Weds 14th Nov - Transfer-tastic!
Up at 7am for breakfast, finished last bits of packing ready for the off. Found out our Blackberry's had both been going off at 6.30am every morning, since we'd been away, probably waking up the entire hostel! Oops! Walked out to bus station around 8am where we were to catch our bus back to El Calafate. Sam bumped into his mate Jason from Reuters and his wife, so compared itineraries for 10mins whilst i got the bags loaded onto the bus (!). Then basically we spent the whole day on the bus - which, given the collective knackered state of our legs and knees, was probably a very good thing!! The first 5hrs was spent driving back to El Calafate, where then - in a perfect storm of organization skills - we left our backpacks at the bus station, found a laundry service to do our washing for us whilst we sat and ate steaks in Rick's and slowly got toasted in the 3hr interval between buses! As there are no ATMs in El Chalten, we worked out how much cash we'd need and got out sufficient pesos at the nearest bank, before moving on to a coffee shop to wait out the last hour or so before picking up our laundry and hoofing it to the bus station. The lady who'd done our laundry had been rather enthusiastic to say the least with the fabric softener, so we yomped up the hill to the bus station accompanied by voluminous clouds of heavy Lenor-esque perfume!Then plonked our arses back on the bus for another 4hr journey to El Chalten - this bus had a rather interesting collection of cracks on the windscreen which, of course, Sam proceeded to take pictures of and through!
After about 2hrs, we stopped at the Patagonian equivalent of Little Chef - a small huddle of buildings in the middle of nowhere, but which served wicked empanadas and also fantastic fried dough dessert-type pastries. Mmmm!!! So, we finally arrived in El Chalten around 10pm - as per sod's law, our bus initially stopped right near our hostel but - as we had bags - wouldn't let us off until we reached the bus station proper - a full 10min hike away! The hostel was absolutely great - we had our own double room with bathroom (luxury!) and they had also sorted our ice trek for the next day. An early start at 7am, so we decided just to call it a night ready for the off tomorrow!