fools in the rain.

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27 hrs on the same bus. Awesome. With a capital s for sh!thouse. Woken by constant police checks at which I was always asked for my passport. It was either the tattoo or the Led Zep shirt and, dammit, I like that shirt. Sort of attached to the skin on most of my arm, too.

But, I gild the lily. It wasn't all that bad. For most of the way the bus was pretty empty. And, we can now say we criscrossed the entire country, from the Andes to the Atlantic, then back again. There was food provided, but only one meal. Luckily, here's something we prepared earlier....our window-sill snap frozen goulash from Bariloche kept us satiated.

And, importantly for a long distance bus, the toilet was clean. Clean as it was it had one niggling design flaw. The flushy thingo activation pedal (technical term) was positioned just so. Bleary eyed and not really actually awake I would clamber down the stairs from the cheap seats, open the dunny door, step inside....and suddenly the bus would be filled with a horrifying sucking sound as the weird chemical blue water swirled manically around the stainless steel toilet bowl. And that happened a number of times – like Bart in the Simpsons episode with the electric cupcake I just didn't learn.

But, we arrived in El Calafate. The hostel we had booked was excellent, if a little pricey. We had decided to splurge. Actually, we hadn't had a lot of choice – no one would accuse the place of being a budget destination. Not too far from the bus station, the Las Cabañitas Hostel had a dorm type bit, and a row of 5 small A-frame cabins at the back of the property, framed by pretty clumps of lavender. We got one of these, and it was a bit like having your own house – albeit a really slopey tiny house. A lounge room downstairs, bedroom upstairs, private bathroom and a good heater. It also had a microwave. Score! I spent the week proving to Klaire that you can, in fact, cook good food in a microwave. The hostel did have a kitchen, but that was a whole lot of effort – you had to actually leave the warm cabin and walk the ten metres to the next building.

The cabin was wonderfully cosy, which was good, because it was positively...well, Patagonian, outside. Cold, biting wind, a bit of sleet here and there, and rain.

There's a fair bit to see around El Calafate, and we had 5 days to see it in, so set about seeing stuff. The first was a tour out to the Perito Moreno glacier. We opted for the cheapest tour, as we do. There was also a boat option, but it was a lot more expensive . We caught back up with the parents for an overpriced feed of pizza that night – they had been in Ushuaia and were on their way to Puerto...something. They had taken the boat tour up the various glaciers and had good things to say, but it was too rich for our blood..

I was a cold day that day, not that a trip to a glacier ever promised to be that warm. The glacier was, as expected, suitably impressive. A drive out to the National Park in a little mini bus, then we joined a thousand other tourists on a large catamaran which took us quite close to the face, although not dangerously so. Still, it was a bit disconcerting seeing icebergs beside the boat.

The glaciers here, near El Calafate, are formed by snow compacting in the nearby Andes. The Perito Moreno glacier is one of only handful in the world that is, in fact, increasing in size. Aha! Proof! Global warming is a lefty myth!

Not so – every other glacier in the area has lost mass drastically over the last ten years, and scientists believe that the increase in size for this glacier is directly linked to the change in the way the snow melts and flows down the Andes.

On that day, though, it was still cold. And overcast. Initially disappointed with the aspect of the day, we were to find that the contrast enhanced the incredibly blue colour of the ice. Indeed, the next part of the tour was the most impressive because of this. We jumped back in the mini bus and were taken to the top of the glacier, where a whole network of walkways had been built through the forest.

We were dropped off and given a time to be back – my kind of tour; no tramping about in a giant group with a flag and name tags. Not that we'd done that; we'd seen plenty, and they looked miserable.

The day itself did tend tend toward the miserable. The rain was constant, and not warm like good Darwin rain, or refreshing like Brisbane rain. It was cold, and...wetter. Yep, definitely wetter, as it ran down the back of my neck and soaked the legs of my jeans because I was to stupid to have an actual raincoat.

Wet cold rain aside, the walk was fantastic. We walked, carefully, down the slippery walkways, through weird looking trees, then emerged to take in the view. The glacier was huge, and from our vantage point you got the full view – right across the ice field in both directions. You could see both faces of the glacier. Brilliant blue in the grey day, the ice made awesome cracking and popping noises until the inevitable massive splash as another iceberg was calved. In the foreground – the autumn colours again framed the scene. It would have made an excellent photo, and I took many. Every one of them covered in raindrops.

That took up a day, but we had a few more. We decided to rent a car – a bold move we felt. We had no particular destination in mind, we just wanted to go for a drive. We booked in online, then walked down to the main street to pick it up. So far so good.

The standard stuff – checking what damage it had and noting it on the picture that looks nothing like the car. The car was a Volkswagen Gol – not a spelling mistake, it is different to the Golf, basically a Polo, although they have those too and they're different again. It had a huge dent in the driver's side door. I looked quizzically at the bloke.

“Viento.” he told me. You need to be careful when you open the door. The Patagonian wind will grab the door and bend it back on itself like it's made of glad wrap (he didn't say Glad wrap – I added that bit). Dings and scratches noted, he passed me the clipboard to sign off. As the pen touched the paper, with Hollywood like timing, a snowflake touched my cheek. No word of a lie. Not that I realised what it was straight away. For a second I thought the car hire bloke had sneezed on me, then I spotted the flakes drifting down. A cold hand squeezed my guts from the inside – not only would I be driving on the wrong side of the road, the side humans are not meant to be on, but it would be the first time I drove in snow.

I mentioned that to the guy.

“En serio?” he replied incredulously. “I thought there was heaps of snow in Australia.”

“No, dude, you're thinking of Austria.”

“They're not the same?”

Well a syllable and thousands of miles....

We had 200kms to use, so we simply used it all up.

It went pretty well. We drove out of town towards the glacier and ran straight into the blizzard (known locally as a very minor snowstorm). Cold cows and vicuñas, giant birds of prey with frozen wings caught unawares by the snow. We did randomly stop the car a bit and prance around in the snow like dickheads, but that was our prerogative as kids from the north of Australia.

Then we turned the car around and headed back into town. Driving past the car rental place we still had 160ks left, so we decided to drive 78ks, stop for lunch, then turn around – leaving 4ks for a trip to the shops.

We ended up on the fabled Ruta 40 – one of the best drives in Argentina. It goes right the spine of the country, from the top near Mendoza to the bottom. We went 72.3km up it, and it was great. An awesome ribbon of ashpahlt heading off into the Patagonian wilderness in the direction of Mendoza. Apparently the ashphalt stopped just over the horizon - a lot of the rest is dirt.

Lunch on the steppe may have been a little ambitious. The Patagonian wind was ridiculous went we stopped by the side of the road, so we ate inside the car.

We dropped it back the same day after driving to the shops to do the shopping – it's funny how the little things like driving to the shops can be exciting when you haven't done it for a while.
The bloke at the rental car agency gave the international fingers together sign of arse puckering when I told him about the nieve on the road. No hay nieve en Australia, at least not where I learned to drive.

And that was pretty much it for Patagonia. We both decided (maybe more me) that we would need to return one day to do the Torres del Paine trek and see a bit more of the area, but for now we were done. We had a flight to catch to Buenos Aires and an apartment waiting for us. That, and El Clasico.

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Comments

[slowfeet]

Gathering pace
You'll soon catch up to yourselves. Enjoyed the post and the photos. We're in the middle of finding out how to rate photos so might do that as soon as we get good internet again.