On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Anyway, we went as far south as El Calafate, I think the largest town in Argentinian Patagonia. Nevertheless, Wiki says it has an estimated population of 28,000, so it is not a large town. It is, however, the birthplace of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, former First Lady and current Vice President. This means, Argentina being Argentina, that federal money was spent freely there.
So, for instance, you have this wide and completely empty boulevard along the lake shore. My dear wife and I walked down the middle of this road for 10-15 minutes before seeing a car.
Looking east along Lago Argentino. You may notice the emptiness.
One day I decided to go fly fishing. The deal there is that nearly all the land is privately owned (called estancias) but established guides have a working arrangement with the landowners where they can take clients onto private property to fish. They will have keys to the gates and know the spots. You can see a small stream flowing through here. I joked that if they decided to rob and kill me, there was absolutely no chance that my body would ever be found out here. Anyway, this was the end of January – mid-summer. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers, and snow flurries started mid-afternoon. My guide knew almost no English, and I know almost no Spanish, so this wasn’t an ideal day.
The rainbow didn’t cheer me up very much. It was fucking cold.
We decided to rent a car and drive to El Chalten, where the famous Torres del Paine are located. This gave an opportunity to drive on the famous Ruta 40, the highway which traverses the length of Argentina down to Tierra del Fuego. This is a view of the road. The degree of nothing here is just hard to describe. The road, as you can see, is undivided, one lane each way, no shoulder, no nothing. Hours and hours of nothing. You can drive easily 20 minutes without seeing another car in either direction. No telephone poles, no houses, no fences, nothing. For mile after mile. And people drive down that road to get to the tip of South America – then they have to go back. Weird.
The one thing you may see is gauchos, herding sheep. Thousands of sheep. They use dogs to do the work, of course, and signal to them by whistling. It’s a unique audio-visual experience. The mountains behind the clouds are the Torres del Paine.
The Torres del Paine. Frequently hidden in clouds. Climbing them is serious business, and we were not there for that.
There is one gas station in El Chalten. The guidebooks say to fill your tank there, no matter how much is already in your tank. The next nearest gas station is probably four hours away.
What struck me on Ruta 40 was when I passed a couple of bicyclists, clearly long-distance tourists. But from El Chalten to El Calafate is ~130 miles, and there are *no* services. Nothing. That’s a *really* long day, if you’re riding a touring bike carrying camping stuff.
JPL
Beautiful pictures!
raven
So cool. Thanks goodness you didn’t post any pictures of you holding fish!
Albatrossity
Ruta 40 looks like my kind of road!
Steve in the ATL
@raven: ha!
HinTN
Just wow! I had looked at Patagonia as an interesting place to visit in Argentina and, while it is visually stunning, you may have disabused me of that notion. This vicarious tour is plenty, I think. Thank you!
YY_Sima Qian
Nice pics!
Gin & Tonic
Jesus, the typos… I usually prepare these late at night, and in the cold light of day I look like a goddamn illiterate.
TriassicSands
@Gin & Tonic:
Too much gin and tonic? Don’t worry, people come for the photographs, not the letters. As long as we know what we’re looking at, you’re OK.
Gin & Tonic
@HinTN: Not a response I expected. “Love the pics, made me convinced I don’t want to go there.”
Gin & Tonic
@TriassicSands: Looks like somebody went into the descriptions and fixed the typos. Thanks, WG.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: What typos? :-)
Yutsano
@Gin & Tonic: WaterGirl is best editor. Who cares about a few typos anyway?
So much depth in the nothing. I have to ask though: could you see what kind of herding dogs they were using?
Gin & Tonic
@Yutsano: They were pretty far away, but seemed at least sort of border-collie-ish.
mvr
Nice photos once again and they do a nice job of conveying the emptiness.
But what I want to know is whether you caught any fish.
And while I’m commenting, having once ridden 165 miles in one day on a bike loaded with camping gear I agree that 130+ miles is a long way to ride. I was 16 years old when I did that stunt and I was literally falling asleep while pedaling. I would not recommend it.
OTOH, perhaps the bicyclists were stopping half way since you don’t really need services to camp out so long as you brought enough water.
West of the Cascades
With great respect for your beautiful photos, your geography is a little off. The Torres del Paine are a massif in Chile, about 100 miles south of El Chalten in Argentina (I visited both in 2016 by flying in to El Calafate and driving in two different directions, with a rental car from a company in Calafate which prepared all the paperwork to cross the border into Chile and back to Argentina). The area in your photos look like the mountains of the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, including Cerro Torre and Fitzroy. But they’re not the Torres del Paine. More info: https://knowmadadventures.com/travelers-blog/el-chalten-torres-del-paine/
Andrew
I visited El Calafate and El Chaltén in 2015. I did a hike in El Chaltén that was more technical than I expected but had great views.
Wombat Probability Cloud
Thanks for your wonderful photos. This place has been on my bucket list for years, and I appreciate the additional inspiration.
StringOnAStick
@Andrew: We did the same in 2019; it was a fabulous trip. Then we went to the Chilean side and did the 3 day “W” trek, with the required rooming houses because sleeping outdoors by tourists in that route is not allowed due to pumas. I cried as we crossed the lake from our pickup point to go back to civilisation, because it was all so gorgeous and I didn’t want to leave.
way2blue
Hopefully your wife would have raised a search party if you didn’t return from your fishing adventure…
Gin & Tonic
@West of the Cascades: Well, this is embarrassing, but you’re absolutely right, and thanks for the correction. We went into Parc Nacional los Glaciares, and for some reason I had assumed that Fitzroy was one of the Torres del Paine. So, in fact, the picture above is of Mount Fitzroy.
Gin & Tonic
@mvr: Caught quite a few small perch. But nothing to write home about.
J R in WV
Great job showing the emptiness, which is really hard to do anywhere empty…
Thanks for sharing!
Mart
The highway pic brought back my favorite memory of Argentina. I was flying from Buenos Aires to La Rioja. There were a couple three men wearing make-up on the plane. When we landed at the tiny airport a bunch of police and media. Asked the plant manager picking me up what the hell? Said former President ousted in a coup was trying for a comeback and starting the campaign in his home town. While driving into town on an empty highway in a Plymouth minivan with four on the floor; a line of protesters with barbed wire, bats, and pitchforks crossed the road. I thought oh shIt, this is it. My driver speeds up and I thought he was going to plow through them. At the last second he veered into the desert and with a huge smile whipping right around the gang. Driving in town was insane. He caught me repeatedly pressing on an imaginary brake. He laughed at me and said when he was in Miami they had all kinds of rules and accidents. Here we have no rules and no accidents.
Gin & Tonic
@Mart: So I had no issues or concerns driving in Patagonia. But I have to say, on another Argentina trip we went to Mendoza. Spent a couple of nights in a wonderful small hacienda, where the proprietor recommended a drive. This was from Uspallata to Villavicencio on RP52. I thought we would die, honestly. At the end I could barely remove my hands from the death grip I’d had on the steering wheel. Later, after we got home, I found that it’s listed on dangerousroads.org.
dr. luba
I’ve been to Argentina, but missed the west, so I may need to go back…..
I love Patagonia and have been there twice, once driving down to the Puerto Madryn area from the north (elephant seals, Magellanic penguins and Welshmen), and once cruising over from southern Chile to Ushuaia and environs. Both amazing places to visit. And the far south is cold, even at the height of summer.
Driving through the pampas is an experience, sort of like driving through the American west but with less traffic, fewer amenities, and lots of trucks without headlights at night. The strangest thing was the huge flocks of small yellow butterflies–they would suddenly appear, and inundate the car, getting splattered over the windshield. It was blinding. We had to constantly stop to wash it.
I would go back in a heartbeat!
Draco7
I have been watching for these posts this week with particular interest, as I will be in El Calafate next week. From thence to El Chaltén, back to El Calafate, then south to Puerto Natales.
It’s a plus to see these photos if only for their real-life perspective – most photos of the destination on the web look like the work of professionals. Maybe it’s hard to take bad photos there, but it’s good to see some that give an idea of the in-between parts.
@StringOnAStick: I both do and don’t hope I end up crying – how’s that for cognitive dissonance?
Draco7
@Draco7: I am seeing the need to add a disclaimer – one which I somehow edited out on the first round. The comment could be read as shade on the posted photos, which was not at all intended. The difference I was noting was that most of the available photos are attraction specific, whereas in these I can see more context. IOW, what I’ll be seeing out the window while getting around. Obviously not thinking of a good way to phrase that initially.
Gin & Tonic
@Draco7: Very late in a dead thread, but in El Calafate there’s a wonderful funky little restaurant called Pura Vida. It’s a little bit west of the main downtown area, but still walkable. Great change from the ubiquitous asado joints.
Also, if you are crossing the Argentina-Chile border by land, please make sure you are not transporting any food of any kind.
mvr
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks for that update on the fish.