South America: Argentina

We have been back from our South America adventure to Chile and Argentina for almost two weeks now and I’m excited to finally be sharing about our trip! Because we took over 1,300 photos and covered so many places, I’m just going to share about Argentina today. I’ll be sharing more details than probably most want to know, but I hope this post can help someone else at some point who might be planning a trip to this region. We found it very overwhelming to plan so hopefully some tips and pointers can prevent others from feeling the same way.

Our time in Argentina was spent in Buenos Aires and two towns in Patagonia called El Calafate and a smaller town called El Chalten.

Day 1 – 2 – We flew straight from DFW to Buenos Aires. We had less than 24 hours in Buenos Aires and that seemed like more than enough since we don’t love big cities. After taking a taxi from the airport to our hostel, we spent our time eating lunch, walking around town looking for an ATM (this took way too much time), and going to their local park, Bosques de Palermo. By 7 pm, we were exhausted and ready to rest for the early morning we had ahead (3 am wake up call after overnight flight the night before)!

Day 3 – Our second stop of the trip was down south in Argentina in a town called El Calafate. We took a flight from Buenos Aires and landed that morning at 8:30 am. After checking into our hostel and walking around town for a few hours trying to figure out how to get to the Perito Moreno Glacier, we finally discovered a company that had a 1 pm bus so we signed up for that and headed out to the glacier. The first part of the trip consisted of a Catamaran taking us in front of the glacier and the second part we were able to walk along the side of the glacier.

Day 4: The next morning, we made a day trip and took a bus from El Calafate to El Chalten. As you can see in the pictures below, we were greeted with extremely freezing temperatures. We decided to do the Laguna Torre Hike based on what we had read/heard. The hike was 6 hours round trip and when we got to the end, we were greeted by the view below. Because it was snowing during our hike and very overcast the view wasn’t quite what we expected, but we had heard going into that it’s a necessity to have a clear day so we weren’t too surprised. After 17 miles of hiking/walking that day we were exhausted!

Our time in Argentina was short, but we really enjoyed it. Some tips to share with others who plan on traveling to Argentina:

• Buenos Aires:
  • We had a hard time finding ATM’s that worked in the city, so get cash in the airport.
  • We used Taxi Ezeiza for transportation from EZE airport to Palmero where we stayed. We found they were not friendly at all and even charged us more than what they had told us it would be (and I had proof to show them the price in an email). Choose a different option, if you can.
• El Calafate
  • We enjoyed the place we stayed, Hospedaje Lautaro, and the owner spoke English.
  • Don’t miss the glacier! It was the highlight of our stay in Chile. It took us all morning to find out how to get there, until we got on wifi and found there was a 1 pm bus (our hostel owner failed to mention that). Make sure to do both the walkways and the catamaran at the glacier. You will have more than plenty of time to do both.
• El Chalten
  • We used Bus Caltur for our transportation to/from El Chalten
  • We took a day trip here for the hike mentioned above. It was a very long hike and if the weather isn’t good like what we experienced, be prepared that the view won’t be that great.
  • Bring all sorts of clothes for the hike. I went from dressing as an eskimo, to shorts, back to dressing up as an eskimo!