Sendero al Fitz Roy Backpacking Trip Part I

April 24, 2024May 1, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

While it was super fun to visit Buenos Aires and Ushuaia, let’s be real – I came to Patagonia to hike. There are lots of options for hiking in both Argentina and Chile, but there are really two quintessential trips that everyone wants to cross off their bucket list and most of the tourists we met were all doing some variation of the same trip. Those hikes are Torres del Paine in Chile and Sendero al Fitz Roy in Argentina.

Since we started in Argentina, Mount Fitz Roy was the first hike on my list and I was ecstatic to finally go backpacking. Unlike Torres del Paine, which has two circuits that most people follow, Mount Fitz Roy is really more of a collection of hikes that you can make your own custom itinerary for. Mount Fitz Roy is located in the Andean foothills near the Argentina-Chile border in Los Glaciares National Park. Most people don’t climb the mountain itself as that is a major mountaineering objective, but it can be viewed from many different trails within the park. Most trails are accessible from El Chalten, which is a tiny mountain town that pretty much exclusively caters to hikers visiting the mountain.

The hike to Lago de los Tres is THE hike to do if you want to get the best view of Mount Fitz Roy. It’s roughly 11km each way to hike to the lake, so it’s usually done either as a big day hike (with accommodations in El Chalten), or as part of a backpacking trip (camping in the park). There are several other hikes in the park that can be combined with this hike to extend your trip, with the second most popular being the trail to Laguna Torre. While I easily could have spent an entire week hiking around El Chalten, I decided on a 2 night, 3 day trek to visit both Lago de los Tres and Laguna Torre.

The convenient part of our itinerary was that we didn’t need to book any accommodations. Unlike Torres del Paine, which has a mandatory reservation system that fills up months in advance, you can camp for free in Los Glaciares National Park with no pre-planning. This has some pretty big cons, which I’ll get into later in the post, but it’s definitely convenient. Accommodations in El Chalten are pretty limited, but it’s only a 3 hour bus ride from El Calafate, so we planned our entire visit around the bus schedule and didn’t stay in El Chalten at all.

We left El Calafate on the 8am bus and had a very scenic ride through the desert to El Chalten. We saw lots of guanaco along the ride and even some rhea (which is a big bird like an ostrich or emu). We arrived in El Chalten at 11am and immediately started hiking. Laguna Torre and Lago de los Tres can be done as a loop trail measuring ~45km in total. You can go in either direction; the two campsites you’ll stay at are Agostini and Poicenot. Agostini is located right next to Laguna Torre, while Poicenot is 2km before Lago de los Tres and has 400m in elevation gain (so it’s a considerable climb from the campground).

My planned itinerary was to hike to Laguna Torre on day 1, hike to Lago de los Tres on day 2, and back down to El Chalten on day 3. I hadn’t planned for any sunrise hikes, which is why I planned to start with Laguna Torre. We ended up hiking to both lakes for sunrise, which means I had to do the climb up to Lago de los Tres on my final day (making for a long day and fast hiking to catch our bus), so if I had my time back, I would have done the hike in the opposite direction. But we still had a fantastic time!

Like I said, we got off the bus and pretty much immediately started hiking. It was ~10km from the bus to Agostini Campsite. We were super lucky with the weather and quickly switched to shorts and t-shirt after we started hiking. We could only get away with this because it was a blue sky day and the presence of the sun makes a huge difference in the air temperature. The trek starts with a hike up through the canyon to Mirador Cascada Margarita and then on to Mirador Cerro Torre, which is approximately halfway to the campground. It’s a steady uphill hike until you reach Cerro Torre, but it’s pretty flat after that, so we decided to stop at the viewpoint for lunch.

This was where we had our first experience with the park outhouses. Normally I don’t have a lot to say about outhouses – they’re generally never nice – but the latrines in Los Glaciares National Park were probably the worst I’ve ever used. They’re pit toilets, which I don’t have a problem with, but they were all in extremely poor condition. Some of them were almost full to the top with waste, the structures were rotting away, and the metal plate that separates the structure from the pit looked in danger of collapsing in some of them.

The park, and this trail in particular, receives thousands of visitors a year, so they really need to invest in replacing the outhouses. They’re so gross that most people were not using them and just going in the woods. That’s fine when people properly bury their waste, but the park receives so many visitors (and so many inexperienced backpackers) that it’s not sustainable for the well-being of the park to be without usable toilets. It’s amazing that you can hike and camp in the Park for free, but I would happily pay $10 a night for a permit if it meant the latrine situation could be improved. It was shameful in my opinion. That’s my rant – I’ll shut up about it now!

After lunch, we continued to the campsite. The second half of the hike was much easier than the first half and you have a pretty incredible view of the back of Mount Fitz Roy the entire time. The one tip I would give to other hikers is to make sure you fill up your water carriers at the river ~1km from the campsite. The Rio Fitz Roy runs right past the campsite, but it’s extremely silty and will easily clog up your filter, but there’s a great drinking water source at the bridge crossing the creek 1km before the campsite. Most people weren’t filtering their water, but we filtered everything we drank, especially once we discovered the outhouse problem and that people are just shitting next to the river at the campsite without digging catholes.

The campsites are pretty bare bones. They’re nice in that there is lots of room for tents, but there is very limited privacy. The Poicenot Campground is a nightmare because of the volume of people and the limited amount of camping experience the average visitor has, but I didn’t mind the Agostini Campground at Laguna Torre. It was reasonably busy, but it didn’t feel too crowded. I felt that most of the people there had previous backpacking experience and were considerate and respectful of the other campers and LNT practices. This was not the case at Poicenot Campground, but more on that later.

We found a nice site for our tent and then packed our bags for day hiking and set off to Laguna Torre. It’s only a 5-10 minute walk from the campsite to the lake. It was still sunny when we arrived at the lake, so I immediately decided to go for a swim. No one else was swimming and I knew it would be cold, but I have a lot of cold water pride as a Canadian, so I couldn’t resist going in the water. It was cold, but no colder than the glacial lakes in BC. Swimming isn’t permitted in Torres del Paine, so I’m glad I took the opportunity to swim at Los Glaciares!

The lake is extremely silty, so it’s kind of an ugly grey colour, but it has an incredible view of Mount Fitz Roy and the glacier. Plus, it has a ton of glacial ice floating in the lake, so it was really cool to swim with the bergy bits (something I’ve only actually done one other time in BC). After my swim, I was determined to continue hiking to Mirador Maestri. The lake is surrounded by a large moraine that was deposited by the glacier in the past, so you can hike up to the top of the moraine and then circle around to the back of the lake where you get a better view of the glacier.

I think Seth would have happily skipped this part, but he was a good sport and accompanied me up the moraine. It’s ~5km round trip to the viewpoint, but because you can see the full trail the entire time you’re hiking, it seems closer than it is. It’s also a steady uphill, so eventually Seth lost interest and decided to hang out on the rocks and look at wildflowers while I finished the hike up to the viewpoint. I didn’t quite make it to the end of the hike, but I made it up to a natural crest in the topography and got a fantastic view of the back of the glacier! It took me ~1 hour to get there (2 hours round trip), but I definitely hustled. I would give yourself a solid 2.5-3 hours to do the full hike and properly enjoy it.

We raced the sun back to the lake and it set behind the mountains shortly after we got to the lake. As soon as the sun went down, it immediately got a lot colder and we quickly bundled up in all our layers, including our puffy jackets. But we still enjoyed eating our dinner at the lake before returning to the campground to go to sleep. Like I said, I hadn’t planned on doing any sunrise hiking, but the campground is so close to the lake that I knew I had to at least hike up to Laguna Torre for sunrise (but was still undecided whether I would do it for Lago de los Tres). So we went to bed pretty early and I set my alarm in time to get up for sunrise the following morning. It was cold overnight, so you should definitely come prepared for that, but I was warm in my -7 degree quilt and puffy jacket.

Check back next week for Part II!

Birdwatching in Ushuaia

April 10, 2024April 24, 2024 / Maria / 3 Comments

We arrived in Ushuaia very late at night and took a taxi to our hostel. It was a harsh welcome because Buenos Aires was 30 degrees and Ushuaia was more like 10 degrees. It didn’t help that our room at the hostel could only be accessed from outside and no one had turned on the radiator before we arrived, so it was freezing on the first night.

We had a full day excursion booked, so it was an early rise the next morning with a 6am wake-up call. But it was worth it because we were taking a tour to Isla Martillo to walk with penguins! We were very lucky that it was a gorgeous day, which can be hard to come by in Ushuaia. Ushuaia is the most southern city in the world, and is popularly known as “the end of the world”. So even though it’s summer in February, the weather can still be quite harsh. It didn’t get much warmer than 12 degrees the whole time we were there and it can get extremely windy. One of the locals told me it does get up to 25 degrees sometimes, but there was fresh snow on the mountaintops while we were there.

We were up early enough to catch the sunrise as we walked down to the waterfront to find our tour. Ushuaia is in Patagonia, but it is more commonly associated with Tierra del Fuego, a large island at the bottom of South America. Ushuaia is located on the famous Beagle Channel, which separates Argentina from Chile. It’s also the starting point for most cruises to Antarctica, so there were a lot of ships of all sizes docked in the harbour. We enjoyed the sunrise over the channel and then jumped on a bus to drive 1.5 hours towards Haberton Ranch to catch a zodiac to Isla Martillo.

One of the most popular activities in Ushuaia (aside from Antarctica), is to cruise the Beagle Channel to see penguins. There are a ton of pleasure cruises that leave from Ushuaia and motor down to Isla Martillo to observe the penguins that nest on the island. There is just one tour (Piratour) that allows you to actually go on the island. It was definitely a costly tour, but I don’t regret paying extra for it because it was fantastic!

There are only 20 people allowed on the island at a time and you have to be accompanied by a certified guide. Our group was split in two and we spent the first hour visiting the Museo Acatushun at Haberton Ranch, while the other group toured the island. The Museum has the largest collection of marine birds and mammal bones in the world. It’s an eccentric place – the owner was an enthusiastic collector of whale bones, but they can be pretty stinky, so she basically bought the ranch as a place to store all her bones and then turned it into a museum. She’s since passed away, but the museum is now staffed by energetic biology students, who run daily tours and then clean bones in their spare time.

Tierra del Fuego is a great place for a bone museum though because it seems to be the place where whales go to die. We saw one dead whale washed up on the beach on our way to the ranch, and another one from the boat on our way to the island. But it’s a cool place and the students that give the tours are very knowledgeable. We had a fun time and it’s a super scenic location. It was quite chilly and windy and it really contributed to the “end of the world” vibes. It kind of hit me at that moment, the gravity of where we were and how lucky we were to be there. I’ve wanted to visit Patagonia for at least 6 years now, and it felt unreal to actually be doing it.

As cool as the Museum was, the penguins were infinitely cooler. We took a zodiac for about 15 minutes to Isla Martillo, where we disembarked with our guide to walk the island. There are two types of penguins that nest on the island – Magellanic Penguins and Gentoo Penguins. Occasionally you can see King Penguins on the island as well, but they don’t nest there. The Magellanic Penguins don’t really like the cold, so from what I remember, Isla Martillo is one of the most southerly colonies of Magellanic Penguins and they only migrate there in the summer to nest. The Gentoo Penguins are more traditionally found in Antarctica, but this colony can be found on the island year round.

I would hate to have to be one of the guides shepherding people around the island. It’s really important to stay together as a group and to always be with your guide so as to cause the least disruption to the penguins. But as you can imagine, people more or less lose their minds the second they see a penguin, so there was a lot of trying to keep the group gathered together. But it’s really such a cool experience. The boat drops you right on the beach and you visit the Gentoo colony nesting on the rocks first. There are Magellanic Penguins all over the island, so after that, you walk a little bit inland to see some of their burrows. They don’t seem bothered by people and it was cool to watch them waddling around. But my favourite was watching them swim. They’re so slow on land, but they absolutely whiz through the water!

We spent about an hour on the island before getting picked up by the zodiac and returning to Ushuaia via bus. We had a few hours of break time in the afternoon and we spent some time exploring the town. Ushuaia was not at all what I expected. It’s the “end of the world”, so I was expecting a very small town and was completely shocked to find dozens of mid-level high rises stretching across the oceanfront. The town is nestled on the foothills of the Patagonian mountains and because of the Antarctica cruises, it’s absolutely crawling with people. The actual town population is ~82,000, but I’m sure that balloons quite a bit with all the tourists.

Because of its location, seafood is easy to find and we quickly learned that the delicacy in Ushuaia was king crab. We decided to save that for our second day and instead, found a nice restaurant selling roast lamb, another Patagonian delicacy. We ordered lamb with roast potatoes and vegetables for two and received a ridiculously delicious and large portion of lamb! We ended up bringing half of it back to the hostel and eating it again for lunch the following day.

In the evening, we returned to the waterfront for our cruise of the Beagle Channel. Cruising the Beagle Channel is one of the biggest attractions, and like I said, a lot of people ride all the way down to Isla Martillo to view the penguins from the boat. We didn’t need to cruise that far, but I didn’t want to miss the channel, so the evening cruise was a great compromise!

One thing I loved about coming from Canada to Patagonia in February was the increased amount of daylight. Sunset was still 5pm in Vancouver at that time, so it was a real treat to enjoy a 9pm sunset every night in Ushuaia. Our cruise left at 6pm, but instead of having to motor all the way down to Isla Martillo, we got to circle around the Channel observing all the marine life! I think it may have been Seth’s favourite day of the entire trip and we had a blast on the boat because there were a ton of other very enthusiastic bird nerds on board that we quickly befriended.

It was pretty cold, so a lot of people stayed huddled inside the heated part of the boat, but we spent the entire cruise on the roof. Seth had his binoculars of course, but most of the other birders were sporting very large cameras. We hadn’t been able to find a quality English bird guide yet, so we took advantage of the other birders identification skills and had a great time spotting wildlife.

The highlight of the cruise for the birders was spotting a Blackish Cinclodes, which is a pretty unremarkable little black bird, but apparently it’s super rare and was flying around the boat for a solid hour, so all the nerds were in a tizzy over it! I’m not sure what my favourite bird was, I’m still pretty partial to oystercatchers, so maybe them, but it was cool to see an albatross.

The highlight of the tour for non-birders is probably Faro les Eclaireurs, which is a small lighthouse structure on a barren rock. It’s probably known as the “lighthouse at the end of the world” if I had to guess. It did have a bunch of sea lions hanging out on it at least! What I found more intriguing was the fact that the Channel is basically the border between Chile and Argentina, so while you’re cruising around, you have Argentina to the east and Chile to the west!

The tour finished around 9pm and we made a quick exit back to the hostel to try and catch up on some rest before another big day exploring Tierra del Fuego National Park. Check back next week for that!

An Expensive Welcome to Argentina

March 27, 2024April 16, 2024 / Maria / 2 Comments

After a very sad winter (weather-wise), I was thrilled to have a big trip on the agenda for mid-February to early March! Me and Seth started travelling again last year with a visit to my cousin, who is studying in Finland. We had an incredible time, so I convinced Seth that 2024 was the year to finally cross a major trip off my bucket list – hiking in Patagonia! I still had some banked vacation time from 2020, so we booked off 3 weeks to explore around Southern Argentina and Chile.

In order to get to Patagonia, we had to go through some major cities first, and like most plane trips these days, it was chaotic. We booked an Air Canada flight to Buenos Aires through Toronto. We planned to stay for 2 days before catching a flight to Patagonia, which is the region that encompasses the southern portion of both Argentina and Chile.

The trip almost got off to a rough start. We weren’t due to leave Vancouver until 1pm, and I woke up early on Saturday morning to an email from Air Canada saying our flight had been cancelled and we’d been rebooked 2 days later through LONDON HEATHROW. I know it’s an automated re-booking, but it’s just unfathomable to me why any program would ever re-book a flight from Western Canada to South America, with 2 crossings of the Atlantic Ocean.

We would have lost our entire 2 days in Buenos Aires with this itinerary (and maybe even our flight to Patagonia), but fortunately, with a little detective work we were able to solve the problem. It was only our flight from Vancouver to Toronto that had actually been cancelled, so we re-booked that portion of the flight 2 hours earlier and rushed to get to the airport in time to make the original booking. Fortunately I’d woken up early, otherwise we might have had a really bad start to the trip.

Our flight did still end up being a bit delayed and we arrived in Buenos Aires ~4 hours late, just in time for a pretty sunset. We had very limited time in the city and there was a lot to explore! I would have preferred to spend a few more days in Buenos Aires, but I had to limit myself because our trip was primarily about Patagonia and I’m committed to the idea of returning to visit Northern Argentina and Chile on a subsequent trip.

There are a lot of neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires and I had a hard time trying to decide where to stay. I was mostly between San Telmo (for location) and Palermo (for atmosphere). I’d heard mixed reviews about how safe San Telmo was, but ultimately decided on a hip hostel because the location was so ideal. It ended up being great! We didn’t really go out after dark, but I never felt unsafe in San Telmo and our hostel was really nice. We had a private room, but our hostel had a lot of community space, including a bar and 2 pools. The entire front atrium is made of glass with crisscrossing glass staircases (very Harry Potter). The coolest part was that it had a glass bottom floor pool on the roof! So the atrium was always kind of shimmery from the light reflecting off the pool, through the glass floor, and across the walls. It was really neat.

With limited time, we could only do a few activities in Buenos Aires. This was further exacerbated by the fact that we ended up having major money problems in Argentina that we needed to solve before leaving the capital.

Argentina’s currency is the Argentine peso, which is problematic because it is a very volatile currency that has seen rapid inflation and de-valuing of the currency in recent years. It seems to be a bit of a pariah currency internationally and we couldn’t get any of it in Canada before we left. For this reason, Argentinians prefer to try and keep their savings in US currency because it’s much more stable, so we brought several hundred dollars of USD with us, and assumed we could get pesos from ATM’s once we arrived.

Argentina’s main problem is that the official government rate from USD to pesos is about a 3rd of the actual rate. So ATM’s are not really an option because they give you a terrible conversion rate; they can only dispense a maximum of ~$20USD at a time; and they charge you high fees to take the money out. So to take out the equivalent of $20USD in pesos from an ATM would likely cost you more like $60USD. However, because Argentinians prefer to keep their savings in USD, there’s incentive for them to change money on the street. So there’s a separate conversion rate known as the “blue rate”, which people use colloquially to change money. So stores will indicate that they will accept USD at the “blue rate” or you can exchange cash in Argentina’s thriving black market.

This seemed completely wild to me and I’m still a bit shocked that we actually did it. Honestly, I would have been good to just exchange the US currency we brought and pay for everything else on card, but our money problem was further exacerbated by the fact that Argentina is a cash based economy and we heard horror stories about more remote towns not accepting credit cards. There’s definitely a preference for cash and many stores will list their retail items at two different prices: a “cash rate” and a “card rate”. I was very worried we would get to Patagonia and not be able to use our credit cards, leaving us with no way to get any more money than the USD we’d brought with us.

This turned out to be very much not the case. You can pay for most things in Argentina on credit card, even in Ushuaia, El Calafate, and El Chalten. They are all small towns, but tourism is their main source of revenue, so they have adapted to accept credit cards. It does cost you a bit more to pay on card because of the fees – which used to be exorbitant as well, but were regulated in 2022 – so while cash is still king, the rate I got on my visa was fine. It’s pretty much just street markets, buses, and taxis where you need cash. But even that was hit or miss. Lots of taxis do take card, as do some of the major bus depots. I think this cash myth is perpetuated around the country because paying with cash on the blue rate is the most economical way to spend money and most Argentinians can’t imagine having the luxury of paying a bit more to simplify your life. So I recognize that that is a privilege we had as tourists.

But I didn’t know most of this when I arrived in Buenos Aires, so we immediately became stressed out about how to obtain enough cash for the entirety of our time in Argentina. We exchanged some of our USD on the black market, but even then we got scammed. It sounds shady, but it’s a pretty accepted practice and there’s a street in Buenos Aires where you can go to change money. We found someone and he led us back to an apartment building where he had set up a bit of a secret office. He only let one of us go in, so Seth went and changed half of our money. The largest bill Argentina has is the 1000 peso, which is worth ~$1USD. So it’s basically the equivalent of everyone in America walking around and paying for everything with stacks of $1 bills. To manage their stacks of cash, a lot of people and businesses use electronic bill counters. The guy we were buying from counted out the money for Seth using the machine, but when we counted the bills later, they had clearly rigged the it and we got short-changed.

It turns out, the most reliable way to get money is through Western Union. I only have good things to say about Western Union after this experience because they offer a great rate and you can basically send yourself money in Canada and pick it up in Argentina in pesos. So it’s the easiest way to get your hands on cash without getting scammed. The problem is, we couldn’t send ourselves money once we got to Argentina. So my Mom ended up going into a Western Union in St. John’s and sent us all the money we needed and we picked it up in cash in Buenos Aires. It’s still somewhat challenging because a lot of the small branches run out of cash, but there’s a few big branches, including one near our hotel, that was very reliable. So after much difficulty, we finally got enough cash for the trip and I was able to breathe easy.

Mostly I’m relieved we started the trip in Buenos Aires because I think this would have been much more difficult if we’d started the trip in El Calafate or Ushuaia. My recommendation for anyone going is to wire yourself a ton of money through Western Union before the trip, pick it up in Buenos Aires, and avoid the blue rate altogether. We ended up keeping the rest of our USD for an emergency. We didn’t exchange it for pesos and ended up just taking it home. Maybe not ideal if you’re European, but as a Canadian, I don’t mind having some USD around.

So it was a hectic and stressful welcome to Argentina, but fortunately the trip improved a lot from there! Check back next week to hear about the fun things we got up to Buenos Aires and make sure you adequately research the money situation if you decide to visit Argentina! Economically, Chile is much more stable, so it was only Argentina where we had issues.