El Chalten

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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