First, it is twenty to one in the morning here and we are waiting to go get our 3am bus. We've already done a 3 hour bus journey to get to our hostel, and before that we did a 22km walk in the Andes... we are tired!
The area that we've been walking in today is possibly the most beautiful on the planet. If you own a passport and a pair of legs, you owe it to yourself to come and see. It is a national park with over 300 glaciers and two very famous mountain peaks, the Fitz Roy and Cerro (which means mountain) Torre (which means tower). We were pretty impressed with Argentina before but the last few days have blown us away.
We started a hike yesterday afternoon from El Chalten to see the Fitz Roy mountain. There is no point describing the valley, the woods, the mountains, the views as it won't do it justice. Then we began this morning at 8.45, with a steep uphill climb, then followed a river through woods, with the snowcapped mountains ahead of us. 3 hours later we arrived a glacial lake at the foot of Cerro Torre, complete with little icebergs. We caned our way through about 100 photos because every step we took took our breath away (with the scenery, not the exercise!!). Awesome, awe inspiring, and just down right beautiful. And, against all the odds, we did the whole thing in sunshine with a clear blue sky (very unsual for here). This was particularly surprising as 2 days ago the area we had been hiking in had been snowed in...
Before we did this trekking trip, on Monday we went to Glacier Perito Moreno. It's a lump of ice. What's the big deal? It's MASSIVE. The end that we saw was 5 miles long and the height of a 15 storey building....that was just the end that drops off into the river. And it does drop off. You'd hear an explosion then see lumps of it falling below. To make this day perfect, we woke up to a small blizzard of snow. THis meant that on our journey to the glacier we got complete winter wonderland scenery and on the way back it had all melted to reveal stunning Patagonian scenery. We also saw loads of condors as they come out after the snow as a lot of the new born animals don't survive a snow fall this late so they come to pick them off.
So, our late / early bus is taking us to the most southernly city in the world - Ushuaia. We don't know how to pronounce it either. 20 hours on a bus (oh, when we say bus, they are actually coaches that put UK coaches to shame), crossing into Chile then back out, and a ferry across the Magellan Straits....
Did we mention before that we love this country?!?
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