When I first heard that it was going to rain in El Chalten I thought, “This isn’t a horrible place to be caught in the rain.” The town was small enough to walk around, we were only there 2 nights, and we actually had booked a nice hotel for the El Chalten leg of the trip. At the worst, I thought I could look at pretty views, blog, and enjoy the room.
Little did I know that we’d end up staying 2 extra days, that we’d switch to a much more rustic hostel on the other side of town, that "wind and rain" was constant and intense, and—most importantly—that there would be little-to-no internet.
What on earth do you do in the rain with no internet? Seriously!
Another thing I’ve realized since arriving in El Chalten is that 99% of the things you can do in El Chalten involve being outside. Not a lot of indoor activities—or, as I mentioned, internet—to be found.
Even in the dead of summer, dramatic displays of wind and rain are common in much of Patagonia, but especially in the southern part of the region. Wind is the mainstay of El Chalten, and there are even shirts in all the shops that say, “Hace viento—mucho, mucho viento” (which just about sums up our experience. An insane amount of wind, all day long.) And when you go to the hostels, almost everyone lives and dies by Wind Guru, a site I never had any reason to know about until we arrived here.
The really bad thing about the bad weather in El Chalten, was that—when it’s bad, it’s really BAD. I already talked about the scarring experience on Viedma Glacier, but even going out to get dinner was a bit of a nightmare.
The town was so small that you can walk everywhere, but this also means there are no taxis to be found. (We finally saw one driving by on our way out of town, but I have no idea how people got in touch with him. For us, dinner meant a 10 minute walk in the dark, with rain and 30mph wind gusts. I felt like I was right back on that damn glacier.
At this point, the weather forced us to make a change to our itinerary. We were supposed to spend 2 nights in El Chalten, and then take a 6-8 hour bus trip to Puerto Natales, Chile for 2 nights, but because the weather was so bad, and we had barely seen anything in our one day in El Chalten, we decided to skip this detour, and extend our stay another 2 nights. It just felt like we were spending a lot of time on the bus, and we hoped that, by staying put, our luck would change.
From everything I read, I was expecting El Chalten to be like Tahoe in the summer—but this is Patagonia, and everything is a lot more extreme than anywhere you’ve been before. So, there’s really no way of knowing how the weather is going to go, you could get snow in the summer, and 50mph gusts of wind out of the blue.
I imagine we were not the only people who came all the way down here this summer to be stuck inside. But then, we saw people trucking up the mountain with 50+ lbs of camping gear in the middle of the storm, so maybe that means Dan and I are just wimps.
The view from inside, where we spent a lot of our time in El Chalten.