Cueva de las Manos

For all you travelers out there planning on going to Patagonia one thing to keep in mind is how expensive it is. Buses, hostels, entrance and exit fees, and food, all add up very quickly. One way that we have saved a bunch of money is by hitchhiking. Thank goodness we have been blessed by generous travelers.

After El Chalten we wanted to head north so we set out to find a ride. Another tip for travelers is it is very helful to have a femal with you while hitchhiking because people always stop to pick up girls, they are less intimadating and face it girls rock ;). Mike usually sits on the side of the road by our stuff while I work the thumb.

After only being out on Route 40 for about 15 minutes a fabulous truck stoped and offered us a ride to our next destination which was 12 hours away. Thank you Leo and Maria fro Chile. Can you imagine riding in a car for12 hours with people you just met? Well we did and it was great!

Route 40 is the only road that stretches up the western side of Argentina. It´s a nortorious road because it´s unpaved, extremly muddy after rain storms, and you can only go around 50 - 60 kilometer per hour. The ride was bumby and made me extremly car sick but we were happy to have a ride. The surroundins are also very dull, long stretches of bush fields, a random mountain here and there, and guanacos.  

About 3/4 the way up to Perito Moreno there is a historical site called Cueva de las Manos (cave of the hands). We had planned to stop by along our way, because Maira really wanted and we were in not rush, but it was closed. We were happy just to continue driving to our destination but Maria insisted that we slept over night and go the next day. We ended up camping over a night in a very small run down truck stop and then waking up early in the morning to go.

This is the valley where Cueva de las Manos is. It is believed that thousands of years ago a civilization lived down in this valley. This valley was the perfect set up because it had fertile soil, a fresh water river running throuh it, and much game to hunt.

On the side of one of the walls there are hundreds of hand prints made by various colors, manily red, black, and white made from guanaco poo, glay, water, and blood. The interesting thing is that they didn´t dip their hands in paint and then press them against the wall instead they used (theroletically) a straw of some sort to suck up paint and them blow the paint around there hand. They believe that their hand prints were a type of sign in book kinda like the ones you find at weddings stating, yep I have been here.

Here is fabulous Leo and Maria.

The hand prints have been preserved because the rock mountain hangs over so no rain and little sun gets to it.

Yeah buddy, the cave of the hands

If you look closely you can see the guanaco (part of the lama family) painted on the side of the wall. They have many drawings of hunters chasing and killing the guanacos. The paintings are a story or history of the people, there valley, and the game they hunted.

Yes, we got to wear these sexy helmets.

All of the hands painted besides a couple were of the left hand significing that the majority of the people were right handed. In this picture you can see one of the very few right hands that were painted. On the wall they also found a six fingured hand print.

Overall the cave was very cool 

As we were leaving the cave we were fortunate enough to drive by a bunch of gauchos (cowboys) rounding up sheep. When you see gauchos you gain of sense of what this country used to be like. They dress very traditional liked they stepped out of the 1800´s.

After 15 hours of driving (took a bit longer because there was a huge rain storm making the dirt roads muddy and extremly slippery; nultiple times I thought I was going to die), one night sleeping in the middle of no where, and visiting Cueva de las Manos we made it to our destination.

A huge THANK YOU to Maira and Leo!

El Chalten

 An extremely small city, basically one main road, known for the famous Mt. Fitz Roy a climbers slice of heaven. We arrived by bus and spent 5 days finding random camping sites, fishing, hiking through the forest, getting extremely sick, and hitchhiking.

Our bus arrived at 11 pm and Mike and I had no place to sleep so off we went trekking through a "no camping" zone to find a place to set up tent. Lucky we found a cute little spot surrounded by trees to hide our tent and right next to the river so we could get fresh water and fish.

When we woke up in the morning, due to the blaring sun, this is the beautiful view we were welcomed with. The moon was still shinning and Mt. Fitz Roy was glowing with warmth.

Fly fishing is a sport that Mike and I have grown to love, here I am doing my thing. In Patagonia there are hundreds of rivers and lakes, a fishers paradise.

Way to go Mike! Unfortunately, he was just a little to small :)

This is my favorite little guy of all times, the bowling ball frog (not his official name just one I came up with :). His defense mechanism, as far as we could tell, when someone or something got to close to him or touched him was to pull his little arms and legs close to his body and tuck his head, kinda resembling a turtle. It was seriously the cutest thing!

For anyone traveling through Patagonia hitchhiking is the way to go. Fortunately, we have had great success, the people who pick us up are usually other travelers from other Providences in Argentina and Chile. We love trucks because you can just jump in the bed and you don't cramp their style.

We give a shout out and HUGE thank you to the many many rides we have gotten and the generosity of the drivers for picking us up :)

We got a ride to the backside of Mt. Fitz Roy where we did some more hiking, camping, and fishing. Even in the summer there is snow on the mountains down here and it gets pretty chilly at night.

This was the beautiful lake we went to, lago del disierto .

Funny but disgusting story: El Calafate is named after the "El Calafate berry" that grows everywhere, they kind of look like blue berries. El Chalten is also filled with these berries so Mike and I picked a bunch and had the berries for dessert after dinner one night. I will save you the disgusting details but about 6-8 hours later we were woken in the night with paralyzing cramps followed by bathroom explosions. Since we were camping (and there are no toilets) the forest got it! Our bodies did not like these berries and so they exported them back to the forest.

Note to travelers: be careful when eating something for the first time your body may not be as found as your palate

El Calafate - Perito Moreno

A day at one of the largest glaciers in Argentina, Perito Moreno.

When Mike and I bought our tickets to Perito Moreno we thought that we would spend a couple of hours exploring the glacier and then head on to our next destination. Wow, were we terribly mistaken! The bus services comes twice. Once to drop off at 10 am and once to pick up at 5 pm, yes folks that is 7 hours of staring at a freaking glacier.  For the first 2 hours we were pretty enchanted by the sheer size of the thing, the continual ice chunks falling off and crashing into the ocean, and the amazing cold icy blue color but seriously 7 hours was WAY to long.

 

There are these maze of stairs that take you to several different views of the glacier, seriously this thing was gigantic.

Little story: When we got off the bus in the morning there was this little older lady traveling from Turkey, who didn't speak Spanish and hardly spoke English, who asked if she could follow around with us for the day. Of course we said yes. Throughout the day she explained to us, multiple times, how amazing her country and city were and how we needed to come to Turkey and stay with her (she gave us her address, email address, and phone number). Her sales pitch about Turkey was very persuasive and it is a place were Mike and I would love to go, Eastern Europe. Why is it that everyone thinks "their country/city/place of residence" is the best even in reality it may not be? I am not saying that Turkey is not all that and a bag of chips I am just saying that people are naturally bias.

Now it's time for Glacier Love 

(we have 7 hours of pictures of practically the same thing so here are a couple that we liked)

On the far right of the glacier you can see where a huge ice chunk just fell into the water

Torres del Paine 

Part II

Day 5 Quickie but goodie - Yeah, day 5 was fabulous we were able to sleep in, take our time packing our tent and eat lunch before we started because we had a nice short hike of only 3 hrs 6 km. This part of the trek was by far the easiest the only difficult parts about is were these steep (poorly maintained) ladders, muddy swamps, and another little fall :)   

 

Along the trail there was this beautiful view up one of the river. The mountains here are amazing; there is a wide variety, you have your traditional mountains covered with trees, then you have your steep rocky pointed mountains, and finally you have your straight rock wall cliff looking mountains. 

Yes, it happened again, I fell in the bushes, unfortunately this time my hand landed in a big muddy puddle. Mike was laughing hysterically :)

Tip for hikers: if you're going to do the circuit bring trekking poles with you. The hike is much easier with poles (especially if you lose your balance easily :). Thank goodness Mike found us these really awesome walking sticks.

Day 6 Third campsite is the winner - 22 1/2 km 7 1/2 hrs of hiking. We passed two campsites, both of which you had to pay to sleep in, before we made it to the third campsite which which was free. This day was long but the weather was extremely beautiful and the trail was not to demanding so overall, it was a very enjoyable day.

Floating out in the water, pretty far away from the main glacier, there was this gorgeous blue ice burg. It reminded my of titanic for some odd reason and yes it's pretty windy, check out my flying hair.

More spectacular views

Blessings from above: The second campsite we passed was by far the nicest campsite on the whole circuit; due to the fact that it's right on the port where all the ships come to drop off people who are just doing the "W" part of the trek and the fact that you had to pay to sleep there. So we decided that since it looked like a great area it would be a great place to relax for a bit and enjoy lunch.

The campsite was awesome and huge. It had a hotel, restaurant, huge area filled with tents, big bathrooms with running hot water and showers, a little store to buy food, and a huge kitchen for all the campers. In the kitchen they even provided gas to cook your food. The kitchen also had a blessings shelf aka: a shelf where other travels leave food that they don't want. Mike and I took some blessings and had a delicious meal (oatmeal with milk and real sugar, I know it doesn't sound like much it rocked). We also snuck into their showers and enjoyed our first shower in over 5 days :) There was also another hiker, Alex blue eyes from Russia, that we told about the awesome showers who snuck in right after Mike.

This is the campsite: In the middle me right after my glorious shower, to my right was the kitchen, to my left the bathrooms, and behind me were all the tents.

After lunch we had a nice hike to third camp, right before the campsite there was this really cool bridge that stretched across the river.

 

Day 6 Day of Freedom - Today was a day of relief and freedom from our packs. From our campsite there was a 6 hr hike (round trip) up to Valle de Frances so we decided to leave our tent and gear and take the day to hike it. It was the most liberating feeling not to have our packs with us. Valle de Frances is a valley surrounded by rock mountains, literally everywhere you look is a rock. You feel so small and insignificant next to these towering giants, its an incredible feeling.

The hike was beautiful and we only got lost once; sometimes when Mike is in front leading he forgets to look for the orange markers and we end up lost in the boonies.

This is one of my favorite places is Torres del Paine.

I love Valle de Frances!

It was a pretty cloudy throughout the hike but for a split second, once we were at the top, the sun came out and shinned directly on Mike. If you notice in the background it's all dark from the thick cloud coverage but Mike was lit up like a little angel.

Mike and I on our way down from the French valley. Check out the diverse terrain. The circuit trail has a bit of everything; from lush jungle, to rock cliffs, to muddy swamps, to sandy tree forest, to dusty dirt, and to makeshift mega stairs.

Us still on our way down and Mike with his uzie

Day 7 Short Cut - 26 1/2 km 10 hr. Today was exhausting. We didn't plan on going as far as we did but we made it to the base of the towers and now we can have a day to relax.

Tip for travelers: Don't pack much water. A great blessing about Patagonia and Torres del Paine is that the water is fresh and clean and you can drink from any stream or river you want. There are rivers and stream every where along the trail and so you don't have to carry much water.

Check out Mikes awesome beard and mustache :) 

Day 8 Taste bud Angel - The weather went from 7 days of sun and shine to rain and snow. On the morning of our 8th day we hiked up to the famous "Towers". As you can see by our picture the weather was horrible; rainy, freezing, and windy. Unfortunately, we could only see clearly two out of the three towers. On a positive note we ran into this other backpacker from Arizona named Cameron. He was down in Patagonia hiking Mt. Fiz Roy (another famous trekking area which we will get to in later posts) and decided to the towers for a day. On this hike he brought with him 3 sandwiches filled with two different types of meat and delicious cheese. He was kind enough to offer us a glorious sandwich and a small packet of cookies which we accepted with open hands. Seriously, as I took hold of that sandwich my mouth was watering and my taste buds were singing with joy. Mike and I had almost run out of food at this point and the food that we did have left, 1 meal of polenta and 1 meal of oatmeal, sounded disgusting because that's all we had really eaten in 8 days. Cameron we love you!

It started pouring rain as we were taking pictures and so Mike has a raindrop on his head

For those of you who do not know this is what polenta looks like. Polenta is made out of corn and kinda tastes like grits.

This is our other fabulous meal, oatmeal. Check out our awesome homemade tinfoil oven contraption. 

Day 9 Raining cats and dogs - It poured all night long, huge fat rain droplets. The rain was so loud that it kept us up half the night, it kinda sounded like water balloons hitting our tent all night long. When we woke in the morning it was still pouring rain and there was mud and dirt all over the outside of our tent. We had planned on catching the 2 pm bus back to Puerto Natales (bus only come once a day and since we were officially out of food we didn't want to miss it) so we had to hurry and pack a muddy tent in the rain and make our way down the mountain as fast as we could. 

This is a view from the bottom of the trail looking up at towers and on the left you can see the snow we got during the night.

We made it to the bus in time. This is the very start of the trail, in the far background right over Mikes left arm you can see the towers faintly.

Yahoo, we did it!!!! 

This trek and place is beautiful and we loved every minute of it!!!

The first thing we did once we got back in town was head straight to the supermarket. There we bought meats, cheeses, grapes, olives, breads, avocados, chips, nuts, drinks, and dulce de leche :)