The Road to El Chalten

Two Cabins with a View

It is 8 in the morning at the bus station in El Calafate.  Outside, it is pitch dark and we are rubbing the sleep from our eyes.

This bus station is like any other bus station in the world. Glass-covered counter windows, orange and yellow flyers with rates to glamorous destinations, sleeping bums and dirty toilets.

There are seven of us. A German, two Irishmen, and four Americans, including Kelly and myself. There are others, but we’re not sure who they are yet. Later, there will be a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a couple of Danes, and a few others whose nationalities, much less their names, we won’t remember. There are some Argentines who aren’t traveling to the destinations on the flyers for glamour. They are the quiet ones. Just a few hours ago, none of these people existed.

We are all waiting to board the bus to El Chalten. We wanted to go trekking — trekking, which is a word people use around here. El Chalten is some 4-hours away, so I figured on catching a nap. At least I did the night before when deciding to cart the evening further into the night. “Yes, we can have another round. We’ll sleep on the bus tomorrow,” I had probably said to someone out loud.

But now, as the bus starts to roll out of the florescent parking lot and into the dark, snowy mountain-looming roads, I’m not so sure.

I don’t want to miss a single tread of tire on the La Cuarenta highway. Having grown up only a few miles from the Pacific Coast Highway, I have always been a great admirer of roads. Routa Cuarenta is the ultimate road in Argentina, running over 5,000 km along the entire length of the country, most of it parallel to the Andes Mountains. We will be driving alongside Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, which sits on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. The road is mostly unpaved.

I want so badly to stay awake. I want to see the distant white dinosaurs rise.

***

Something is fluttering. My eyelids are flashing orange. Then black. When I open my eyes, it is the distant glow of the sun. Although I can hardly tell from the thick windows coated in dew. I use one of Kelly’s green gloves to wipe the dew away. She is asleep and doesn’t notice when I slide the damp glove back into her coat pocket. The window is no longer covered in dew but I still can’t see anything out of it. All it does is leave a smear of wetness and tiny specs of green wool. But I can just make out the landscape. It is grainy and brown, like sepia film. There is a thin layer of snow over the dirt that would make for a great etching board. I imagine the large, powerful tires of the bus crushing through the thin layer of ice that had formed overnight. I can hear the constant crunch of the road, like someone munching popcorn at a movie theater.

The bus is rattling along, the constant hum of the engine floats from the back. Up front, the bus driver is bobbing his head to an Argentine folk song. A chill wind whistles through the gaps in the window. I like the coolness on my face. The rest of my body is wrapped in warm layers. I look around to see that most people are asleep, some bunched into fetal positions covered in woolen sweaters and heavy parkas. Alex is experimenting with the settings on his camera, occasionally lifting the lens to take a snapshot of the smeared window.

***

We stop at a small roadside cafe where we meet a woman bottle-feeding her baby guanaco. He looks like a camel or a llama and is very social. Half the bus empties into the small café that looks like someone’s living room. There are sets of wooden tables and chairs and a great breathing fire. All the seats near the fire are the first to go. Cafe con léchés all around. A boy brings around a basket of croissants and sweet breads. We warm our hands and faces from the steam of the coffee and fire and watch the baby guanaco pose for photographs. He is not camera shy at all. Roaming through the crowded living room cafe, he is the master of his domain, controlling when the act of petting is permitted or forbidden.

With the new sun blasting through the large café windows, all signs of weariness depart. Anticipation to finally set our hiking boots on world famous hiking trails starts to build. Visions of infamous peaks and otherworldly towers — the Cerro Torre! the Fitz Roy! — normally only seen in postcards or oversized coffee table books at other people’s houses, start to materialize.

We head back to the bus. Along the way, a few travelers who had slept through the first leg of the journey stop to notice the great planet we are standing on. It is almost noon but the sun is just starting to show color.

Out here, with the only manmade formations being a roadside café and a winding dirt road, I realize what an alien place this really is. The cafe is a pebble in the yellow desert sea of nothingness. Yet tourists with long camera lenses took photographs of this nothingness, of extraterrestrial morning light. I join them.

The ground is saturated in crisp yellows and crunchy browns; the sky cloudless and blue. It was only raw earth we were staring at, but it made us feel healthy. And good. Our shadows long, our fingers cold, we watched the wind blistering the steppe with all its brute force. Over the thunder of an Argentine flag beating against the wind, we hear the faint sound of the start of an engine.

“Que bonita, no?” said a middle-aged man who looks as if he hasn’t shaved in days.

A cat with a 15-foot long shadow crosses our path.

I nod, and snap another useless photograph. We aren’t staring at anything in particular. Just light and color.

The man is dressed in shiny performance clothes. He tells me he’s traveling from Bilbao to see the famous mountains. I mention that I had once been to his city, and it too was bonita.

He smiles. He is proud of his country and feels a sense of ownership of it. We walk back to the bus continuing our conversation in Spanish.

Just when you think it’s impossible to comprehend the vastness and the beauty of the world, you stumble into small pockets of familiarities, and suddenly it becomes a little bit easier to grasp.

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