From DFW to Patagonia and back, Tom and Karen recount their adventurous trip in March 2011. It was a wonderful hiking trip on the Argentina side of Patagonia - trip AGA8 with Adventure Life.
My wife and I (hereafter referred to as Karen and Tom) had a very unproductive day at work on Friday as we counted down the hours.
Finally a little after 3pm we left for the airport. We were flying DFW-MIA-EZE departing at 6pm and although we didn't expect much traffic or any parking problems, sometimes it is just easier to arrive early. Plus Karen had never been inside an Admirals Club, so I wanted her to get that experience.
The DFW flight was a tad late leaving, but nothing material, it cut-down our layover time in MIA.
The MIA-EZE flight on the other hand! That was full of issues. We boarded on time and found our cozy business class seats. Departure was scheduled for roughly 11pm local time, but that time came and went. The first set of reasons was that the flight was oversold and they were looking for 3-4 people to stay in MIA overnight and fly to EZE the next morning. It was actually a tempting offer since they were offering $800 vouchers per person.
This went on for sometime and then we had a medical emergency on the plane. In hindsight, it was good that we hadn't departed so the person could receive proper medical care. They needed to leave the plane and of course their luggage needed to be removed from the cargo hold.
Finally, we had a water leak that needed to be fixed.
All told, we left roughly 2 hours late and landed at EZE around 12pm local time. But that is for tomorrow's entry.
Arrival in Buenos Aires
Mar 12, 2011
Although we arrived a bit late, we had nothing pressing on our agenda for today, so a few hours didn't matter one way or the other.
We did have the joy of landing right after a Qantas flight from SYD and all of those passengers were in front of us through both the Reciprocity Fee and then Immigration -- that took nearly an hour :-(
But finally, we were in Argentina and our bags also arrived with us -- always a concern with connection flights.
We had opted to not utilize the Adventure Life hotel for our Saturday night stay -- I have plenty of Starwood hotel points to burn and we utilized some of those to cover our Saturday night stay.
We stayed at the Sheraton Liberator - which is very centrally located. Nice perk of having Starwood status -- we were given the Presidential Suite!! The room was huge and included a sauna.
Prior to our trip, we had spent a lot of time trying to plan for our evening in BA -- many people recommended a tango show and we researched several. We opted to skip the Tango for a couple of reasons -- 1) we feared staying awake that late into the evening as we had a 5:45am flight the next morning, 2) Many of the major shows seemed too touristy and we didn't have the courage to try a purely local show.
So we opted to take a free walking tour of BA that began in Plaza Saint Martin at 5pm. It was a wonderful walking tour that lasted about 2 hours. We had a dinner (early by BA standards, but late by our standards) and rearranged our gear for our early morning flight.
We never did take advantage of the in-room Sauna :(
Patagonia here we come -- we think
Mar 13, 2011
A responsible traveler should have at least a basic understanding of the local language and for Spanish that is more than just saying *un momento por favor*. We were not responsible travelers :(
Why does that matter? Well, if you are getting in a cab headed to the airport for a very early morning flight (and you wanted to get as much sleep as possible and thus didn't leave a time cushion) in a city with two airports, it would be good to be able to direct the driver to the correct airport. About 10 minutes into what should have been a 10 minute taxi ride, I look up and see signs to EZE -- that was very bad since we wanted AEP. My butchered Spanish coupled with the boarding pass got my point across and we were soon headed in the right direction, but by this time is was already 4:45 and LAN flights have a 40 minute baggage cutoff. We were getting nervous.
We checked our bags at 5:03am -- a full 2 minutes to spare. No reason to be nervous :)
Since we were flying LAN, it was a one-stop flight to FTE (we stopped in USH for about 20-30 minutes).
We landed on-time at FTE, collected our bags and meet our driver. We had roughly a two-hour drive from Calafate to Chalten. The drive itself was unremarkable -- there are some nice views along the way. The most memorable item was the lack of gasoline for the car -- as we pulled into Chalten our driver mentioned that he was happy we made it. There was an on-going strike and no gas was available in Chalten and when it was available it was limited to one fill-up per family.
We toured Chalten for about an hour and that let our driver find another car that would take us to our hotel.
We were staying in a beautiful hotel (Hosteria El Pilar) that was at the trail head. Very warm and friendly hosts -- my favorite aspect was the big square fireplace in the common room.
We took a short hike to get our legs stretched before dinner - about an hour each way to a wonderful viewing point that overlooked a glacier. At this point in our trip, I was amazed at the views of the glaciers (this beautiful view would be regulated to the second page of my *top views* in a few days, but for now it was awesome). While hiking we heard and then eventually found a woodpecker busy at work. Very fun bird to watch for a few minutes.
We had a leisurely start time of 9:30am tomorrow, which is when we would be meeting our trekking guide.
Trekking Begins!
Mar 14, 2011
We had a very leisurely start to our first day of trekking. Departure time was 9:30, so we had plenty of time to eat a wonderful breakfast and get our gear situated. Since the next two nights would be in tents, we needed to split our gear and only take what was needed. The remainder of our gear was shipped directly to the hotel where we would stay on Wednesday night (today being Monday morning).
Our guide, David, arrived a little after 9am. Everything was situated and off we went. This ended up being a *private* trip although that was not our intention. Because of when the Spring Break holiday occurred back home, this was the only week that we could make this trip. Adventure Life arranged for a trip with a custom departure date, which is probably why it was a private trip. Although one of the things I love about travel is meeting different people, the fact that it was just Karen and I worked out very well (but I'm jumping ahead).
The trail head begins right outside of the hotel. For the first hour or so, we were on the same trail that Karen and I had waked the previous evening. It was still just as beautiful in the morning light as it was the eventing before.
Our first stopping point of the morning was the lookout over the glacier and the lake. This was the view we thought we were walking to the previous evening, but didn't actually reach. The previous night, we had arrived at what we thought was a wonderful vantage point to see the glacier and we turned around an went back for dinner. While this morning, as we walked right past the vantage point we had used as the turn-around, Karen and I figured out that we must have turned around a bit early. About 15 minutes later we understood that the view from the previous night palled by comparison to the view at this morning's vantage point. Just beautiful.
There were a few other trekking groups and our guide seemed to know every other guide -- which really isn't that unusual.
The highlight of our hiking day was the view of Fitz Roy -- it is a bit of an ascent to get there, but very much worth the effort. We had a relaxing late lunch on the shore of the lake at the base of Fitz Roy and simply enjoyed the beauty of nature.
After a nice full day, we saw the signs to camp. This was one of those cruel situations were the campsites for the tour companies are in a different spot than the public campsites. Our tired legs were not happy as we walked by tent site after tent site (while seemingly always going uphill) on the way to Adventure Life's site. It really didn't take as long as my legs thought it did.
Finally, we arrived and our tent was set-up. This was Karen's first night of hiking and then sleeping in a tent, so I gave her my two cents on protocol: change out of the hiking boots into something more comfortable, wash up a bit, rearrange your pack before you lose too much energy/motivation.
Snacks were awaiting us and we walked to the dinning tent. Great selection of snacks and drinks were laid-out. Karen probably won't like this being saved on a website, but,I mentioned earlier that this was her first multi-day guided trek, she thought the snacks were dinner. Silly girl.
David told us that the view from the lake typically provided some wonderful views, so Karen and I took our tired legs and headed down toward the shore. We found a nice spot on the *beach* and sat and enjoyed the beauty of nature for 30 minutes or so.
The owl and the waterfall
Mar 15, 2011
After a surprisingly restful sleep (remember this was Karen's first real night in a tent), we had a light breakfast and hoisted our packs onto our backs and set off.
David took us slightly off trail to explore a secluded waterfall that was picture perfect. It had Fitz Roy framed in the distance and we spent 20-30 minutes taking photos.
Later in the morning, David's excellent eye site allowed us to see an owl (I think it was a pygmy owl) resting on a tree branch. Neither Karen nor I had every had the opportunity to see an owl from only 10 feet away or so and it was cool -- we stayed for a bit to take photos and watch the owl rotate its head.
We stopped between the Mother and Daughter lakes for lunch. The wind was very calm and the location was very nice for a lunch break.
The afternoon hike to camp was beautiful and peaceful.
At this point, I should mention that Karen had tweaked her knee pretty good during the decent from Fitz Roy the day before. She varied between being in pain to being just uncomfortable, but she showed just how amazing she is by fighting through the pain and trekking at her pace.
Thus when we arrived at tonight's camp -- which is wonderfully secluded under a forest canopy - she was more than willing to let David and I do the optional hike while she rested.
After another round of fantastic snacks (by now Karen was an expert and knew that there would be dinner later), David and I set off.
This was a fairly demanding ascent to the old base camp -- I was working extremely hard, but as with everything associated with trekking, the view at the end is worth the work. The only down side was hearing from David and some of the other guides about how much the glacier has retreated over the years. From this lateral moraine we had a great view of the trail we would use tomorrow along with a clear indication of how far the glacier has retreated. The terminus of tomorrow's trail had historically been on the glacier, now trekkers have to scramble across 100m or so of the side of the moraine to get to the glacier. From this distance, it didn't look too imposing, but....... that is for tomorrow.
David and I returned to camp to find that Karen had napped and her knee was feeling better. We enjoyed a relatively early dinner and headed to our tent for the night. One of the many things I'll remember about the trip was the rolling wave-like sound of the wind across the tree tops. It wasn't a constant noise, rather it was truly like waves and you could hear the wind start on one side of the canopy and move across and then repeat.
Rope Bridge @##@!$^ and some Wind
Mar 16, 2011
We set off about 30 minutes early today because we wanted to be in front of the other group of hikers -- they had a big 15-20 person group and you don't want to be caught waiting at the rope bridge.
Also we were carrying our crampons for the glacier hike, pretty cool accessories and they fit nicely into our packs.
After roughly an hour we arrived at the rope bridge. I should tell everyone, that I clearly misunderstood the definition of a rope bridge. (The Adventure Life site says, rope harness, but somewhere along the way I had converted that to rope bridge). So, Karen and I were expected a typical V-Shaped rope bridge that we would walk across while hold the ropes on each side. WRONG.
This was a *step into your harness, attach the primary and secondary clamps, and then hang upside down and pull yourself and your pack hand-over-hand to the other side* type of crossing. It was only 15m or so, but boy, the triceps burn was noticeable. I'll politely note that Karen did not enjoy being upside down less than 5m about the water. Only one person can go at a time and this is a fairly exposed part of the moraine, which is why we wanted to be in front of the larger group.
You then begin a long ascent along the lateral moraine (on the opposite side from the optional hike the day before). The trail takes your through forest and up and up and up so you can cross a river. Then it is back down, down, down to what historically was the gateway onto the glacier. I can't remember the exact ascent, but it was over 250m in my guess.
By this time, the other group had caught us and we let them cross the scree and loose rocks to get to the glacier. This part of the trek is not for the faint of heart -- while there is a *path*
across the loose rocks, they are as their name implies loose rocks and they can shift and move when you place your foot on them. We decided to give it a try and slowly made our way across without incident.
Once on the glacier, we donned our crampons and began to walk around to get used to the feel. David lead us to different areas and we were able to spend as much time on the glacier as we wanted. Eventually, we indicated it was time to head back and thus we started back.
After a long day, the ascent from the glacier to the stream crossing seemed much steeper on the ascent that it did on the descent earlier. We also had a good taste of the famous Patagonia wind while trekking on the moraine. At some points it seemed like we were literally going to be blown off the trail -- so much so at one point that I actually grabbed Karen's pack to make sure she wasn't going anywhere!
Since I love my wife, I'll just mention that we made it across the rope bridge -- no further comments necessary.
We made it back to the campsite and had a nice snack and brief rest. At this point, our legs assumed we were done, since we were at a campsite, right? Wrong. The day's activities don't end here -- rest is in El Calafate and that is about 2 hours further away.
Karen and I set off (because what else are you going to do). It was a leisurely pace across trails we had used the previous day and then a new trail that leads to town. We did have some wonderful views of the valley on our right hand side.
Finally, the trail opens up and provides a great view of the town -- spread out in all of its' color and quaintness. Very memorable. The descent into town took a bit longer as Karen's knee was not happy with her, but she continued to be *trekker woman* and sally forth.
The hotel in town provided lukewarm water in the shower, but at that point, it was still heavenly. David had recommended a local pizza spot for dinner and it was a fantastic place. We were sore, tired and hungry, but very happy and very content with the memories we were making.
The hotel bed -- another slice of heaven!
Day Hike from Chelten
Mar 17, 2011
The original plan for the day had us trekking to a view point, but a combination of an overcast sky and Karen's knee had us modify the plan slightly.
We trekked to the clearing point at the top of the forest and had another experience of Patagonia wind -- although David reminded us that on a truly windy day, we wouldn't be standing there!
It was a peaceful, shortened hike that offered one more day in the beautiful environment.
We returned in time for a late lunch at our new favorite Pizza spot and then spent an hour or so waiting for our driver to take us to the bus stop and the trip back to Calafate.
One minor travel *experience* as part of getting to the bus station. Our driver dropped us off at the bus station and to my surprise there are actually 3 or 4 bus companies that do trips to Calafate and we had no idea which company we were supposed to use. Quickly looking through our paper work, we identified the correct company based upon the departure time. My horrible Spanish skills once again caused a few moments of anxiety as the bus company indicated the bus was completely full. The man was asking for our vouchers and we didn't have any. Finally, I had him show the manifest and noticed that there were spots on the bus for Tom and Karen and then everything went smoothly.
It was roughly 2h commute and a driver meet us at the Calafate bus station and took us to our hotel.
The GLACIER
Mar 18, 2011
This morning would be the touristy part of our trip. No more trekking per se - although today's tour does have *multi-trek* in the name. A big tour bus picked us up in the morning -- I can't remember the exact time, but we had time to eat breakfast in the hotel and not feel rushed.
We had to make a few more stops to pick up other guests at other hotels. I think it took roughly 60 minutes to reach the park boundary. At the park entrance, the national park rangers board the bus and collect the entrance fee -- we had been told the fee was payable in Pesos, but clearly other people on the bus hadn't gotten the same message. Everything was sorted out and we had another 15-20 minute drive through the park to the boat docks.
We boarded the ferry, for what was going to be a 10-15 minute transit to the other side. Most people started out inside and moved up-top once we got going to get better pictures. There was a light rain failing and a chill in the air.
The Perito Moreno glacier is massive - there is no other term to describe it. The rain had picked up a bit as we made our way from the welcome huts to the glacier. Unlike our previous day glacier trek, where we had to carry and then fit our crampons, this tour had workers waiting to place the crampons on for you. Our tour was split into three groups.
Like I mentioned at the top, this is a more touristy tour and you follow your guide along a predefine route -- that didn't take away from the beauty of glacier in any fashion.
At the end of the tour, the guides offer up fresh glacier water (literally a chunk of glacier ice that is ice picked and placed into a drinking pitcher), whiskey or a combination of both. Nice little end to the tour.
The rain had picked-up even more by that point and we headed back to the welcome hut to dry out and eat lunch.
The second part of the trip entails re-boarding the bus and heading to another view point. The trails are laid out much like a national park in the US and are easily accessible by all as they are mostly ramps or defined walkways. Despite the rain, the views were amazing.
We ended up back in El Calafate in mid-afternoon and spent some time touring the city. We had an early dinner at a restaurant next door to the hotel and then settled into our hotel room to repack our gear for the trek home.
Long (did I mention long) travel day
Mar 19, 2011
Today would take us from FTE to AEP, switch to EZE and then fly to MIA on the overnight. And we still wouldn't be home until tomorrow morning.
Our driver arrived a few minutes later than our original pick-up time for the trip to the airport, but there was a substantial cushion already built-in so there was no problem.
Another one of the fun things about travel is foreign airports. LAN was not checking-in any passengers when we arrived, but the line was already out the door, so we waited. Eventually (probably 45m - 1h wait) we received our boarding pass. One of the fun things during the wait was that we ran into David -- it was the end of the season in Patagonia and he was heading back to his family. We had purchased his photography book as a souvenir the day before and took this opportunity to have him sign our copy.
After our boarding pass wait, we got the opportunity to do the departure tax line -- that was only 15-20 minutes.
Easy flight back to AEP. We had roughly 4.5h before our departure from EZE and it seemed like most of that time was spent waiting for our bags to be delivered at AEP. The reality was it only took 45m or so, but it seemed much longer.
We took a taxi to EZE -- the shuttle buses are cheaper but we wanted the ease of the private service.
EZE allowed us to enjoy yet more lines. We arrived prior to when the AA counters opened up. Once they started allowing check-in our line (we were in First) was having technical difficulties and we waited another 15m or so.
Then the security line, which was only 20-30m. Then the immigration line - which was very long - nearly an hour. Fortunately we did have time in our schedule, but there was a bevy of passengers on a Lufthansen flight that were pleading with everyone to allow them through as their flight was boarding.
That all being behind us, we still have over an hour before we boarded so we headed to the Admirals Club for a bit. We also did a final bit of shopping.
The flight home to MIA was very smooth and the MIA customs and immigration queues were relative quick (very quick compared to the one at EZE).
Back home
Mar 20, 2011
The MIA-DFW flight went off without a hitch. I skipped breakfast and slept nearly the whole way, Karen ate (I think) and continued reading her Nook.
Luggage pick-up and the shuttle back to remote parking were smooth and we headed for home thinking about where our next hiking adventure should take us.
Clara has been a great help and is very knowledgeable. Getting excited already about our trip
David Corey
4 days ago
Franny was knowledgeable with just the right touch. Highly recommend.
Bob
6 days ago
There was no detail left unconsidered in our South American itinerary. Our vague dream was turned into an unforgettable experience and lifelong memories. Our team of planners, guides, hosts, and excursion leaders were amazing and we were so honored to have been able to share their countries with them for a time. We would absolutely work again with Adventure Life-indeed, this was our third trip with them at the helm!
Jamie Park
3 weeks ago
The trip was planned well. They worked through local travel planners in the two countries we visited. The trip planner was fairly knowledgeable, but she could have been better. The hotels selected were good. There were a few things I think they could have planned better related tot he transportation between the various locations we visited, but it was a great trip overall.
MR
4 months ago
Mary Curry found right trip for my budget and the best date that I liked. She made
that reservation when other company's agent could not do it.
Thank you so much!
Theresa AN
4 months ago
Clara has been a great help and is very knowledgeable. Getting excited already about our trip
David Corey
4 days ago
Franny was knowledgeable with just the right touch. Highly recommend.
Bob
6 days ago
There was no detail left unconsidered in our South American itinerary. Our vague dream was turned into an unforgettable experience and lifelong memories. Our team of planners, guides, hosts, and excursion leaders were amazing and we were so honored to have been able to share their countries with them for a time. We would absolutely work again with Adventure Life-indeed, this was our third trip with them at the helm!
Jamie Park
3 weeks ago
The trip was planned well. They worked through local travel planners in the two countries we visited. The trip planner was fairly knowledgeable, but she could have been better. The hotels selected were good. There were a few things I think they could have planned better related tot he transportation between the various locations we visited, but it was a great trip overall.
MR
4 months ago
Mary Curry found right trip for my budget and the best date that I liked. She made
that reservation when other company's agent could not do it.
Thank you so much!
Theresa AN
4 months ago
Clara has been a great help and is very knowledgeable. Getting excited already about our trip
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