Justine and Dylan’s Travel Blog

Next up after Bariloche was a few days of (fairly boring) driving to get us to our next destination: El Chalten in Los Glaciaros National Park. 

Again, with our usual time constraints, we got straight into it with a walk up a hill called Tumbado which on a clear day would give you great views of all the surrounding world famous peaks (Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy). Unfortunately the weather had collapsed a little bit by then; I´ve never been to such a windy place in my life (and apparently it only gets windier from here on in as we go further south. Interesting). Apart from the wind, the glaciers around the place seemed to generate their own weather, or hail and mist anyway. At one stage we would´ve been standing a few kms away from one of the glaciers under a perfect blue sky and we were being pelted with hail and struggling to stand up with the wind. Needless to say the view wasn´t great. Nothing a quick glance at a postcard (taken on a sunny day) couldn´t fix, but different nonetheless.

Still a good walk, but a shame with the timing weather-wise. I suspect from here on in, even though it´s mid-summer, the weather is far from guaranteed to be sunny or anything even close. Can´t have everything I guess, it´s just that the weather around the Atacama desert has made us a little spoilt.

Well, Xmas day was certainly a little different this year. Compared to last year (on a plane to Oz) and the previous year (in wintery London), this year was spent in sunny Bariloche in Argentina.

We only had a couple of days here and so we decided to do one of the hikes we had planned (loop to Refugio Frey around Nahuel Huapi National Park) on Xmas day. Not the most laidback option (especially considering the ski lifts which would normally reduce the walk by 5kms and 600m of ascent weren´t manned that day… strangely enough 8-), but glad we did it. 27 kms of walking, sliding, boulder climbing and some light jogging (to make Xmas dinner on time!) later, we had seen some awesome scenery including panoramas of Nahuel Huapi lake, waterfalls, valleys and mountains reminiscent of Switzerland, a condor and even snow (Justine even made a snowman… way too much energy!), all under a dark blue and very sunny sky. Awesome. And yes, we are a little crazy.

To finish off the day (and ourselves), we managed to get back in time to join the others from the truck for a Xmas dinner at an Argentinian microbrewery (or cervezeria). Slept well that night.