Day 27 - El Chalten.

7am start. The bus to El Chaltén takes us through the same spectacular scenery – wide open plains, guanacos silhouetted against the crimson sunrise, bare mountains in the distance coloured maroon by the first rays, the pale wide ribbon of a glacial river…

We stop at the Estancia La Leona, an isolated farm on the banks of a river whose claim to fame is that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stayed there for three weeks in 1905, while on the run from the law in the United States.

Some fellow passengers crowd around the tame guanaco, not yet fully grown, but almost llama-sized. It seems happy to be petted and has the softest fur on its head, and the biggest eyes, framed with long eyelashes. It nuzzles me with its soft lips and then half-snorts, half-sneezes at a Swiss girl.

In El Chaltén, Zoe is waiting to pick me up. It’s rainy and windy, so we go to her place for a cup of coca leaf tea first. She’s a Brit who married an Argentinian from Córdoba and they both work here as mountain guides. In fact, the last time I was here – on New Year’s eve 2008, was the day I went hiking with them and Leo proposed to her. They were married twelve days later by the Lago del Desierto and had a post-wedding barbecue; Zoe shows me the photos.

El Chaltén is like a ghost town at this time of year, though you still get a few backpackers. I make a note of the changes: a bus station has now opened, an international airport is in the pipeline and there’s talk of making a proper border crossing between El Chaltén and Chile’s Villa O’Higgins, which is currently the end of the Carretera Austral. Two years ago, I did the crossing by boat and on foot – across Lago del Desierto, then a seven-hour hike, followed by another boat to Villa O’Higgins. It was still exciting and still off the beaten track. They're thinking of making a proper road where there's now a hiking tral and putting bigger boats on both lakes, capable of carrying vehicles. More business for the two little towns, but at what cost?

We catch up on gossip about mutual friends, I tell Zoe about Carla’s agency in Natales and offer to put them in touch with one another, and since Zoe is part of El Chaltén’s environmental committee, she’s interested in Erratic Rock’s recycling scheme and suggests that maybe the two can work together if El Chaltén can somehow send their glass over to Chile, maybe with a willing bus company…There’s no help for recycling from the local municipality, yet rubbish disposal is a problem. I ask Zoe about the border crossing logistics, because that's actually part of my research; I'd have loved to do the boat-hike-boat again, but at this time of year it's impossible; there's one weather-dependent boat per week, or perhaps in May they stop altogether.

After lunch, Zoe shows me the new building where they’ll be moving by next season- they’ll actually have a proper office which’ll raise their profile, and they’re saving up for a minibus so that they can drive visitors to the start of a popular hiking trail themselves, rather than pay other companies to do it. Zoe and I go for a short walk to the nearby waterfall. Even though this town of 400 people has no cinema, only one paved road and not much in the way of conveniences (out of season, at least), the setting is spectacular: they’re at the base of the Fitz Roy mountain range, surrounded by jagged peaks that are covered with freshly-fallen snow, and they get to see all this natural beauty every day. It really feels like autumn: the beech trees are all spectacular shades of yellow and red, and once the wind dies down, it’s good hiking weather – cold and crisp. It reminds me that the last proper autumn I saw was in Japan, five years ago.

It’s a good day trip. I finish off the day with the biggest, bloodiest steak yet at ‘Casimiro Bigua’, anticipating living on sandwiches for the next two days, until I get to Coyhaique, Chile. So, tomorrow I’ll catch a bus to Comodoro Rivadavia, getting there at 4.25am, and then catch the 8am bus to Coyhaique, making it around 30 hours’ travel in total.