Day 1 - Cerro Torre and Campamento de Agostini

  El Chalten, Argentina
Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Day 1 - It rained all night and for the whole trip up to El Chalten, we couldn't see jack out of the windows through the mist and the rain. I'd lost my watch in the bus station when it was pulled off by my backpack and the strap broke. The bus leaked water and some poor guys journal got soaked. The buses travel very slowly over here, probably because most of the road was unfinished. We were thinking hiking today wasn't going to be too fun. But by some miracle we arrived in El Chalten and the rain stopped. A good sign I do think.

While there was this break in the rain we quickly picked up some bread, booked a bus back to El Calafate, booked some accommodation for when we returned from our hike and got on the trail. Our hike that day was meant to be a 3 hour trip to Campamento de Agostini. Well the sun came out, the views were fantastic and we ended up taking it slowly and spending about 5 hours getting to camp. There were lots of small birds on route and some great views of Cerro Torre, including when we came over the top of one hill to the mirador and you can see your first but great view Cerro Torre up the valley. Hares seemed to be everywhere, some of them were big. There were lots of really old twisted beach trees with old branches scattered over the ground once we got a bit higher up the valley.

In camp there were torrent ducks diving in the stream next to our tent and an Austral Parakeet that squawked noisily from his hole in the tree just above our tent.



We took our stove and some coffee and went to sit up by laguna torre and watched as the sun set on Cerro Torre giving it some fantastic colour as the moon rose behind it.

Our camping food was a little out of date, still this was freeze dried food, this stuff surely couldn't go off. Well it turned out to be nasty and bitter. Luckily I had a spare.

It was 10pm that evening before the sun when all the way down.