The Finest Journey of All (How We Stopped Being Grumpy Gits)

If you’ve been following this TravelLog, you’d be forgiven for thinking
we’re two joy-sucking vampires who hate fun, sunlight, and functional
transportation. The journey had been a masterclass in frustration,
requiring the patience of a saint and the resilience of a Nokia 3310.

But then we flew into El Calafate, and the travel gods finally decided
to stop using us as their personal punchbag.

Being a small municipal airport, we collected our bags in roughly 20
minutes — a timespan so brief I almost forgot how to scowl. Even others
on our flight noticeably relaxed. Immediately, we were met by our
mini-bus driver from Las Lengas. I’ve used this company five times, but
this was the first time we were the only passengers. That's right. We
had a vast mini-bus all to ourselves. It wasn't a transfer; it was a
private, slightly excessive, chariot of solitude to El Chalten.

I remember this route back in 2006. It was a four-hour kidney-rattling
ordeal on a dirt road that seemed designed by a particularly sadistic
goat. Now? It’s a glorious, smooth tarmac that accomplishes the journey
in a breezy three hours. And what a road! To the right, the dry,
semi-desert badlands of the Argentine Pampas stretched out, looking
beautifully… beige. To the left, massive, the shockingly blue glacial
lakes of Lago Argentino and Lago Viedma were backed by range after range
of snow-covered, jagged peaks that looked like they’d been drawn by a
dramatic teenager.

The sun was shining. The views were stupidly
amazing. The frustrations of the previous two days were not so much
forgotten as violently evicted from our minds by the sheer awesomeness.
It was emotional. I may have shed a single, manly tear. Or it might have
been dust.

As we sped along at a cool 90kph, we entered a live-action episode of "
Planet Earth". Herds of guanacos (which are basically llamas that have
been to a finishing school) dotted the landscape, with ever-watchful
condors flying overhead like feathery secret service agents. We even
spotted the strange-looking Rhea, an animal best described as an ostrich
that gave up on life and decided to become a walking
haystack.

We didn’t stop at the Parador de las Leones,
allegedly a haunt of Butch and Sundance. No time for historical
day-drinking; we had mountains to gawk at!

In our excitement, we took approximately seven billion photos. About six
billion, nine hundred million of them are a blurry mess, thanks to a
holy trinity of interference: road bumps, gale-force winds shaking the
bus, and a windscreen that appeared to have been cleaned with a potato.
It didn’t matter. We were happy, content, and being magnetically pulled
towards the mountains, whose summits were dramatically swaddled in
clouds being thrown around by the jet stream.