We drove in on the bus and arrived at El Calafate.

It was considerably warmer than the previous places we were in. The next day we went to the Perrito Moreno Glacier, which is the main attraction to do in El Calafate. I should have considered the fact that we were visiting a glacier a little farther in the mountains, but I just didn’t think anything of it since it was so warm in the town. I forgot to take a jacket.

We got to the glacier, and we were blown away by its crystalline beauty. And I was cold. It wasn’t ridiculously cold, but I did regret not bringing my jacket. In any case, we walked along the shoreline for a bit. The glacier was about 70 meters tall at its thickest part. But cooler than that was listening to the ice cracking and watching chunks of it fall off the glacier and smash into the lake below. Sometimes it was so loud it sounded like a cannon had gone off.

At one point it started raining, and it was just too chilly, so we took refuge in a building until it passed. After that, we continued our tour before heading back to town for the night.

El Calafate was a quaint town, and we enjoyed hanging out and walking around.

I wanted to check out La Leona Petrified Forest, but there seemed to be no option other than taking an expensive tour, so we decided to pass on it. Maybe next time.

The next day, we took the bus to El Chalten. We were looking forward to that since there seemed to be some beautiful free hikes, unlike Torres del Paine.

When looking at places on booking.com, everything was really expensive. Luckily, I stumbled across https://stingynomads.com/el-chalten-trekking-guide/#Camping_in_El_Chalten, which indicated that there were a few very affordable camping sites. We decided to go for it without making any booking, and we stayed one night at La Torcida, which was only a couple of bucks. We were thinking of just relaxing for a couple of nights, but the camp ranger told us that the weather is cloudy most of the time, so we decided to head out the following day instead since there was a rare window of clear skies.

We went up to Lago de los Tres, and there was a cloud perpetually hugging the summit of Fitz Roy. But we persisted, and eventually the mountain showed its shy face to us.

We then continued hiking to Laguna Torre. It wasn’t quite as scenic at that lake, particularly with the low-hanging clouds, but it was still a nice hike in and out.

We went back to town, got some more supplies, and checked out the Chorrillo del Salto waterfall.

Rested and with more supplies, we then hiked to Laguna Toro, which required registering with the rangers. It was still free, but since it is definitely an overnight venture, I suppose they want to err on the side of caution.

It didn’t quite hail, but it was more solid than snow. Little flakes of ice fell and the insane winds blasted and stung our cheeks, so we had to bundle up.

We pushed through, and we made it to the lake. The mountaintops were snow-kissed, and the temperature had dropped a bit.

We hiked back to town, and we ended up having to wait for a couple of days for the next bus.

We wanted to go see penguins in Monte Leon National Park, but it was proving difficult to go there. The most direct route we found was an 11 pm bus from El Chalten to Gobernador Gregores with a 3 am arrival, which was both too early and too late to check into most accommodations. But then, the next bus from that town to Puerto Santa Cruz, which would get us close to the penguins, was another 11 pm departure with another 3 am arrival. We ended up taking a slightly more “scenic” route and went back to El Calafate and caught a connecting bus in Rio Gallegos. There wasn’t much to do in that town, and we didn’t even bother really checking it out. We wanted to walk around downtown the morning of our departure, but we ended up not having that much time, so we just hung out at the bus station, sheltered from the hurricane-force winds.

After that, we bused to Puerto Santa Cruz. We were to stay in an apartment, and the owner lived elsewhere, so we ended up having to roam around until we found some restaurant that had Wi-Fi so we could tell him that we were in town. He very kindly drove to where we were and picked us up and brought us to the house.

The next morning, we hitchhiked and walked to Puerto de Punta Quilla. I have seen penguins before, but Puujee had not, and she was really excited. We also saw a fox there.

The next bus departed from a town not too far away, and we were preparing to hitchhike there since the only bus departed at 10 pm (why are all these buses so late?). But, the owner of our apartment happened to be going to Comondate Luis Piedrabuena, and he again very kindly took us with him.

There again wasn’t too much to do in that town, but we had a long chat with our couchsurfing host.

We did walk around a bit and saw the botanical garden and river.

The town also had a lot of …interesting depictions of Native Americans all over.

The room we slept in had a pool table, and we decided to make that our bed for the night.

We only stayed one night, and the following night we took an overnight bus to Comodoro Rivadavia. I had searched for couchsurfing hosts there, but most people actually said a nearby town called Rada Tilly was much nicer. As it was, I happened to have asked a host there since couchsurfing’s search function searches in a radius around your search query, and we ended up going there.

We walked to the Nature reserve Punta del Marqués, and we could see some sea lions through some binoculars. They said that you could sometimes see whales while up there, but we never saw any.

The beach was big, but the water was too cold to swim in. We still played around on the beach for a while.

It was then time for another overnight bus to San Carlos de Bariloche. On the way to the bus station, we came across the local Karneval parade. I thought it was interesting that they did it during the evening when it was cooler because they do it in the middle of the day in Cologne, and it is still usually rather chilly.

We hung out with our couchsurfing host in Bariloche a bit and figured out what we would do in between checking out the town.

https://trekbariloche.com/bariloche-maps.php#map helped a bit. Information on the refugios was found at http://www.clubandino.org/refugios-y-campings/.

Our host also had some tips and showed us which bus we needed to get there. She also recommended Cerro Tronador, which looked really nice, but it involved quite a bus ride out of the city. With so many long bus rides surrounding our trip to Bariloche, it was decided a shorter bus ride would be ideal.

We wanted to hike from Colonia Suiza to Laguna Negra and then go to Refugio Jakob. For Jakob, it listed the price for using the bathroom while camping as only 80, which is just over 1 USD. The pricing for the Refugio Laguna Negra wasn’t as clear, and I wasn’t even sure “just camping” was possible there. We decided we would go for it anyway. At worse, we just hide somewhere in the woods.

In reality, we ended up camping a bit before Laguna Negra because we got a late start. We missed the bus we wanted from Bariloche, and the next one only went 2.5 hours later. But camping where we did was free.

The next day, we hiked up to Laguna Negra.

We wanted to go to Refugio Jakob, but we couldn’t find the way. Puujee asked the workers in the refugio, and they said that it was impossible to go to Jakob from there, but they did say it was possible to go from Jakob to Laguna Negra. Why that is the case was not made clear. In any case, we had to find a different path, and we settled on going to Cerro Lopez. We didn’t realize what we were getting ourselves into…

It was a mildly exhausting hike up some mountain and then along a ridgeline most of the way to Lopez. Before the mountain, we camped in a valley.

The next morning, we ascended the mountain while losing our way once because the path wasn’t very clearly marked.

We made it up and got up to Cerro Lopez. From there, we had 2 options; either we could go to the refugio and follow the path back to the highway, or we could head out north and go to some lookouts. We chose the latter, and it proved to be the cause of a long and frustrating hike.

We had to traverse steep cliffs, scale down some cliff faces, and navigate over lots of scree. Loose rocks were constantly slipping underneath us, causing us to lose balance and sometimes cause other rocks to crash into our ankles. The side of the cliff was so steep, it felt like any mistake could send you tumbling down the entire mountainside. There was more than one time where we were kind of freaking out over how difficult it was. And it was like that the entire way down. No breaks.

We thought that it would only take a couple of hours to navigate the ~3km that maps.me said was the route, but we needed more than 6 hours. And we ran out of water about halfway. The heat was turned up to 11 that day, and we were exhausted and dehydrated by the time we got down.

But get down we did. We were utterly exhausted. At the bottom, there was the lake. We stripped down and jumped into the lake, drinking up mouthfuls of water that we so desperately needed. They said you shouldn’t drink from the lake. We didn’t care. And luckily, we didn’t really seem to get sick.

And we got down just in time to catch the last bus that went to Bariloche.

The next day, we bused all the way to Mendoza—a 20-hour ride.

Once in Mendoza, we relaxed a bit at first after such a long journey. While relaxing, I did some research on a wine tour. My cousin was once in Mendoza and went on a biking wine tour, and that sounded fun. I emailed a few places, but only one responded, and it was the one that the tourist information booth at the bus station recommended anyway. It was a self-guided tour, but that was fine because it meant that it was cheaper.

We went to the rental place, got our bikes, and we were off! We ended up visiting 4 wineries, 3 of which we sampled the wines at. We also stopped by some fancier food court where we got the tiniest sample of ice cream, but we also did get a free flight of beer samplers. Both of those were included in the price of the tour. Puujee didn’t like most of the wines, which meant that I got to drink them all up.

After the second place, Puujee’s bike had a flat tire, so the company had to come out and deliver us a new bike. Unfortunately, after the third place, her new bike had another flat tire. Talk about bad luck. The guy came out again and picked up our bikes, but that time he actually just drove us to the last winery. It was nice in a way, but we would have preferred biking, especially since it was getting later in the day and not so hot anymore. Oh well. It was still a fun day.

The following day, we walked around downtown. We didn’t find too much to do. There were a couple of parks to walk through, but otherwise it just seemed like your typical shops and restaurants one finds in any downtown.

Our time in South America was then over. We still had to go back to Santiago de Chile, since that’s where our flights left from, so we took the bus there and hung out for a day before catching our flights up to the states.

Argentina was a pleasant surprise for us. I have a friend from Argentina, and he often likes to talk smack about it. I could understand why one wouldn’t be the biggest fan, but we had a great time. I was also in Argentina a while back, but I didn’t do much more than hitchhike through, so this was an entirely new side of Argentina for me.

El Chalten was much nicer than Torres del Paine for us, and there were plenty of other nice spots. Bariloche was also pleasant. It is a bit expensive to travel around on buses, and unless you’re following the major tourist path, it can be hard to get where you want directly. But still, the food was great, the wine was super cheap (less than 1 USD for a bottle of wine), and the sights were breathtaking.

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And that brings us to an end of my world journey. It has been a wild adventure traveling around the globe for more than 13 months, but I am glad to finish. Traveling non-stop and always worrying about what I’m doing the next week has just exhausted me, and I’m ready to just hang out and truly relax for a while. We are going to stay with some friends and family in the USA for a bit while we figure out the next step of life. Thank you so much for joining me on this epic quest. I hope you managed to live somewhat vicariously through me.