickets on the way out, just to make sure they didn’t somehow get into the park without paying, but our secret path worked a treat and the bastards got nothing out of me. I did feel slightly guilty about evading the fare, but upon hearing that the entire town of El Chalten is completely against the park fees, and reading the homemade signs in town of “la montaña es gratis para todos” (the mountain is free for everyone), I felt significantly less guilty. But what turned my retreating guilt into my typical resentment for unnecessarily imposed legislation was learning that the people at the ticket offices were being shipped in from other towns, and the money being collected did not go anywhere near the improvement or maintenance of the trails for which entry fees were being charged. 

Once you can look past the fact that the government is cashing in on what locals have been maintaining for decades out of their own pocket, the trails here are actually stunning. The walk up to Mount Fitz Roy is definitely the best hike I have been on in my entire life. Even though it’s a very long slog uphill to get to the final, very steep rock scramble to the top, a total climb of 700 metres, the 360 degree views are worth the effort. It’s hard to even know where to look once you’re up there. You’ve got the view of the valley back the way you came, Fitz Roy standing in all its glory in front of you with a glacial lake at its feet, or a huge drop to the left with another incredible glacial lake. It’s just so remarkably picturesque and overwhelmingly beautiful that it’s quite difficult to take it all in at once. If not for the howling wind, and the knowledge that we were only half way through the walk and we still had another 14km to go, we could have stayed up there for a very, very long time. 

A 28km hike sounds like a lot, and it is, but I can’t stress enough how much easier it is to hike without carrying all your camping gear. After 9 days on the O Trek, I felt light as a feather hiking in El Chalten, and the knowledge that a cold beer was waiting for me in town was all I needed to keep my spirits high when my feet did eventually begin to ache. Speaking of which, 50km over two days in the same pair of socks with the world’s sweatiest feet is a recipe for something truly abominable. The litres of sweat dried and solidified in my socks outside our room overnight, and when I went to put them on in the morning they were as dry and rigid as if they were made of cardboard. 

We also hiked Cerro Torre, a 15km return which was supposed to be a rest day, but these things happen in Patagonia. At least this one was less of a climb, but due to the fact that this hike was one of the few yet to have a ticket office planted at the trailhead, it was incredibly busy. It was still an enjoyable and very beautiful hike, even if not entirely a day of rest.

After our stay in El Chalten, we packed up and caught the bus back down to El Calafate, which seems to only exist as a setting off point for tours to a glacier called Perito Moreno, which is supposed to be incredible. We decided not to spend the exorbitant $450AUD each to see it, as we’d just seen an awesome glacier on the O Trek, and instead just visited a few bars and had a few average burgers for dinner. We stopped in El Calafate for the sole reason of being close to the airport, as our next destination was Bariloche to the north, and neither of us were particularly interested in sitting on a bus for 30 hours to get there, so we bit the bullet and flew instead.

Bariloche is infamous among Argentines for being one of the most expensive cities in the country (in the most expensive country on the continent), which is exactly not what we needed, but we’d heard of its elegance and natural beauty which made it somewhere we didn’t want to miss. We stayed at a hostel called ‘Moving Hostel Travel Bar’ that had a very weird vibe about it. It’s hard to put my finger on why, but some hostels just have this tense energy in the air which is very off putting, where no one makes eye contact with anyone and no one says anything to anyone, it’s just odd. The good part about a hostel that you don’t want to spend much time in is that you spend more time out and about in the town or city that you’re staying in, and we spent almost a week exploring Bariloche. 

We had dinner at a parrilla called Alto el Fuego, which gave us almost an appropriate amount of grilled meats considering what we payed, and was some of the better food we’ve eaten in Argentina. We also spent a good while looking for chocolate that didn’t cost more than a night’s accomodation in many different stores, as chocolate seems to be a very big deal in Bariloche. I walked to a barber shop to finally get my face cleaned up so I no longer looked like an abandoned wombat, and had a really great chat in Spanish with the fellow ginger that ran the place. I left with the realisation that my Spanish is improving, and I’m really enjoying learning to speak a new language. That, and now I’m able to lick my lips without getting a mouthful of moustache hair! 

In Bariloche we obviously hiked more, which was seriously taking its toll on me. The first hike we went on was a 14km loop where we got to walk around a peninsula and see from multiple vantage points a series of small islands and bigger mountains jutting out of Lago Nahuel Huapi in a mesmerising fjord-like fashion.

The second hike we did was Refugio Frey, an exhausting 11km and 900m climb up to and then back down from a frozen lake with small camping shelters made of rocks piled up in circular walls to shelter campers from the howling wind. Iconic, razor sharp mountain peaks surrounded the lake and extended out either side of the valley which we looked out upon while eating our avocado wraps. I fell asleep up here, resting my head against a rock and welcoming the warmth of the sun. The scenery on all trails here was gorgeous, but the effort of putting one foot in front of the other day in and day out began to allow intrusive thoughts into my head like “oh my god all I do on this continent is walk, there has to be more to my life than this”, which was extreme but I think I was just severely over-hiked and really needed to do anything else for a good while.

We spent half a day riding hired bikes around a popular cycling circuit which was pretty fun, and it was good to put down some decent kilometres without entirely relying on my aching feet for a change. On our bike trip we visited a small village called Colonia Suiza, which is a popular tourist destination established by Swiss immigrants in 1883. The village is particularly famous for Curanto, which is a method of cooking meats and veggies underground, but it takes fricken forever and costs a bomb so we didn’t stick around to try it. The bike circuit and all of the hikes were about an hour’s bus trip out of town, but we used this as a good time to start hitchhiking our way back into town of an afternoon, which was highly successful! We met some really nice people and practiced a great deal of Spanish on the drives back into town, which was far more enjoyable than standing in a crowded bus for an hour in the afternoon heat. 

It was around this time, however, that I began to fall into a bit of a slump. By this point we’ve been in South America for about six weeks, and I’ve developed a strong and a definite undeserving disdain for the far south of the continent. Never in my wildest dreams would I ever have imagined that traveling would begin to become unenjoyable, but I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with how little I really cared about some of the places we were visiting. 

One thing I was probably most excited about before leaving Australia was eating new things, but the food everywhere down here is total garbage and it’s all so crazy expensive, with the exception of just a couple of establishments we’ve eaten in. There are also alarmingly few animals getting around which has been really shocking. I was expecting abundant wildlife at every turn, but the only creatures resilient enough to brave the harsh patagonian conditions are those that are locked up behind fences; cows and sheep save for the small herds of guanacos, or the odd condor circling overhead. This, and I’m not that keen on hiking, so doing nothing but walk for the last few weeks has just made me feel like I’m spending a lot of money to be in a place with nothing I’m interested in just for the sake of making sure we don’t miss out on anything. 

Yes, the natural beauty in this part of the world is absolutely worth dealing with rubbish grub and paying through the teeth for literally anything, but we’ve seen it now, and I suppose it’s just high time we get to some warmer weather. Maybe we’ve been too long away from the ocean and I’m in dire need of utilising the snorkel I’ve been carrying around since we were in Spain. This is where I developed the mantra that would stick with us for a little too long on this trip; “We just have to keep getting north. It’ll be better once we get further north.”

As our time in Argentina’s South was drawing to an end, I was beginning to realise just how little culture there is in this part of the world. It seems that the only hint of any sort of culture we really stumbled upon in Southern Argentina was the psychopathic urge of the entire population to carry a thermos everywhere with them so that they are able to drink maté, a type of tea you drink through a metal straw from a hollowed out gourd. These lunatics are drinking this loose-leafed concoction at all hours in all places; on the train, in the desert, at music events and no doubt in the shower, seemingly unable to last more than a few minutes without succumbing to maté withdrawals and quite impressively pouring hot water from a thermos into gourd while balancing whatever else they’re carrying around. It is actually quite delicious, I sort of get it. There is, however, an art to preparing the perfect cup (gourd?) of maté, which I failed miserably the first time I tried to make it in our accommodation in Buenos Aires. After buying 500g of dried yerba-maté leaves, I quickly decided it definitely wasn’t for me, but upon receiving an offer from a bus driver in Ushuaia to try some of his, I realised that it can be pretty good. Yes. A random bus driver handed me a gourd with a straw and drank it. Sharing maté is the thing to do in Argentina, and much to what I’m sure would be the absolute disgust of my father, sharing straws with strangers isn’t even worth half a second’s thought.

Now, I’m completely aware of the painful whinging I’ve done in this blog post. I wanted to delete a decent chunk of what I’ve written, but I’ve decided to keep it to remind myself of how I felt in the moment. It’s only with the hindsight of a few month’s worth of time that I’m able to truly appreciate what we saw and experienced down here. These are definitely some of the most absolutely incredible landscapes I’ve ever seen. Enormous, sheer rock faces soaring above glacial lakes at the top of rugged mountains that protrude from the tree line. The narrow ridge lines of the Andes that clearly show how once horizontal planes of stone have been forced upwards, to eventually lie vertically at the absolute peaks of the mountain range is truly something special to behold. Having spent a few months away from the Andes, I can feel them summoning me to return. There is actually a small part of me that is looking forward to more hiking in Peru. Shocking, I know.

I think this is a good lesson in not expecting instant gratification from visiting a place. I wouldn’t change our 6 or so weeks in Patagonia for the world, it’ll forever be a special place to me. Doing those hikes with Rachael is something we’re both super proud of; getting to that remote part of South America and putting down those kilometres is no easy feat, and now, as I’m able to look back on this experience, the fact that the food was utter garbage is neither here nor there. The mountains more than make up for that.