At 7:20am, we were picked up at our hostel in a funny-looking, bright yellow bus that resembled a cross between a dump truck and a school bus. We were headed to El Chaltén, which means “mountain of smoke” in the native language, to hike.
El Chaltén is about 215km from El Calafate and it took us nearly four hours to get there with a few stops along the way.
The first stop was for a view of Lake Viedma, which is technically the smaller of the two lakes in the area if you count the arms of Lake Argentina although Viedma definitely looks bigger on the map.