Driving to El Chalten, Argentina

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Today we are driving over the border to get to Argentina's side of Patagonia. Since a car or private driver are pricey options for our large party, we are taking the bus 6 hours to El Calafate. (Flying between countries would take 18 hours.)

We departed at 7am. After an hour, the bus stopped at border control, where we lined up to show our passports. Despite the line of buses, the immigration process was super simple. We went to the bathroom and got back on the bus. Minutes after I put on my seatbelt, the bus pulled away - without Jeremy and Vivian! And somehow we got locked in the downstairs (of the double decker) without any way to communicate to the driver. We drove 50 feet over the border and stopped - for Jeremy and Vivian! They don't seem to do any sort of head count (or speak English); the whole moment was a bit unsettling. (And you won't catch Jeremy risking another bathroom break again.)

We are all happy Jeremy and Vivian made it back on the trip with us!

We slowly drove about half a mile to Argentina's sunny border checkpoint to show our passports again. Greg commented, "A little warmer here!" Well yeah, we're no longer in Chile! No more "Chile in Chile" jokes! (It has been replaced by our funny-to-us "it's Argentina here.") Starting behind several buses at 8am when it opened, the whole border process took about 75 minutes.

The Patagonian scrublands of Argentina are pretty barren. You would think it would make for a boring drive - except the arid landscape is home to a variety of resilient wildlife that I've never seen before! This unique biome is a habitat for the largest migratory population of guanacos (like a lama, from the camel family) and Darwin's rheas (aka the South American ostrich). Seeing them was exciting and felt like being on a safari. Each time I saw one, it just didn’t get old. What was particularly fascinating was the amount of carcasses littered close to the roadside. Tragically, the guanaco try to jump the road's barrier of wire fencing but get their hind legs stuck, leaving them splayed out as a convenient food source for the native carnivores like pumas, condors, and foxes. It was a pretty cool real-life biology lesson!

A whole bunch of guanacos made it over (or around) the fence

A guanaco carcass - the circle of life in Patagonia 

Argentina's Patagonia has something unavailable to us in Chile: a car big enough to hold 7 people! Having arrived in El Calafate, we picked up the car and some groceries, and continued to our final destination: El Chalten.

Our fun clown car - no seatbelts for the passengers but at least no one is on the floor

El Chaltén, Argentina's trekking capital in the heart of Patagonia, is a very small "new" town founded in 1985 within Los Glaciares National Park. It is renowned for its unpredictable weather which is heavily influenced by its proximity to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field (that we saw from the airplane a couple days ago). We are here to hike to Mt Fitz Roy. Even 11 months out I was unable to find "affordable" lodging for a group of 7, so we are staying in two nearby apartments. Arriving at 7pm, we settled in, ate dinner, and crashed for the night.

Car Rental Logistics:

- We rented from Like Rent A Car because it had a car big enough for 7 people and it allowed us to pick up in town and drop off at the airport.