We made the bus trip from El Calafate to El Chalten in about 3 hours. It would have been less if we didn’t have a toilet stop (this on a coach with an onboard loo). The reason to be in El Chalten was the walking and we had 3 days of it scheduled. The most famous hike is the Laguna DeLos Tres via Mt Fitzroy. This is the big one so we wanted to do that with the best weather. And according to all the forecasts, the best day was the first day. Our new hostel is one of the best so we ate large at breakfast and off we went. This walk was advertised as 22km but our hostel was 1 km from the start. Then when you get to the lake at the end you find there is another lake just a bit further which adds some more distance. There were 3 lakes in all (we passed the third on the way back). Adding it all up it came in at 26 km which is probably the longest hike either of us have ever done. There was over 1 km of ascent too and most of that was the last outward km. In fact that last km took over an hour. The last bit of the trek back took us along El Chalten’s main road which has several pubs so we dived into one of those. Great planning had us arrive at the beginning of happy hour and it took us 3 hours before all our electrolytes were back in balance!
