Photo of the Day: Hostel in El Chaltén

As a photo, I like the abstract graphic lines here. I exposed to not burn out the highlights in the cloud and used the shadow slider in Capture One to bring the exposure back up on the corrugated roof. All very easy. One of these days, I’ll have to get out the mini Wacom tablet I brought with me and really work on an image, just to make it worth my while having lugged it around all this way.

If you need a hostel, El Calafate and El Chaltén have a lot of them. The majority of folks visiting these parts do not stay for long, I’d guess the average being 2-3 days in each, so they’re used to the quick turnover and can provide all the necessary essentials, namely having somewhere to lay your head at the end of a hard day’s trekking or climbing. Wood and corrugated iron seem to be the building materials of choice, you’re not here to admire the architecture.

Living in Helsinki, you get used to the easy access to everything you think you need from your smartphone. In Patagonia, the idea of wifi is sketchy, to say the least. In El Chaltén, not only was wifi not available, I couldn’t log on to any phone network either. My hostel explained it away nicely by saying that people came here to get away and experience nature, a few days being disconnected was no bad thing. The rest of the town was the same. Fair enough, really. I’ll soon get the hang of it.