After 2 days in El Calafate, Lauren, Teresa and I continued together to El Chaltén, where the spectacular Fitz Roy mountain is located. To get there we had to endure 6 hours along the famous (and boring) Ruta 40, crossing an empty desert through a quite deteriorated ripio (dirt and stones) road. And accordingly, El Chaltén looked like a town taken from a Western movie, with no streets, houses anarchically situated and a strong wind blowing plants along its paths.
El Chalten is very expensive town because provising have to be taken from hundreds of kilometers away and communications are very limited. This town was created in 1975 simply to stop Chile from trying to "enlarge" it's frontiers and now lives exclusively of tourism, having become one of the most important trekking centers of all South America.
I stayed there 4 and a half days, because half of them was raining and it was impossible to do anything outdoor. And the Fitz Roy stayed covered by clouds all but the last day I was there, frustrating all of us who had gotten there basically to see this spectacular mountain.
After 3 consecutive cancellations due to weather conditions (fortunatelly, I didn't suffered any of them) the ice trekking tour finally took place and that was one of the most exciting (and toughest) things I've done so far. We started walking at 7 in the morning and didn't reach the glacier Torre until 2 pm, going up and down steep hills and crossing the Fitz Roy river with a canopy (you attach yourself to a wheel and then slide along a cable to the other side), but when we reached the glacier we knew that all of that effort was truly worth it.
We put on the "crampons" (to walk on ice) and starting walking along the ice dunes of the glaciar, feeling completely as if we were in another planet. Then, we reached a vertical 15m high ice wall where we did ice climbing with piolets. It seemed impossible that this metal shoes and axes could hold our weight on an ice wall, but the did, and the sensation was incredible (specially when you looked down after reaching the top). It was during that trip that I met Felipe, a very funny Parisien; Eddy and Laura (a great couple from England and Asturias), who were doing the same trip as I but on the opposite direction; and Paul (a 25-year old English physiotherapist) with whom I would travel in the future. On the way back, to complete an excellent day, we were able to see (for the first and last time) Cerro Torre, a spectacular thin finger-like mountain covered by mushroom-shaped snow that it is claimed to be the second hardest mountain to climb (after K2 in the Himalayas)
Two days later, in an incredible and unexpected blue and cloudless sky, Eddy, Laura, Paul and I went up to the Laguna de los 3, to see Fitz Roy close by. The views all day were outstanding, and when we reached the lagoon, after a quite steep 400-m climb, the spectacle of its green waters and the Fitz Roy just behind left us speechless for a few minutes.
Then, the next day I would take a 14-hour long trip on "ripio" along Ruta 40 to reach Los Antiguos, where I would cross the border to enter Chile, after a full month in Argentina. And Paul would be coming with me.
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