Mountains and Penguins

So, to set the record straight, El Chalten has just as many glaciers as Calafate, they're just harder to get to. WHich in my opinion is a Good Thing.

Wednesday afternoon we got to el Chalten and it was just gorgeous, clear, a couple puffy clouds, etc. The mountains there are really cool-looking, they're really pointy and all the wrong shape and there's glaciers everywhere! So we camped just outside of town to get our stuff together to go backpacking for a couple days.

Well, that was the only really clear day. Thursday was okay, but the clouds covered up a bunch of the mountains. We hiked up the Rio Fitz Roy to Laguna Torre, at the base of Cerro Torre and at the bottom of a big glacier. The valley was gorgeous--it reminded Becky and I of the Lord of the Rings, especially with all the mist. And the other great thing: all the water in the park is glacier runoff and drinkable without filtering. And also tasty, and very, very cold.

On Friday we left all our stuff in our tent and hiked around. We went up to the Laguna Torre and saw the glacier, and where the mountain would be if there weren't clouds, and to see a couple of lakes near Fitz Roy. It started being raining and cold, so we came back and spent the afternoon in our sleeping bags in the tent, and it rained and sleeted and snowed but we were warm and dry (the tent didn't even get condensation inside--yay!).

On Saturday we hiked out. Again, really pretty, but cloudy so no mountains. We took a different trail for part of the way, and saw some gorgeous waterfalls. And we got some good hot food and sat around drinking mate and warming up until the bus back to Calafate. On the way back we watched a lunar eclipse out the window.

Sunday was another bus day...and now we're in Puerto San Julian, on the Atlantic coast. We just got done with a boat trip around some nearby islands and so forth. We saw cormorants, which make hilarious nests out of guano--they look like little volcanoes, and smell like, well, guano is cormorant excrement...We also saw some South American terns and oyster eaters which have really long hilarious red beaks, and magellenic penguins! The pinguins (as well as the cormorants) were sitting on eggs. They either have little holes under bushes, or they dig caves for themselves. They looked quite snug (whereas I was cold--again with the cold Patagonia wind). We also saw some dolphins (I forget what they were called) which were black and white and only about 1.6 m long. They were really neat, mostly because dolphins are really neat by default.

We're here till tomorrow night, then we're bussing back to Buenos Aires. We'll get there on Thursday morning. On Monday we fly to Miami to greet the FTAA important-whatsits on our way home. I'll get home the sunday after THAT, which I believe is the 23rd.



On thursday we hiked out