In our time of traveling, Chey and I developed the following theory:
Being a mind hippie isn't the same as being an armpit hippie.
Basically, a mind hippie is someone with a certain hippie-ish ideology. You wouldn't know unless you actually talked to that person.
Then there's people who think that, under the banner of hippieness and saying "pachamama" and wearing colorful pyjama-like pants, they can justify not showering ever again. They also tend to be annoyingly boastful about their lifestyle.
I talk about armpit hippies because they tend to migrate seasonally to certain places, and they were all around when we headed out of Calafate towards El Chalten (the popular hiking destination I was talking about in the last post). They are mostly seen lazily "hitchhiking" on the side of the road. If you would actually call the act of sitting on your backpack looking into the nothingness and expecting that someone will stop for you hitchhiking.
-that last bit is dedicated to my good friend Guido who says "the blog is fun but you complain a lot"-
As for us, we got to El Chalten with another private-tourist-driver, Luciano. A super nice guy who not only picked us up when we were hitching, but also stopped for us to take pictures and took pictures of us, told us a lot about the place (and the misteriously shiny and well fed stray dogs from Calafate), and dropped us at the door of a nice place to eat lunch.
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| A cute and slightly oversized stray dog in Calafate. |
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| Our deluxe ride, and awesome driver (plus me) |
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| The beautiful scenery on the road (and us, short sleeves for the first time in a long time!) |
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| Signs of how far to... |
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| Far. |
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| Cerros Torre and Fitz Roy. |
El Chalten was sunny and absolutely packed with tourists of all ages and walks of life (but mostly groups of israelis and armpit hippies). We found a beautiful and cheap camping ground, picked a good spot and pitched our tent to spend a couple of great days of camping and hiking.
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| Downtown El Chalten. |
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| Ridiculously coloured water. |
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| Hiking. |
The highlight of our time there was definitely the hike up to Laguna Torre, which has a gorgeous glacier.
Hours of beautiful, lonely mountain trails, light blue colored water, and the stunning view of the Cerro Torre, which Chey couldn't stop taking pictures of (you can see why, right?).
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| The start of the hike up was right out of a Disney movie. |
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Happy Chey (you can notice the headphones, we decided to do the walk
with our iPods and switch on the way back. It was just lovely.) |
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| The peaks of Cerro Torre. |
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| First view of the glacier. |
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| One of the series of "Adri going places" |
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The water is actually that color. It has some kind of mineral that makes it
perfect for rock skipping (shame we don't have a video of that, it was impressive). |
Finally we arrived to the glacier. Even in the sun we could feel the icy wind coming from it. We saw bits of ice floating in the lagoon, breaking and floating down the stream.
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| Glacier time! |
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| Oversized ice cubes. |
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| Note the QLD singlet. |
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Chey contemplating the glacier and thinking about the
big questions of life... like What kind of beer am I going to drink
when we get back to town? |
We just stayed there for a while taking in the view and then walked back to town, happy, hungry and thirsty for some celebratory beer.
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| And celebratory pizza. |
Little we knew that was going to be the last bit of relaxed time we were getting in a while.
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