Laguna Torres
Tuesday January 27, 2015
First off, let us mention how horrible the Internet is in El Chalten. Oh sure, you can connect to your hostel’s WiFi. But now try to do something. And watch it fail. It’s the same everywhere in town!
It’s a bit hard to nail down a fitting analogy. It’s kind of like their internet is run on carrier pigeons. But those carrier pigeons have to use tin cans on strings, rather than just fly around with your data attached to them. Given that pigeons don’t understand binary very well, let alone vocalizing it into the tin cans, not a lot gets done. This is El Chalten Internet. This is why you’re seeing these posts days after they happened. So… sorry about that. Blame the birds.
Today was the first day hike — Laguna Torres! We were’ looking forward to an epic hostel breakfast to start the day off right. Oops. “Disappointed” would be a bit of an understatement for the morning meal at this hostel. It’s bread. About 6 slices of toasted (but cold) bread to split between the two of us. One packet of frozen butter and one packet of plum marmalade. Have at it! Want to spread the butter? Hah! It’s frozen! Want to stick to plum marmalade? NIce try — there’s not enough! Oh well, maybe next time.
Sandra and I headed out fairly early in the morning to tackle this one. It’s about 12km one-way, so it took us a fair number of hours to reach the destination and return home. The final stop on the trek is a beautiful, teal lake with a number of tiny glaciers dotting the shoreline. In the distance are the mountains of the Fitzroy range. Sharp, splintering towers of rock unlike anything you’d see in the Rockies. Sandra and I went Full Monty and walked the extra 2km or so along the length of the lake to capture some images of the glacier up close.
It was a pretty draining day given the half-marathon worth of hiking. I managed to score a dirty dirty sunburn all around my neck region. But our boots and morale both held up admirably during the excursion, so it’s good news all around!