to El Chalten and back
We are just back from El Chalten where we have walked some great hiking trails, in preparation for our 6-day walk (including 1 day of ice climbing) in the Torres del Paine national park, starting one day from now.
In contrast with El Calafete which is a very touristy and uncharming village, the 600-people village of El Chalten is very nice, situated right in the national park and near a river, surrounded by the very impressive Fitz Roy en Cerro Torre mountains, part of the Andes mountain range.
The fact that El Chalten turned out to be such a very nice village was even more strange when we heard that El Chalten is only 28 years old, and had been errected solely for the purpose of hosting all the people that are walking in the mountains around it. The village is even that young and at such a location (in the middle of nowhere) that there are:
Very, very bad and slow internet connections, no connections for your mobile phone, almost no fresh vergetables available and you could not get any money from the bank, because there are no banks and cash machines there. The cash machine thing was solved two weeks ago, since they just had installed a cash machine two weeks before we arrived. A very big event they told us. We did not know all of this of course before we left, so we had brought lots of cash money with us, as all the travelguides said it is impossible to get money in El Chalten, so there we where: in El Chalten with plenty of cash money.
Our days in El Chalten really have been one the highlights untill now, as El Chalten is situated in very, very beautifull national park covered with sand dunes, yellow flower covered hills, wild rivers, waterfalls, short tree covered bush, predator birds flying around, snow topped mountains, the very impressive Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre mountains peaks and great walking trails overlooking this impressive scenery.
We noticed that there is lots of building activity going on now in El Chalten, so we wonder if the village will stay the same nice little village in the future. As the village grows, more and more people will visit El Chalten and its surroundings, and the fact is the national park is now suffering a lot from the hordes of people visiting it. We even got a special lecture from a ranger when we arrived, telling us to be very carefull with the environment, not to leave any garbage around and not to smoke anything anywhere (anyone smoking is evicted from the park, because a burning cigarette had started a bush fire a couple of years ago). He said that all the warning signs are now also being written in Hebrew so even Israeli people could understand that they were not allowed to smoke and to throw garbage away (there are lots of young Israeli people here, doing some travelling after they have done their 3-year service in the army)….
It will be a while before we publish another post as we will be hiking arround Torres del Paine the next 7 days, but I will try to publish some more pictures on our Flickr-webpage from our travels around Buenos Aires, flying into Chili over the Andes to Punta Arenas and seeing penguins.
Jannis.
Tags: Travel, Tag Index
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