Hi there from Avery and Lela! After being loyal readers of Traveling Walters for the past two years, we decided it was our time to make a contribution. Here is a look into our nearly three weeks in Chile and Argentina — it may be a bit different than Jane and Darryl’s typical travel. Off we go!
Part 1: Santiago
Our trip started off with exciting celebration; Avery turned 29 mid-air on our NYC to Santiago red eye! When we arrived, we checked into Hostal Foresstal, a great spot in Barrio Lastarria. Quickly, we got caffeinated at a bistro close by (Chile is obsessed with France as Argentina is obsessed with Italy). In Traveling Walter’s style, we started with a walking tour of Santiago followed by happy hour Pisco flights in Barrio Lastarria. Later that night, we went out to Pulperia Santa Elvira, a find off of NYT 36 hours in Santiago. Here we had a phenomenally entertaining 9-course tasting dinner to celebrate Avery’s birthday. The restaurant was a small home that had a speak-easy energy to it — fitting about 15 guests.
Our next day, we took a day-long group excursion to Valparaiso, a coastal city about two hours west of Santiago. We enjoyed the colorful homes, street art, and laid-back vibes. Avery had good flashbacks to his summer job as a fishmonger when we visited the fish market in Vina del Mar, the neighboring town. After exploring the port cities, we travelled back through the Casablanca Wine Valley and stopped at an “organic and biodynamic” vineyard for a fun tasting. We picked up $2 bottles of wine that were far superior to TJ’s two buck chuck. After settling back in Santiago, we had yummy cachapas at a Venezuelan restaurant. We came back to our hostel and enjoyed our vineyard wine while Lela beat Avery in cribbage.
On our last day in the city, we strolled through Santa Lucia park and Barrio Italiano. There, we found some A+ city planning with perfectly shaded, multi-use streets. It got quite hot our final day, so we snagged a completo (Chilean hot dog — huge bun, tomatoes, creamy avocado, entire jar of mayonnaise, sauerkraut) and took an afternoon siesta. Early night because Part 2 starts early (with a 2AM wake up time!). Overall, Santiago really impressed us — it was fun, interesting, clean, and easy to navigate. Would recommend!
Part 2: W Trek // Torres del Paine National Park
A three hour flight from Santiago to Puerto Natales brought us down to the beginning of the Patagonia portion of our trip. We checked in to Container Departmento — our fantastic standard shipping container hotel — and jumped into prep to ensure we were ready for our trek. We are moderately experienced backpackers and pretty experienced international travelers, but the logistics for the two experiences together was a new one for us. Our most tense moment of the trip occurred when we entered the Unimarc grocery store, our one-stop shop option to fuel ourselves with non-perishable food for five days. As you could imagine, the Chilean mountain town did not have the trekking staples we were planning on consuming. We grieved the absence of peanut butter and mayonnaise packets, and then we doubled down on the meat sticks. Next, we went to Day Zero Patagonia where we rented a tent, sleeping bag, and cooking set from perhaps the most pleasant man we’ve ever met. He gave us a great orientation to the W trek and — most importantly — supplied us with peanut butter. We fueled up with a large meal of pulled pork and brisket and packed our bags for our adventure!
The next morning, Avery’s Spanish helped us seamlessly navigate a chaotic bus station. A bus to a shuttle got us to Refugio Central, our first camping site. We dropped our packs and started heading up towards Mirador Base Torres. We started in some classic Patagonia spitting rain in a landscape that looking very vast and almost reminded us of what we’d imagine an African Safari would look like. As we made more turns, we learned the motif of Patagonia was experiencing a completely new feeling biome on each turn. On our way out, we had our first sips of glacier water, drinking straight from the river! The sun poked out as we made it towards the top. We picked up the crowds of the day hikers on the last hour before summiting at Mirador Base Torres, the location of the Torres del Paine, the namesake landmark of the park. The weather turned again at the top, this time from rain into snow! Tired, we capped off the 13 mile day by heading back to Refugio Central where we set up camp competing against the famous Patagonian winds. We probably had our best dinner of the trek here — spaghetti with chorizo, yummm.
Day 2 was a point to point hike from Central to Frances. Most of these 10 miles were along a beautifully blue lagoon. The crowds were gone, and we enjoyed the serenity of the utter silence of this hike. After being tempted during the final 5k right against the lagoon, we decided to dip our feet in for a therapeutic glacier ice bath. We arrived at Refugio Frances where we had (by necessity) reserved a set-up glamping tent. It proved to be quite a nice luxury as we slept in what felt like the coziest treehouse we could imagine. This night was however plagued by truly disgusting dinner fail of peanut noodles (read: egg noodles mixed with PB). Alas, we persevere.
Day 3 was dare I say our favorite?! We spent the first 9 miles without our packs, walking in towards Mirador Britanica, providing us amazing 360 views of the mountains. When we came back down, we snagged our bags and headed along a European Alps-esque landscape for another 5 miles until we arrived at Paine Grande and refueled with lodge brewskis.
Our tent kept us quite dry through a rainstorm, and we woke up on Day 4 to beautiful post-rain light. Making breakfast that morning, we were quite surprised to discover that we had consumed an entire jar of peanut butter in 4 short days. After a slow morning, we headed off on a shorter 7 mile hike to Refugio Grey. We felt like Sam and Frodo a bit in this Lord of the Rings style landscape. This part of the hike shaped out the “W” of the W-trek. After we got to the site, we set up camp and walked a mile further to get a good look at Glacier Grey. We came back and indulged in lodge pizza and cocktails to commemorate our last night on the trek.
We started early on Day 5 to hike 7 miles back to Paine Grande where we had an 11AM catamaran waiting for us to get back to the bus station (bonus: sunrise hike). When we arrived at the bus station, we learned some New Zealand card games from peer trekkers while waiting for transit back to Puerto Natales. On our re-entry to our standard shipping container, we took some fantastic showers, washed clothes, and packed up again to head to Argentina the next morning.
Overall, the W Trek was insanely fun and equally beautiful! We definitely lucked out on weather; never were we hiking against famous Patagonian headwinds. Would recommend for all levels of backpackers; there was a range of options that made it widely accessible. Every day felt so different from the last. It felt fun to be in the mountains consistently for so long and hear our minds quiet throughout the trek.
Part 3: El Chaltén + El Calafate
The next segment of our trip kept us located in Patagonia but was for day hiking around the Argentina side. To get there, Lela loaded up on Benadryl and slept the entire day. Avery was awake for the five-hour bus to El Calafate followed by the three-hour bus to El Chalten. He was quite impressed by the ride: we were on a road for over 100 kilometers with nothing but mountains and then suddenly arrived at a tiny 10 block x 6 block hiking and climbing town tucked in between mountains on all sides. Likely still in calorie deficit from the W trek, we tore up our first Argentinian steak on our arrival.
For our first full day in El Chalten, we embarked on the most famous hike there — Laguna de los Tres (takes you to Fitz Roy, the inspiration for the Patagonia company logo). This town was so cool that we could actually walk straight from our hostel into the national park. Our weather was similar to our first day on the W trek: lower visibility, occasional rain or snow, and sometimes more sun. This was a difficult hike that is pretty popular, so I think the weather thinned out the crowds enough to make it perfectly enjoyable. It was also glorious to be going up vert sans-packs. We cranked out 15 miles this day, so it was nice to end it at Cerveceria Patagonia with beer and pizza.
The next day, we went back to the park through a different entrance for the Laguna Torres hike. This was a lighter hike that still had views of Fitz Roy. By the end of this 11-mile hike, we certainly felt that we had walked quite a lot in the past week and were feeling pretty satisfied with our outside time. Right as we got out of the park, we stumbled upon a restaurant hut and demolished Provoleta (essentially, melted cheese and bread). When we continued into town, we stopped and had our first glass of Argentinian Malbec. After, we returned to our hostel and played our last of the many cribbage games of the trip. Avery won this time.
For our final day, we had a slow cafe morning and then a 6-mile walk/hike to a waterfall. We came back to town and found a salad to eat (our first vegetables of the trip). Then, we headed off on our afternoon bus to El Calafate. We spent just a night in El Calafate but had awesome steak and Patagonian lamb. We stayed at Calafate Hostel which felt damn near a resort.
Takeaways: El Chalten is incredibly unique. It’s remote-ness makes it a challenging destination to get to but works to protect its charm. Obviously the hiking is great and, like the Chilean side, made you constantly feel transported in different biomes. It is quite expensive; we survived off of a lot of empanadas. They do love their stray dogs in Patagonia. El Calafate was quite cool and fun, but we don’t regret sort of skipping it.
Part 4: Buenos Aires
For our last stop of the trip, we took an early morning flight from El Calafate to Buenos Aires. We checked into our hostel, Lighthouse Co-Living. This place was incredibly disgusting. Do not stay here. Anyways, it was in the San Telmo neighborhood which was pretty nice. We found our way to this awesome food hall/indoor market and fueled up on some tapas. In the afternoon, we took an Uber towards the Palermo neighborhood. We started in the Ecoparque which was so random but quite cool — kind of an open-air zoo in this park with animals roaming and then some giant animals fenced in. We wandered around a bit in the evening and got rooftop Aperol Spritz’s before heading to Borges 1975, a restaurant/jazz bar, for a show.
On our final day, we had a slow cafe morning before heading to a Buenos Aires walking tour. Honestly our guide stunk and the other people on the tour were pretty insufferable, so this wasn’t our favorite three hours. We recovered by going to Pizza Guerrin, an insanely fast-past and large pizza joint, where we ordered way too much food. Our last stop was at El Ateneo Grand Splendid, an old movie theater turned bookstore. We headed out to the airport early to make time to take incredibly needed clean airport lounge showers before our final red eye back home!
We feel very grateful to have had the time and ability to spend nearly three weeks in South America together. It was especially nice to pair interesting cities with days and days of hiking in the mountains. We saw beautiful views, met silly people, ate interesting food, slept in funny places, and got really really dirty. Avery’s high school Spanish and Lela’s six months of Duolingo were just enough to get by. Special thank you to the Pullman’s for paying for our return flights! It feels good to be home now, but we loved our time in South America. One more big international trip coming this spring! Ciao ciao!
Traveling Walters 