Traveling Dreams: Explore The Ends Of World

I had wanted to go for eleven years. I had a folder of saved links going back to a laptop I no longer own. When I finally booked it, the thing that surprised me was how much of the planning turned out to be unnecessary and how much of what I had skipped turned out to matter.

What the trip actually cost

Three weeks, two people, flying from Charlotte, in shoulder season:

• Flights: $1,840 for both of us, booked eleven weeks out on a Tuesday, which I am told is superstition but it worked.
• Beds: $1,120. Half hostels, a third small guesthouses, two nights in a place with a view that I will not pretend was sensible.
• Buses: $410. Long, comfortable, and more punctual than anything at home.
• Food: about $900, most of it groceries and one memorable dinner in El Chaltén.
• Park fees and a guide for one day on the ice: $380.

Call it $4,650 all in. I had budgeted $6,000 and spent three months worrying about the gap, which in hindsight is the part of the trip I would most like to have back.

The four things I got wrong

I over-packed by about nine pounds. Every single person I met on the trail said this about their own bag. It appears to be a law.

I under-booked the middle. I had the first five days and the last four planned to the hour and left the middle deliberately open, which sounded romantic and in practice meant two afternoons spent in a bus station looking at my phone.

I assumed the weather forecast meant something. It does not, not there. Four seasons a day is not a figure of speech, it is a packing instruction.

I brought the wrong shoes. Not the wrong kind — the wrong pair. New boots, worn in on flat ground at home, which is not the same as worn in.

What I would do again exactly as I did it

Going in the shoulder season. Fewer people, colder mornings, and the light in the last hour before sunset was the reason I had wanted to go in the first place, and it was not oversold.

I had expected to feel small. What I did not expect was how ordinary it felt after four days — you get used to standing in front of something enormous, and then you are just a person who is cold and would like lunch.

Taking one day with a guide. I am not a mountaineer and I was never going to be on that ice on my own. It was the most expensive day of the trip and the only one I would refuse to cut.

Would I go back

Yes, and sooner than eleven years. Next time with less in the bag, more of the middle booked, and the same boots — which are, at last, properly broken in.