Rare Adventures

Category: Adventures

Stories about travel and adventure

El Chalten – the hard way

Trekking capital of Argentina, but where do we start?

This was a difficult trip to work out. El Chalten is known as the trekking capital of Patagonia, but I found it difficult to find an organised trip that went somewhere. The answer I had been seeking became quite straight forward when I arrived as there are no organised treks. The very helpful receptionist, Mattheus in our hotel explained that all the treks are well marked out so there is no need for a guide.

Being in a foreign land, we didn’t really fancy wandering off into the Patagonian mountains in search of a good time on our own, but in truth, it was that simple. All the treks leave from the same car park, and you can choose the route you to take, ranging from an 8km return to a look out over Mt Fitzroy or much longer treks to the various refuges on the mountain where you can restock on provisions and spend the night.

Knowing what I know now, I would not have done it the way we did I would have taken the bus, stayed overnight, and given myself 8 hours to enjoy the trek and the mountains. This is what a lot of the guidance says, and it was our plan, but the guidance also glorifies El Chalten, which to be honest is a bit of a one horse town and there is no reason to be there other than a hike or trek.

We are also out of season, so I suspect in the high season there will be more group treks available to see the main sights and lakes up in the region. We were dithering over what to do when I spotted a one day excursion from El Calafate which included a couple of guided treks with a company called South Road, which seemed to solve the problem. It involved a transfer up to El Chalten, a picnic pack, and 4 hours free time to do a hike.

At this point, their organiser called Liam intervened. The evening before he sent us joining instructions that involved a 630am start rather than an 8am as we had expected, plus links to organise a visitor’s visas to Chile and a ticket for the national park. This was an exciting development as we hadn’t realised we were going to Chile. After 2 hours of pain on websites with no English translations, plus battles with our credit cards who were reluctant to fund the trip, we finally had the necessary documentation ready to go. As the clock hit midnight, we hit the pillow looking forward what was now only 5 hours kip.

Next morning we were up and ready for the tour, and in reception for 6.15 am and annoyed the breakfast lady by making a dawn raid on her croissants and coffee. She actually chased me out of the dining room at one point. At 630am we were ready to go, time ticked on, 645, 700, 715 still no bus. I contacted the tour company and discovered a moron named Liam had sent us the wrong details and the bus would be with us at 745 for an 8am departure – FFS. Thanks Liam, that was 3.5 hours of my life, or in fact sleep that day, that I will never get back.

They even failed that target time, and the bus turned up sometime after 8am, I didn’t really notice as I’d lost consciousness with frustration. Eventually we got on a magnificent looking off road bus and had a bouncy 3 hours’ drive up the famous M40, which is part of the Panamerican highway and runs along the Patagonian range and into Bolivia.

We arrived in El Chalten about midday, and if ever there was a one horse town this is it. You arrive out of the desert and joined the main street which ends at the car park where the trails start, along the road there is procession of single story coffee shops and gift shops that don’t really grab your attention.

At the end of the street is a canyon with a milky glacial river, and through that canyon blew freezing cold winds and there was even a flurry of sleet to greet us, it was bitter.

So, we piled on the trekking gear, and within 20 minutes we were stripped down to our t-shirts, that is how quickly the temperature was changing.

With 4 hours to play with, our hike options were limited so we headed for Cerro Torre in the hope of seeing Mt Fitzroy and the massive glacier. We also hoped to get to Largo Capri, but the hiking was pretty tough with lots of ups and downs, so we settled for the lookout.

The weather and visibility were changing all the time and occasionally supported by icy rain when closer to El Chalten and that valley. Whilst we sat eating our picnic overlooking the valley, we were lucky enough to get a break in the mist and clouds and caught a glimpse of the two most spectacular views.

Mt Fitzroy suddenly appeared to our right, with a brief view straight to the peak, and then a break in the clouds along the valley exposed another massive glacier 10km in the distance.

It was then back to meet the coach. The courier, Sandra, had warned everyone that the coach would leave at 1530 on the dot, and definitely no later than 1545 (already a compromise). Not surprisingly the coach didn’t leave at any of these times, in fact, we were stood by the coach in the freezing rain until gone 1600, at which point Sandra and the lunch brigade appeared from the restaurant, and after the various pickupss, we were well on our way 1 hour late.

We got back to El Calafette at 7pm, roughly 13 hours after our journey started and we had a 4 hour hike, so you can see why there are probably better options.

So, there we have it, we have done the trekking capital of Patagonia and did a hike to prove our credentials, now it is time to head south and the freezing seas of Antarctica and give some appropriate feedback to South Road.

14/11/2025
The awesome Perito Moreno Glacier

In awe of the power of nature and the size of the glacier

Having settled into La Calafate and enjoyed the local culture the day before, it was time to set off on the must do adventures, according to the tour guides. There is something particularly beautiful about glaciers, so we put that at the top of our list.

We decided to go with Patagonian Dreams as the operator, via TripAdvisor. In all aspects it was a good trip, picked up on time, comfortable coach and friendly, cheerful guide.

La Calafate is the main town in Southern Patagonia, with hordes of summer visitors coming for the trekking and the sightseeing. It is positioned on the edge of the National Glacier park and alongside a massive lake called Lake Argentina, which is the biggest in South America and is absolutely vast. It covers the same square kilometres as Buenos Aries and is an amazing turquoise colour.

The source of the water for the lake are the massive glaciers in this region, so our first trip was to see one these magnificent natural wonders. The main glacier in the national park is Perito Moreno, the journey to get there was across a barren desertscape, vast flat valleys that have been created by glaciers way back in time.

As with all things in Argentina, there is the unexpected park entrance fee that relieved us of £20 each and we headed into the park. The first glimpse of the glacier was a distant white wall in amongst barren hillsides.

The first view of the glacier was from sea level, or lake level. We travelled out in a specially designed boat that more like a mobile viewing platform. The water temperature was 2c, but we still had the safety briefing that told us where the life jackets were stored.

It seemed a bit academic as we would be dead within 90 seconds in that water temperature, but we all seemed happy with the suggestion we would survive a sinking under the glacier and after the briefing we all rushed outside to find a place on the rails.

Even though the glacier was obviously huge, it was difficult to get the scale of the thing as we headed out in the boat, as we got close the full magnitude of this 70m wall of ice became obvious.

All anyone wants on a trip like this is the National Geographic shot of the ice wall breaking, and I’m sure some people did get it because there were regular booms and ice falls into the sea. Unfortunately, I always seemed to be looking the wrong way, or the camera was in my pocket when it happened.

I stood at the front of the boat feeling very safe as we pottered our way through the ice, when for some reason, a huge cloud of icy spray came up over the bow. It wasn’t anyway clear why this had happened, maybe we had some ice under the bow.

However the consequences for me were dire, everyone else seemed to see it coming and jumped back, leaving me to take the full force of this icy spray, even worse, as everyone else backed off they created a wall of bodies and there was no retreat for me. I was absolutely soaked; I had a momentary sense of humour favour it is fair to say.

We spent an hour under the glacier which was a truly awesome (much overused word but not in this case) experience, but you can have too much of a good thing, especially when you are soaked in icy water so we headed back to the dock and off to the walkways around the headland.

By this time, we had become friendly with a couple of fellow travellers from Scotland, Shane and June, who bought a whole new level of humour to the proceedings as we got to know each other’s lives, which had alarming similarities.

In the afternoon we spent another two hours on the walkways looking at the glacier from different angles. If the glacier was awesome from below, it was equally awesome from above, because we could see the full length of the glacier stretching back 19 miles into the distance giving us the 3D perspective that you don’t get from the water.

The Glacier has two faces and feeds two different channels. The left hand face feeds a channel that is more of a lagoon, whilst the right hand face feeds that channel that runs into Lake Argentina. During winter the lake contracts as it has no water source until the iceberg melts in the spring and water level in the lake rises again.

In the company of our new chums, we had a great afternoon wandering the walkways, listening to the ice break off and sharing “empty nester” stories of past and recent travels and our families. In fact, this might have been the reason why we didn’t see an ice fall as we were too busy yapping and laughing at our similarities.

Sadly, all good things come to an end, and we headed back across the desert to El Calafate feeling knackered, but not too knackered to meet up with our new chums, enjoy the great local Patagonian beer and their amazing lamb burgers.

Returning to our room ready for sleep, the next adventure to El Chelten manifested itself in an unwanted way, but that is our next story.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video of our boat cruise and me getting soaked, which I sort of caught on video.

13/11/2025
Loving life in El Calafete

So an unexpectedly successful early morning flight along the Andes landed us on time in La Calafete. Over the next few days we grew to love this place, it is friendly, lots of shops, bars and good places to eat. It also has lots of stray dogs and the Patagonian Brewing Company, what more could we need for a few days break.

El Calafete is well down south in Argentina, the world around us has no trees and is basically scrubland, lots of single story buildings and wide open spaces – a bit like Australia away from the cities.

Checked into our very friendly Lar Aike hotel and decided we needed to enjoy the local culture, but first, we had 2 weeks worth of dirty cloths to get sorted and after a long walk found the laundry.

To be honest, I have been doing Dualingo Spanish lessons for 22 days and I am one of the highest performers on the world, but nothing prepared me for the conversation with the laundry lady, in fact the only word I could thing of as she rattled aways was, Ensalata, and to be honest I was sure the word salad wasn’t going to help.

Eventually we reached a mutual understanding that the cloths would be ready by 1830, but in a discussion with Claire outside the shop I realised the day wasn’t specific, so another check confirmed it was today, so we had 3 hours to spare.

Our hotel was 25 minutes away so hardly time to get there and back, so we thought “maybe a beer” and went for a stroll to kill a bit of time. Before we knew it we found the Patagonian Brewing company full of people drinking beer, the other unexpected development was that we were expecting 10c and overcast, but got 20c and a sunny terrace. Everyone seemed very happy so we went in to the bar.

3 hours later, and after much testing of the local brew, we staggered back to the laundry and hugged the laundry lady and gave her lots of Argentinian cash, we also seemed to understand each other better, and we wandered off down the high street like a couple of vagrants clutching our bag of cloths in a dustbin bag. Thelady even pointed out we were missing one of my socks.

It was a strange walk home, often populated by vagrant dogs trying to keep us company, but luckily we found another bar called Pura Vide, which reminded us of Costa Rica (it means happy life), so we stopped there for a cocktail and the toilet. Unexpectantly we ended up with a bar maid that thought where we sat would be good for nose picking as no one could see us !

Things were getting a bit weird so we headed off and thankfully we have made it home safely.

We are feeling culturally at home in El Calafete, but we are back in the saddle for adventures tomorrow and off to the Perito Glacier.

12/11/2025
Best tours from Bariloche
After a day in Bariloche it is time to explore

Following on from my summary of Bariloche, it was quickly time to move on and explore the amazing scenery in the area. After a bit of research we chose 3 tours to cover while we were there.

We chose to go on the Spanish speaking tours as they were much cheaper, clearly a European surcharge going on. In our experiences the tour is fine without the commentary, it mainly focuses on local species and trees, which I for one, can do with out.
- Cicruito Chico
- Tronodor peak and glacier
- 7 lakes road to San Martens de la Andes
Here is a quick summary of our experience.

Circuito Chico

Our first tour in Spanish, when we boarded the minibus, I did my Spanish Good Afternoon and stated– Yo no hablo Espanol – we could not speak Spanish.

It quickly became apparent that we were not the only English speakers on the bus, a few Americans and Europeans. After a few minutes, the tour guide asked if anyone on the bus spoke SPANISH, only 3 people put their hands up. At this point there was lots of laughter and a good, humoured guide explained she only had a few words of English but would do her best, and she did, and we had lots of fun teaching her.

One of the main attractions is a tour of the local lakes. This was only a half day tour but took us to some spectacular locations with stunning views. After visiting Norway earlier this year we had seen some spectacular scenery, but this was probably better.

First view involved a chair lift to the top of peak where we could get a full panoramic view of the region, the scenery is awesome speaks for itself in the photos. We ended up on viewing platform that provided for a 360 degree of the Lago Nahuel Huapi national park.

We then went on a road tour of the shoreline, with numerous little lake side beaches, ferry port and a final look out with a view back along the lake.

This was a really great tour, it was only 4 hours but we seemed to see so much of the landscape that it is probably all you need to get a feel for the Lago Nahuel Huapi national park.

This tour is an absolute must do tour – it is stunning and cheap

Tronodor Glacier

The second trip of our visit was to the Tronodor peak in the national park. This is the highest peak in the region and is an extinct volcano. The images are spectacular so we thought we should try it out.

We booked the Spanish speaking trip again, but things were a bit different this time. All the passengers were Argentinians speaking Spanish, and the guide knew no English whatsoever. Our theory that it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have a commentary turned out to be solid, my little bit of Spanish helped to understand that the commentary was all about plants and nature so we didn’t miss much as it was just one huge pine forest.

It was an incredibly long day, 10 hours in total on a packed minibus is hard work anyway, but as 90% of it was on rough mountain tracks to get to the waterfall and peaks made it that much harder.

The first stop was the beautiful Cascada Los Alerces waterfall. We arrived after a couple of hours bouncing our way along the tracks so the walk to the falls was really welcomed. There was a really cool boardwalk built through the forest that enabled people like us to see the splendour of the beautiful falls.

We then headed off to the Ventisquero Negro glacier, which hangs off the side of the Tronodor peak. The stop off for lunch was a bit of a disaster as the café didn’t take credit cards, so we sat around dreaming of food and grateful we pocketed a couple of pastries from the breakfast bar.

Eventually we arrived at the car park for the glacier and headed off to experience the views. The benefit of being in the mountains during spring is that as the weather warms up the high level snow starts to crack on glaciers, as was the case here.

On a clear day I am sure that the scenery would have been more spectacular, but on a cloudy day we missed that, and once you have seen one lake you have probably seen them all, so

While we stood and watched in awe at the size of the mountain and the distant glacier. We heard those telltale booms that tell us that the snow is breaking high up on the mountain and hoping that we would see an avalanche of snow coming off the ridge, luckily on this occasion we saw some snow flurries rolling down the gully.

After an hour spent in this placid location it was time to head back onto the minibus and the 2 hour journey on tracks back to the entrance to the park, and the luxury of tarmacked roads!

On reflection and bearing in mind that we are heading towards South Patagonia and the Glacier National Park, maybe we didn’t need to go through the trauma of all those hours on the minibus to see the glacier, as there was very little else to see as we travelled through the miles of pine forests. However, the waterfall was fabulous, and we have seen the best of the Bariloche region.

If you have never seen a glacier then this is a must do, if you can cope with 8 hours on a minibus on rocky roads

7 lakes road to St Martens de la Andes

This was a our last trip so we were getting a bit saddle sore in minibuses by now, so it was nice to have a coach. The journey from Bariloche was interesting and worthwhile.

This was another Spanish speaking trip but the guide, Stella, was great and worked really hard to explain to us in English what was going on. She had a huge passion for the vegetation and history that fired here enthusiasm.

As you head out of Bariloche you realise that the scenery is basically scrubland and desert and the road is dead straight, in fact, the Romans would have been very proud of it.

In a distance of about 10 miles along the lake, the climate changes from huge levels of rainfall with ski slopes into desert scrub and hardly any vegetation, no trees, nothing.

The early part of the drive around the lake was through the scrubland but as the altitude rose so did the vegetation. As moved through the lakes the dense forest from the Tronodor trip reappeared and made for spectacular scenery, if only the low cloud wasn’t blocking off the peaks.

After 4 hours of checking out numerous lakes we arrived in St Martens Andes at which point I was hugely relieved that I was only doing a daytrip. It was a rather dull modern lakeside town which nothing of interest to do other than eat lunch and walk back to the bus station. There were no walks or anything, but as luck would have it, the rain poured down so we just had a little wander and got back on the bus.

A must do if you like looking at lakes, I might have overdosed

I

Storm over Bariloche

That is a summary of our trips from Bariloche. As someone who spends a lot of time in the Alps snowboarding and mountain biking, the waow factor of Patagonia wore off pretty quickly and I’m happy to be moving on to El Calafete and the rest of the trip.
11/11/2025
Bariloche, heart of Patagonia Lake District

What to find in the town and surcharges for European

We managed to get to Bariloche with surprisingly little drama. FlyBondi had a good day and were only 90 minutes late. Bariloche is the tourist capital of northern Patagonia, which is known for its massive array of lakes surrounded by mountains.

My summary of the tours is a separate post.

So, our expectations were for lots of water, and we weren’t disappointed when we found our hotel had a fantastic view of the biggest lake, Lago Nahuel Huapi. We stayed at a brand new Radisson Blu, which promised much but seemed to still be in the shake down period with lots of issues and things not working which were a bit disappointing, but hey, it had a great view.

Bariloche is a major ski centre in the winter with pistes on the mountains behind it in Cerro Catedral. The high street is full of bars and restaurants with strong Spanish and Alpine influences, however, just like most skiing resorts, if you aren’t skiing there isn’t much else to do. There are a few boat trips but with freezing cold water there aren’t many water sports going on.

A thing we had not seen before was dual pricing of tours. Basically, if the tour included an English speaking guide the costs were significantly more than for a Spanish speaking guide. In the case of Circuito Chico the Spanish tour cost £13, and the English tour cost £30, for the Tronodor Glacier the price difference was £45 for Spanish and £80 for English.

We gave it some thought and decided that we would be quite happy to forgo the tour commentary as we were going for the scenery anyway, so we went with the cheaper option with differing experiences!

On the first tour, it transpired that only 3 people spoke Spanish, so the guide received some adhoc English lessons, on the second tour nobody spoke English and on the third tour we had a personal commentary from an English speaking guide, so all in all it was money well saved.

The locals have a bit taste for chocolate. Every other street seemed to have some form of chocolate shop going on but the ultimate was the chocolate supermarket, the irony of this being that iin a 3 story department store, the ground floor was dedicated to chocolate and the other two floors were a gym.

Not only did it have a department store, it also had a museum, who on earth cares about the history of chocolate, surely you just buy it, eat it, regret it, forget it. Not in Bariloche, they just love chocolate.

There appears to be a bit of a sinister past to the town and many of the Nazis headed here after the second world war, there is even a walking tour dedicated to the memory, which in my view shoul be forgotten but that is life.

There is also a nice civic square. It is build in a European style and does not appear to be very old, but it is very pleasant and there lots of shops around there if the weather is wet.

So all in all, Bariloche is a dull place in November unless you like chocolate, but the locals are very friendly and I definately got the impression it would be a lot more fun in the ski season when all the bars are open.

09/11/2025