While in Patagonia, we stopped at a town called El Chalten for a couple days to do some hiking. On the way there we stopped off at one of the Patagonian enstancias, or ranches. In the picture the guy´s playing a traditional game to see who ends up buying the round of drinks. It involves catching a metal ring on a hook in the wall, and if I had actually been playing the game for real I would have ended up broke from all the rounds I would have had to buy.

El Chalten is one of those dusty frontier towns that is currently experiencing a tourism boom due to the weakness of the peso. It had always been a destination for rock climbers looking to climb Cerro Fitz Roy (on the right), or even Cerro Torre (the pointy one in the middle) which is supposed to be the toughest mountain to climb in the world (or something like that), but is now becoming a hot destination for your average trekker as well. This leads to somewhat schitzophrenic development. There´s a big fancy hotel that´s being built on one side of town, while on the other side (which is only about a 10 minute walk - the town only has a couple hundred permanent residents) guys were throwing up an honest-to-God, Abe Lincoln-style log cabin.

Since most of those climbers come during the summer months (December to February) and we were there in May, there were exactly three things open - one store, one restaraunt, and one pub. This pub, like a lot in Argentina, had its own micobrews (or "cervesas artisnales" in Español). No fancy names for them like back home though - there were only two: blanco and negro. Some pubs we encontered later threw in a rojo also. The beer actually wasn´t bad at all, but also not very strong.

But the beer wasn´t even the best thing to drink. According to the park rangers (and also this sign), you can actually drink the lake and river water straight up in the area around El Chalten. The rangers don´t know for how much longer the water is going to be potable - the more people around, the better chance of E. Coli or something getting in the water supply eventually. They´re already having ecological problems with the hikers - the stray dogs in town have been following them up into the mountains and end up hunting the endangered deer-like thingies that live up there. It´s tough - we thought we had shaken the cute little puppy that got attached to us while we were still in town, only to have him show up 4 hours into our hike. The hike was great - in addition to the pics above, we ended our day by this waterfall