On my last day in El Chaltén I did nothing in particular. I walked around town one last time, visited my favorite fruit shop one last time where I bought three peaches and ate all three on the shop’s stoop one last time. I strolled aimlessly around town, admiring houses and flowers, until I ended up at these cliffs.

Happy to be sitting at the base of the Fitz Roy in warm sunshine, Olivia and I decided we would catnap for a little while. There was no rush to head back to town and after all, we had waited four days for this moment.

The weather remained dodgy, with high winds bringing systems of rain across the mountains and just as quickly whisking them away again to let sunshine and blue skies tempt everyone outdoors. The forecast called for a very wet ladder part of this day, so Olivia and I headed out for another day hike.

Many things were going wrong this morning, a series of events I have already explained in another story called “A Hard Day’s Travel”. However, to honor the meeting of this dear travel companion, I must tell another version of the story.

With the Fitz Roy hidden in clouds for the third day in a row, my friend Olivia and I decided to take it easy with a short, sweet hike. We wandered out of town, down the main road towards a trail that leads up to a mirador (view point) overlooking the mountain village.

I had been moving through South America at a rate rivaled only by the speed of sound. Blasting through cities and sites for various reasons, and sometimes regretfully for no good reason at all. One of the better reasons was to keep pace with a solid travel partner. Like way back when I was in Perú and spent all of 36 hours in the beautiful mountain village of Huarez.

After the W Trek I was left with a bum right leg. Blisters had erupted along the borders of my feet during the four day hike and in a sad attempt to ease the discomfort, my right knee and achilles tendon had over compensated.

To get from El Calafate to El Chaltén is an easy and beautiful bus ride. For three hours we drove across flat, golden, big sky plains and passed by two huge milky green lakes, fed by glaciers tucked away in the mountains beyond, whose surfaces lapped with white caps revealing winds were high.

Traveling is not always as romantic as it seems. More often than not, it is a series of problem solving, an exercise in getting yourself where you need to or want to be. On this day, despite ending up here at the Perito Moreno Glacier, the journey there was not as simple as this photograph might suggest.

From Puerto Natales I followed the well traveled Gringo Trail across the Chilean border into Argentina, heading towards the tourist town of El Calafate. The bus ride and border crossing took over five hours but I passed the time swapping travel stories with an American guy sitting next to me.

In the week before traveling down to Puerto Natales, my first stop in the region of Patagonia, I had been unable to organize reservations at the campsites along the famous W Trek: one of the two main treks in Chile’s Torres Del Paine National Park.

In the dorm were seven of us: a very chill Aussie Dude, a Swiss mountain mongrel who serenaded me with many tales of her parasailing off peaks around her home city of Bern, and a group of four young women traveling together.