You may think that two girls who opt out of Christmas with their families don’t care much about the holiday, but we really are just not willing to lose a month of travel time in order to be home for a certain day.  Steph has only spent 1 Christmas at home in the past 7 years.  Personally I felt no guilt about missing Christmas this year (my second holiday hiatus in a row as Christmas 2014 was spent eating German pastries on a boulder overlooking the temples of Hampi, India) as the entire family came together for my sister Sandy’s wedding on December 5^th, also known to the Dutch as Sinterklass, and on the morning of the 6^th opened the gifts left in our clogs.

Celebrating Sinterklass on December 6th

Being in Patagonia for Christmas felt special enough, but a bit of planning is always required to make sure that one does not find oneself on a 6 to 8 hours bus ride getting from A to B instead of relaxing somewhere with wi-fi to skype with family and finding a nice place to have dinner.

The Route

In order to avoid this situation we had committed to hiking the entire “W” in three nights instead of 4 so we could leave Puerto Natales on the 23^nd and spend the 24^th in El Calafate. The city of El Calafate doesn’t have that much to offer, but it is the jump off point to visit Los Glaciars National Park where visitors can get very close to a moving glacier.  Since visitng the park would only take half a day, we planned to take a bus out of El Calafate in the late afternoon of the 24^th and be settled away for Christmas in El Chalten, a quaint town loomed over by the famous peaks of Fitz Roy, by 8pm of Christmas Eve.

El Chalten

When we booked our bus tickets to the Glaciar National Park, located a few hours outside El Calafate, we asked the ticket agent what time we would return to El Calafate since our only option for a bus to El Chalten was at 5pm or 6pm. She assured us (in English) that the bus would be back by 4pm so we booked the 5pm bus to El Chaltan to give ourselves more time to find accommodations which we had not booked yet due to a lack of internet and time.

The bus ride to the glacier took about 2 hours and before we were let off, the bus driver explained in quick Spanish that we would have to wait at the cafeteria/gift shop area at 13:45 for returning to El Calafate.

The weather wasn’t spectacular at the glacier, but we made the best of it, exploring the various boardwalks offering different views of the jagged wall of ice that stretched far into the distance. As the sun began to shine, after midday, large chunks of the glacier crashed off the wall to the cheers of the onlookers.

The series of photos below shows a large chunck of  the glacier (on the left) crashing into the water.

After four hours of walking about (and a bit of time warming up in the cafe) we went to the parking lot and waited for our bus. 10 minutes passed, 20 then 30, but it didn’t come. After almost an hour we began to panic and couldn’t find employees of the park who might know when it would be coming.  Finally we recognized a few people who we had seen on our bus that morning who explained that it would be coming at 3:45pm and leaving for El Calafate at 4pm. If anyone is wondering how this happened tres (3) and treize (13) sound very similar, and we had just assumed that the driver was using international time.  We can only assume that the woman who sold us our tickets had incorrectly communicated when kindly trying to help us in English.

Feeling rather small

With our Christmas plans on the line and non-refundable bus tickets, we let out a few profanities and then decided to approach the owner of the gift shop to ask if there was the possibility of a taxi.  He was kind enough to find a private taxi driver in the cafe to see if his clients would let us share their taxi on the way back, but it was not possible.  However, that taxi driver asked another taxi driver who found a private minibus company who graciously invited us to return with them. They dropped us off straight at the bus station even though they didn’t have to and attempted to refuse the money we could afford to give them.

Having arrived at 4pm we were the first in line to get onto our bus when it arrived awarding us the coveted front seats that offer the best views of Route 40.  We also sat next to a couple from the UK who had worked in Labrador for a while which was thrilling for me because everyone knows about BC when Steph talks about home, but I normally get confused looks when I talk about Newfoundland and Labrador.

We arrived in El Chalten at 7:30pm and walked from hostel to hostel being told the same thing…Sorry there is no room. Luckily we had our tent with us and would not have to resort to a manger, but finally at the very end of the road of the very small town we found a place to take us in and Christmas was saved!