Stranded

Hello everyone. This is just going to be a short blog, as this computer sucks big time. Right now we are stranded in this small mountain town El Chalten. Apparently buses out of here are a rare commodity, and the soonest we could get is Sunday, and we were lucky to get that. We left one bus company to check if the other one had a bus out sooner, and by the time we made it back they only had places for tuesday. Very worridly we busted it back to the other company again and got our tickets. We were very happy that they hadn't sold out while we were gone too!
El Chalten is very nice, but windy as all hell! The kind that stops you in your tracks, blowing dirt into your eyes and all sorts of pleasant things like that. But we haven't been hanging out in town until today. We went for an awesome four day hiking trip in Parque de Los Glaciers. We spent two nights at the foot of this awesome peak called Cerro Torre, which took us just over 4 hours to get to. The first half hour was very very steep, especially for me, who does not generally hike, especially with a massive back pack. We ditched a bunch of stuff at a local hostel, but somehow our bags were still quite full and heavy. Damn this camping gear! haha. In the parque there was numerous free camping sites which were really well set up, shielding you from the howling wind. For the third night we hiked for almost 5 hours over to the giant mountain called Fitz Roy. It too had an extremely steep part, which left me panting and sweating like a crazy person, constantly begging orin for breaks. The rest of the hikes were awesome though, well worth the crazy inclines. It was generally even trail winding through the wilderness with random grasslands, lakes, rivers, glaciers and beautiful forest to keep us amused at all times. And except for one day where we just hung out in the tent, the weather was awesome. We were lucky and got to see both peaks stretching into a clear cloudless sky. So beautiful. It was really an awesome trip, and even though we are stuck here for 3 extra days it was well worth it. Now I am a little worried about the time, because when we look at the map we are still way the hell down in the bottom of Argentina! We are getting a 14 hour bus on Sunday at 1145 at night, which should be an aboslute pleasure, and then bussing and boating into Chile for a while, then back out into Argentina and across the country to the east to see this massive penguin colony. I have never seen penguins and am pretty excited. I remember when I was little my favourite hockey team, other than the Canucks, relax family, relax, was the Pittsburgs Penguins, just because I loved penguins so much. And so we meet again old friend...
Anyways, we are going to go raid the grocery store in hope that we can gather all the ingredients to whip up a batch of pancakes....and hopefully this damned lavandero will open up, as every time we've gone there with our bag of clothes they are closed, even though right on the door they say they should be open! As much as it bugs me I'm really not suprised....