Reasons not to like El Chalten

If I thought Ushuaia and then El Calafate were, increasingly, crammed to the pretty gills with clanking rustling travellers' trousers and their owners, ho hum - try El Chalten. It's a tiny place, a large village really, and down the dusty streets march a constant patrol of trekkers. Aint nothing going on but the hike. There are no little local bars, no clothes or stationary shops, no buses, no news stands or sweetie kiosks, nothing that glues together any ordinary town. If El Calafate didn't exist 10 years ago, El Chalten was barely a speck five years after that. It is for tourists and that's IT. I was told by one waitress that the place is only open between the end of October and Easter - she, like everyone else, goes back to Buenos Aires for the winter. If you arrive in May or August you're likely to find several feet of snow and a couple of miserable looking llama herders. In fact the weather is gnerally terrible - I found a vistor's book with tonnes of comments about having travelled all the way here to go walking and see the mountains and actually having to sit inside for days - I had two days of cold drizzle and grey skies. And the town is still being built - all over the place shoddy buildings are being banged up at a rate of knots. Every second structure is a hostel or an over-priced pizzeria or a micro-brewery. Oh and BTW both Ushuaia and El Calafate's ludicrously expensive beer was also all micro-brewed. Well frankly I don't believe a word of it. I never saw any evidence of any kind of brewing going on, cept the kind of 'brewing' that charges three times the acceptable price for a drink and laughs at the poor gringo who coughs up. And El Chalten isn''t landscaped or even paved - it's a series of dusty treeless tracks, pot marked by hiking tour companies, hiking equipment rental, hovering hiking guides. My hostel was blighted by an endless stream-of-consciousness conversation in the small living space about where to go/have been/how/timetables/trails. I could hear it from my room - it rocked me to sleep and woke me up every morning. The very patient woman who worked there spent ALL DAY standing in front of a map of the area advising guests where to go for a walk. AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAA AAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH. I finally took refuge in a nearby phone shop which had a very amusing (non-trekking) girl working in it - we had a NORMAL conversation involving non-hiking subject matter and then I rang my boyfriend and burst into tears.