Our time in southern Chile and Argentina started with our road trip down the rugged and extremely scenic Carretera Austral in Chile and ended with brilliant day hiking from El Chalten in the stunning Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina. Distances between destinations are huge, and you can drive for a long time without seeing anything other than the odd guanaco. Here are our highlights from southern Chile and Argentina, including our favourite accommodation and dining experiences.   

Best Hostel: Tin House Hostel, Puerto Natales, Chile

Tin House is a small hostel run by American and Chilean couple, Laura and David. The hostel has no more than eight people staying in it at a time, being basically a three bedroom house with two double rooms and one dorm with four beds in it.  The mattresses are unbelievably comfortable.  It has a beautiful and complete kitchen with all the mod-cons including a kettle, a coffee maker, and a modern gas-stove cooker. The lounge is just as comfortable, with the new lounge suite being made for sitting and reading on for hours which is good because the hostel also supplies an endless stack of travel and outdoors magazines.  The breakfast is amazing as well: homemade bread, orange juice that isn’t cordial, coffee from the filter coffee machine, muesli, yoghurts, fruit, real milk (not powdered!), and raw eggs so you can make them the way you like it. We felt at home here, and found this hostel really refreshing.

Best Campsite: Hotel Yelcho, Lago Yelcho, Chile

This fancy fly-fishing hotel on the rugged and deserted Carretera Austral has a beautiful campsite attached to it. It was by far the most expensive campsite we’ve paid for so far on our trip (20,000 Chilean Pesos) however it was Richard’s birthday and we were in mood for celebrating!   The campsite is set beside a beautiful lake in Northern Patagonia, with snowy and glacier topped mountains surrounding it.  When we were there it was the hottest week of the year and we enjoyed temperatures of 37 degrees each day.  The lake had a pontoon which we would swim to each afternoon and sit on for a long time soaking in the sun and enjoying the quite and impressive views.  The campsite had some of the best facilities we’ve seen so far. Each site had a large and sturdy shelter made out of natural stone with a tin roof.  Inside there was a picnic table, plus a fire place with chimney.  There was also a light inside, and a powerpoint which is something you don’t see everywhere.  Each fireplace was stocked with lots of firewood so each night we made a fire and kept warm in the best shelter we’ve seen.  Other ticks were the 24/7 hot water in the bathrooms, great big tubs for laundry and dishes also with running water, and access to the hotel facilities (restaurant, bar, lounge, walks around the area, and the all important wi-fi).  On Richard’s birthday we shared a bottle of wine at the hotel and they very generously gave us some birthday cake to help make the evening more festive. It was a relaxing couple of days and a great start to our road trip on the Carretera Austral.

Hotel Yelcho – the perfect campsite with the best facilities we’ve ever seen at a campsite.

Now that’s a proper shelter!

Best Dining Out

I’m going to be honest here and say that overall the food in Chile is not great.  We most often cooked ourselves.  But every now and then we’d eat out, and a few times we had a really good meal.   Typically food in Chile is pretty boring:  old meat cooked for over and hour in a fry pan, served with our favourite potato puree or fries.  I was always able to find something to eat, although it was always more or less the same sort of meal:  a salad of some concoction (nothing fancy) or a sandwich with whatever vegetables they had to hand, sometimes with cheese or an egg.  Our favourite thing to have when we were out was a ‘jugo natural’, which is freshly squeezed juice of whatever fruit they have available.  The best was freshly squeezed orange juice, but we had other flavours like freshly squeezed strawberries, watermelons, kiwifruit or a mixture of whatever they had in stock.  All were just as refreshing.

Best Dining in Chile: El Living, Puerto Natales

This vegetarian café was a highlight for me.  We had dinner here before going to Torres del Paine and had some of the best food so far on this trip. Nothing fancy, but good healthy clean tasting food.  We could literally feel our bodies sucking in all the good vitamins and minerals here!  We had freshly squeezed juices, sweet potato soup which was simple but so delicious, and then split our mains. Richard’s was burritos with lots of lettuce, avocado, beans and cheese and mine was a super burger, which was a walnut vege pattie with egg, cheese, tomato and lettuce on wholemeal bread. We returned a second time after coming back from Torres del Paine and again had a great meal. An Englishwoman who worked there was even brave enough to have a go at making a flat white coffee for us. We appreciated her effort as we’re only just getting used to the strong bitter coffees which are the norm here.

Best Dining in Argentina: La Cerveceria, El Chalten

This microbrewery pub housed in a nice wooden building with lots of character is Richard’s pick.  This pub has two local brews, one hoppy pilsner and one dark bock.  We had the pilsner which went down very easily after a long day’s drive from Puerto Natales to El Chalten.  The pub was obviously a favourite with locals and travellers alike, being packed out at all hours. Richard had the locro, a spicy stew of maize, beans, beef, pork and sausage typical to the Patagonian region. He thoroughly enjoyed it and had counted on going back after a long hiking day only it was too busy, the line to it went out the door!

Richard really enjoyed his locro – a local stew of maize, beans, veges, pork, sausage.

My salad was quite an upgrade on the usual salads here – blue cheese, pears, walnuts, tomatoes, cream sauce. Yum!

On another note, food is overall a little better since we got to Argentina.  While in El Chalten we had several great dining out experiences.  The quality was just a lot higher, maybe because the town survives on tourism so everybody has to pick up their game if they want to get a piece of the pie.

Best Things to Do in Southern Chile and Argentina

We can only speak from experience but the favourite things that we did while in the south of Chile and Argentina were:

• Day hiking from El Chalten in Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina

Simply the best hiking ever.  From the dusty frontier village of El Chalten we did the amazing day hikes in the northern sector of Los Glaciares National Park.  The village itself is nothing special, but the hiking is out of this world.  We did two day hikes and also drove out to Lago del Desierto close to the border with Chile, on the other side of the Carretera Austral.  Stunning scenery. We preferred the hiking here to the hiking we did in Torres del Paine National Park. Why?  Because everything was a lot easier, less busy, less frantic and the scenery was a hundred times better!  You thought our photos of Torres del Paine were stunning, well these day hikes beat Torres del Paine NP hands down! Best of all it’s free! You can read more about our time El Chalten here. Go there, go there soon, go there before El Chalten is turned into a mini-El Calafate.

Hiking has never been so fun or so rewarding!

• Road trip on the Carretera Austral, Chile

Driving the rugged Carretera Austral was an adventurous road trip along a gravel road cutting through remote and stunningly beautiful terrain.  The campsites and access to some of the most splendid nature are countless here.  It my opinion, this area has the most potential for tourism in Chile.  If they paved the road, the number of tourists going to it would sky rocket, it’s simply that stunning.  Richard wrote an account of our time on the Carretera which you can read here.

On of the best views from top of mountain range

• Ushuaia, Argentina – the town with too many things to do

Ushsuaia was great.  We were a bit travel weary and worn and it was here that we relaxed and recuperated in a pretty woodsy cabin just outside of town. There is a lovely day hike to a glacier, some really great museums (especially the Yamana museum, which is simple but extremely interesting and informative), the stunning Tierra del Fuego National Park with its wide array of wildlife, and boat cruising along the Beagle Channel, again, good for more wildlife watching.  Ushuaia is also the starting off point for Antarctica cruises, and if we’d been on the cruise that would probably be in my list of highlights as we’ve only heard good things about it.  People often come to Ushuaia solely to secure a spot on the cruise to Antarctica with last-minute deal rates (some as low as US$3900) and it sounds like money well spent.  We’re thinking of doing it but maybe when we’re older! You can read more about what we did in Ushuaia here.

Milestone of our trip, most southern point of South America you can get to by car. End of the road at Lapiata Bay, Ushuaia!

This sums up our time in the southern Chile and Argentina, a beautiful and remote area.  We are now on our way up north, driving up the Ruta National 40.