Reasons to love El Chalten

During two days of mooching due to bad weather I found some consolation in El Chalten. I had lunch in the front room of a very mournful man called Carlos who had a small restaurant which was just his front room, complete with various bits of stuff - childrens' toys, odd socks etc.. He had a limited menu but made me a delicious sandwich and came out of his kitchen to chat - there was just the two of us in Carlos' restaurant at the time - while I ate. He told me how cold it was in the winter and quiet. I'm not sure if Carlos was entirely sure he'd made the right decison in coming here from warm northern Argentina. Strangely I never found his place again.

I had a tasty couple of glasses of wine in a wine shop run by a very beautiful and cool couple (also not from El Chalten but clearly nobody is). I liked sitting surrounded by walls of wine. I had coffee in the coffee shop of a cheerful Chilean. I had a pricey bowl of soup/stew which worked a treat on my gloominess. I had a salad which amounted to more than watery lettuce, tomato and onion - hurrah! Not easy to find in Argentina.

The good things about the town aren't all food related. The patient woman, Celia, who worked in my hostel turned out to be a bit of a star. She was endlessly kind and helpful to even the most irritating of guests. And she wore a beret and looked like a proper park ranger - which maybe she was. I saw a couple of woolly llamas walking down the street. They were good.

And it's sweetly safe. I lost my passport and firstly the man in the phone shop where I thought I might have dropped it told me to listen to the local radio (?) where lost things found were advertised. I liked that. And then I went to the police station - clearly an underused facility - and there it was, handed in by a nice Frenchman who'd found it lying in the street. The policemen just laughed at me. No-one believed for a minute that I wouldn't be reunited with it - which seemed like a good thing.

But really, El Chalten IS the capital of trekking. It's in the middle of a national park, the Parque Nacional de los Glaciares, home to the FitzRoy massif and countless other huge mountains and glaciars - which means no park fees and thousands of acres of protected land. It's not just any old national park either - it's the mother of national parks, the big one, the real beauty, the diamond ring. It's one of the only places I've been where you can just walk out of town on a well marked seemingly ordinary trail into ONE OF THE MOST STAGGERING, AMAZINGLY, GOBSMACKINGLY BEAUTIFUL places IN THE WORLD. It's clearly not just my opinion. Everyone says so.

And for once eveyone is right.