Back in Chile now, after a week in Argentina. We left Puerto Natales for El Chaltén, Argentina, the base for exploring the Fitz Roy area. Hitchhiked, since the buses in Argentina are terribly expensive, and met (as almost always) some nice and interesting people on the way. The weirdest ones were probably the two pals from the US who picked us up at Cerro Castillo border station and took us to El Calafate. Actually we never intended to go there, just to a junction nearby, and they were going some few hundred km in the opposite direction, but they wanted to be nice and took us to Calafate anyway. The unpredictability of hitchhiking is wonderful! Both of these guys studied at Berkeley, the one who drove is a physicist with a Ph.D. in string theory (as if anyone can be expected to know what that is) and the other one (the one reading Stephen King and drinking 1l/hr. of Coke) did physical chemistry. No wonder the back seat was littered with pieces of paper with equations and obscure symbols...

Getting from Calafate to El Chaltén was no small challenge, it took us two days hitching and one night on the loneliest junction in the world. We almost gave up and took the bus but finally got the ride we needed!

Fitz Roy and all its pals are absolutely amazing. Wow. Someone said it is the most perfect mountain in the world... For those of you who don´t know, it is a 3400 m peak of granite with cliff walls too steep for snow to settle on them. To either side you have lower peaks, called Aguja (Needle) this and this, and only a few km away is the famous Cerro Torre, a 3100 m needle of granite that was for most of history considered absolutely impossible to climb (until someone managed to do so in 1970). Its top is covered with so-called ice mushrooms, accumulation of rime formed when the moisture in the air freezes directly onto the cliff in the howling Patagonian winds. We felt those howling winds once, they´re so strong they almost knocked us over!

The trek we did was an easy one. On the first day we walked to the basecamp for climbs to Cerro Torre, Campamento Bridwell. The campsite was really crowded, not only with trekkers but also with climbers. Ropes and other gear hanging from almost every tree. Actually I thought that this is what would also be the case in Torres del Paine, but there we saw no climbers. Strange. It was pretty cloudy and we could not see Cerro Torre itself, but did the mandatory walk to the viewpoint in the evening anyway, just in case the weather would be even worse the following day.

Believe it or not, the next morning I woke up and got out of the tent at 5:30!! The sky was completely clear, promising a beautiful sunrise. I took on all my warm clothes and went out with my new camera, spending half a roll on the spectacle of the night turning into day. Poor guys who slept too long and came running with their cameras to get the last traces of pink on the peaks at just before seven... Anyway, that day was a lazy one for me; I slept until noon and went out walking, found myself a good spot to lie down, have a sunbath, listen to the surroundings (avalanches, ice breaking off the glaciers, rockfall) and read a bit. Good life :)

The following day we walked from Campamento Bridwell (probably named after some mountain bloke) at the foot of Cerro Torre to the Campamento Poincenot (a French mountaineer who died in 1952 attempting to cross a river nearby) at the foot of Mount Fitz Roy. The weather was still with us so we walked up to the Laguna de los Tres (Lake of the three), the traditional viewpoint for the mountain. They´re so elegant, these cold granite giants, and Fitz Roy especially so with the row of smaller peaks on either side of it. Like soldiers. Tindátar. It was just as well that we did this view-walk that evening because the next morning we found the sky heavy with clouds and some rain falling. No sunrise photography that day. Can´t say I was too sorry to stay in the warm sleeping bag...

The weather didn´t want to cooperate again for sunrise pictures, so after the second night in Campamento Poincenot we ate all the food we had left (not too much...), packed our bags in the pouring rain and hiked back to El Chaltén through rolling granite hills and what to my Icelandic eyes looks like heath vegetation. Low bushes, some patches of woods (rarely seen in Iceland) and tiny flowers, all of them preparing for the coming autumn. It felt almost like walking in Jokulsargljufur. The last trek in Patagonia was over.

The hitching back to Puerto Natales worked out, even if we had to take a bus once and then pay a tour operator for taking us from the lonely border station in Argentina (where there was a small puppy sharpening his teeth on our backpacks and Arnon´s hand) to Puerto Natales last night. It was such a bleak prospect having to spend the night in the tent in this rather God´s forsaken place. The best ride: On the top of a huge truck through the endless plains on Ruta Nacional No. 7, with the sand from everywhere blasting your face and covering everything, and fantastic views of the Torres del Paine massif.

Next Friday we´ll take the Navimag ferry to Chacabuco (still in Chile, close to a town called Coyhaique on the Camino/Carretera Austral), from there I´ll make my way up north as quickly as possible to visit my host family in Bolivia (I found them!!!).