El Chalten..

Arrived in El Chanten off a 27 hour bus from Bariloche.. worthy of a paragraph in itself..

We were pretty nervous about our longest bus of SA, moreso because the people selling it to us seemed almost sketchy on the details.. some buses had no toilets, some no food.. However, all turned out better than expected!! We boarded the bus at 10.30pm, and although we were sitting at the very back(a nightmare for people like Cass who get really travel sick)thankfully we both fell asleep fairly quick, and slept more or less through until the 2 hour stop at 10am the next morning!! So although we had missed most of Route 40(only waking up periodically to see what looked like a desert landscape with a sky full of stars brighter than one can imagine)all was well, as we now were fresh with only a 12 hour journey to conquer! Good job we were fresh though, as route 40 ceases to be `paved at this point, and the bus journey can only be described as a cross between being on a boat during wavy seas/a very turbulent airplane/a rollercoaster! So no sleep but THANK GOD for Sturgeron, Cassies travel tablets, we got through the 12 hours with no worse feeling than boredom because of a broken tv and a lack of being able to read! (Given Cass's current immersion in the UNBELIEVABLE 'Half a Yellow Sun' this was, infact, more of a tragedy than it sounds). Boredom relented only in the last 2 hours of the journey with a somewhat surreal series of events unfolding... A very merry bus driver (there are always two and this one had finished his shift) came back into the passenger area of the bus and iniciating a singsong..to which eveyr country had to participate!! All seemed a bit ridiculous, but we were very bored, so after Argentina, Chile, Columbia, France and Germany had took the stage, and even a Boston couple had serenaded us with Miley Cirus's ´Party in the USA' Cass and I decided it was time for 'Irelands Call'..which the whole bus seemed to thoroughly enjoy!(and thankfully I managed not to crack any windows!)

So arrived in El Calafate late, making it necessary to take the first room we came upon, which although expensive did have the most comfortable beds of SA so far!! In the morning we moved to one of the more common, more reasonably priced hostel/campsite combinations that saturate the town.. Really, El Chanten was a mad place to stay, although set in a beautiful location it consists of nothing but makeshift shops and hostels for tourists, which look like they have been thrown up beside the highway in the 5 minutes before we arrived! We didnt encounter any amenity for the local Argentinian..unusual as it takes at least a couple of hours driving before reaching civilisation again, and by the time we left we were half convinced it was only robots populating this eerie and horror movie like town!

This is absolutely not to say that we disliked El Chanten however!! Although the town was a little strange the location more than compensated for this and we enjoyed two amazing days walking in Patagonias, SA´s, trekking capital! On our first day in El Chanten we walked to Lago Torre, a beautiful forest walk (Its uncanny, every corner you turn in these forests it appears like someone has set up the scene, it is just so picturesque!.. Many times we felt we were walking through 'A Midsummer Nights Dream'!) arriving finally at a beautiful, if extremely windy, mountain lake backed by a glacier and some amazing snow capped peaks! The following day, a little tired from socialising the night before with a Dutch couple, we walked just an hour to the waterfall, a realy rewarding walk along a beautiful fast flowing river, again with constant views of snowy peaks, arriving at a spectacular waterfall where one had to jump from rock to rock to take the perfect photograph! The waterfall was mesmerizing and the stepping stones made the experience a little like arriving at a playground at the end of our walk!

We left El Chanten that evening after a great afternoon of learning about Israeli culture from one of the most interesting people we have met on our trip, and one of the longest games of jenga I have ever played!!