What happened on the way to El Chaltén

A couple days ago, we decided to go look at Mnt Fitz Roy near El Chaltén, which is a 3 hour drive through Arizona* from El Calafate. I attempted to photo-document this trip for you. The full set of pictures can be found in the El Calafate set on Flickr.

There was a lot of this for many hours:


I will not waste your bandwidth with the 20 pictures that I took that look just like that. Pretend that you are bored and looking at dirt. It was like that.

Then we saw this:

(Guanaco. It's like a llama. It's a camelid, which means it is related to Camels. Speaking of Camels, I learned on the ship all about the wild Camel problem that they have in Australia. Apparently, there are enough that it is a "problem". How odd.)

And this:


And this:

(Nandu. AKA Rhea. Like smaller, wild Ostriches.)

Which was pretty awesome. We also saw a Piche in the road, but were so freaked out with a hairy Armadillo that I neglected to take a picture before it scampered off, so I took a picture of the picture that they have in the visitor's center of their National Park. It looked like this:


I found a Hidden Mickey at a scenic viewpoint:


I spent about 30 minutes very excitedly confused by this picture. I understand what the words mean, but I have no idea what the picture is supposed to be of:


And then this sign baffled me as well:

as at this point in the trip, I had not seen a tree in several hours.

FINALLY, we see Fitz Roy, which should look like this:


But actually looks like this, thanks to the fact that is summer, the glaciers are melting and there's lots of water in the atmosphere:


We stopped in El Chaltén, had a pretty good lunch and then hiked up a huge rock to a summit called los condores viewpoint, mostly because I said "that doesn't look that big" before I actually knew what I was talking about. Our car is somewhere in the town below:


We went back down the rock, had a beer brewed in the town (pretty good!) and then headed home. I yelped on the way because I noticed that we had a lago with Flamingos in it, which we did not expect here (expected in San Pedro). Fortunately for us, I have binoculars with u son this trip. Here's a far off picture:


They did not do the dance. That made me sad. Maybe later.

For those of you who have no clue what I am talking about, watch this. Its incredible. I would pee my pants if they did this while I am here:



Then we had an *outrageously* awesome sunset, which my camera cannot capture, but I tried (this was at 9:45 at night):


And came back to the hotel really late, packed up, and went to bed, listening to the music festival that was going on in the town. The next morning, we had to get up early to get to Santiago... and we all know how that went!

*and by "Arizona", I mean "land that looks exactly like Arizona"