What You Don't Want Happening in the Middle of the Night

McHale and I had gone south. Not quite to Ushuaia (the southernmost city), but to first to El Calafate, then El Chaltén. Of the two, El Calafate is the bigger town. From there you can arrange day trips to the glacier Perito Moreno. But this story is about El Chaltén. It is a tiny place about four hours north of El Calafate. I think the town had one phone. At the hostel that we camped at they communicated by radio. The town itself is technically within the limits of Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, but we didn't know that at the time.

After spending the night at a hostel, we divided our bags, leaving some stuff at the hostel and only carrying what we needed to hike. Our plan was to spend four days and three nights in the wild. We went to the one shop in town and bought bread, cheese, and something that resembled orange Tang, plus a few empanadas to start us off. That was our food for the trip. We had no stove, no way to even make fire if we wanted to cook. And then we set off.

Keep in mind that even though this was December, the peak of summer, it's not very warm there. We are in the Andes, though only at about 4,000 ft (1300m), we are still in a place that has been named after its glaciers.

There was no real path to the park. Just a few barely visible signs. As we left town it was so windy that we seriously considered heading back. But we walk on. And on. It's cold. Freezing. We battled light rain, occasionally snow. We are wearing all our layers. We have socks on our hands since neither of us had gloves. We were probably the worst trekkers ever. But we had fun. The park is absolutely beautiful and pristine. We could drink the glacial water straight from the streams. Take that Evian.

After a few hours of walking, we found what looked like a place to camp. It was a clearing and there was signage nearby. We may have seen another tent there already, but I can't recall. We set up camp there, ate some bread and cheese, and went to bed.

It was dark when McHale woke me. At that time of year in that part of the world it is only dark from 10PM to 4AM. McHale woke me with a nudge and, “I felt something just crawl over me.” My response, "So did I." Some creature was in the tent with us. We found the flashlights and looked around. We spied a quarter size hole in the side of our tent. I felt a little better. Whatever was in the tent with us couldn't be that big. We heard some scurrying. A mouse. A cute little mouse had gotten into our bread. It took about half an hour to catch and rid it from our tent (thank you Mc) including discussion of how to do so (for it could have rabies).

We took a few photos for posterity and tossed it outside. We then covered the hole with some electrical tape.

But after that we couldn't quite sleep. We've both had quite a bit of camping experience before, but it didn't even cross our minds to leave our food outside. We didn't even contemplate that there could be animals around.

The next day we checked for more damages. There were droppings in McHale's book. And about half the bread was gone. Our three night trip would need to be reduced to only two to prevent starvation.

But the hikes were amazing, even though the weather was not. The glaciers are such an astonishing shade of blue that you become mesmerized. However, we continued to do slightly stupid things during the next two days, like plunge our hands into glacier fed pools to take photos in order to see what was under the surface (I had a waterproof camera).

And when we returned to town, no more bread and cheese for a while. We feasted on huge Argentine steaks.