The Apartment

We’ve been housebound, or more accurately, apartment-bound, for the last few days. The reason? Patagonia is showing off outside our window with hurricane-force winds and driving rain that could strip paint. Suddenly, being here for a month instead of a few rushed days feels less like a booking and more like a brilliant, prescient survival strategy. The pressure is off; we have nowhere to be but in.

The apartment itself is… basic. My wife, Kiersten, likens it to a student pad, and she's not wrong. But to me, it’s a warm, functional fortress. It does the job. Its greatest asset is its location, parked right on Avenida San Martín, putting shops, bars, and restaurants within easy, if currently wind-blasted, reach.

You can tell this apartment was designed and built by a man. It has all the feminine touches of a tool shed. The kitchen is a masterclass in impracticality. The kettle lives a lonely life on the dining table, exiled from the kitchen due to a critical lack of power outlets. Cooking on the hob is less a culinary exercise and more a high-stakes balancing act, requiring the focus of a bomb disposal expert.

The quirks don't end there. The curtain ties engage in a daily act of rebellion, leaping from their rails whether you untie them or retie them. The bedroom power sockets are mounted halfway up the wall, as if for a race of friendly giants. To charge a phone on the bedside table, you’d need an extension cord long enough to rappel with.

And yet.

We have everything we need. It’s cheap, it’s clean, and it’s forcing us to be resourceful. We’ve become masters of our domain, adapting to cooking in, which in El Chaltén, a town not known for its cheap eats, is saving us a fortune. We have TV, internet, toilet/shower and storage places for our "mountains" of mountain gear. 

Then there’s the bed. It’s a behemoth, topped with a duvet so massive and heavy it would take a small rescue team to shift it. But it’s gloriously comfortable. Lying there, buried under its weight as the wind screams through the rafters like a demented banshee, is the coziest feeling in the world. The apartment may fight us all day, but at night, it tucks us in with brute, unapologetic force.