El Calafate and The Perrito Moreno Glacier

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A 30 hour bus ride sounds a little worse than it actually is. Granted, it was pretty damn boring but we watched something like five movies and I did quite a lot of sleeping, or slapen, for those Dutch readers. The biggest problem I had with it all was that I basically lost a whole day of my life on the bus and no Gerard Butler and Jennifer Anniston movie can remedy that. The bus stopped like five times and the final stop last night was for dinner, we dined at a lovely spot called the FSA gas station located on the Atlantic coast of Argentina. The cuisine was spectacular. Amidst the grease covered gas station attendants and the simpletons who were also sharing the fare, they served, a la carte of course, your choice of Doritos, candy bars, sodas, juices, and the main course consisted of some cold ham sandwiches slathered in mayo that had been sitting on the shelf for god knows how long. If you haven’t picked up on my sarcasm yet this was a god awful place to stop for dinner and I didn’t buy shit because I would rather chew on the bus seat I had been sitting in for 17 hours than eat that garbage. That's not true I did buy some bagel chips that were overpriced that we enjoyed with our salami sandwiches which we purchased before we left Bariloche. Thank god for the supermarket stop before we left or we would have gone hungry, Christ. We arrived to El Calafate today at around 1400 and we were pretty happy to get here considering we hadn’t showered in nearly 48 hours and my hair was greasy, not unlike the gas station attendants we’d seen some 15 hours beforehand. We caught a taxi with a Scottish girl who was also staying at our hostel and was on our bus and we were pleasantly surprised when we got here. It’s a nice place with a spacious common area, a kitchen, and hot showers, and get this: heated floors in the whole building. We showered up, unpacked some of our things and headed out on the town to book our trip to the glacier (one of, if not the main, attraction here in El Calafate). We ate some lunch beforehand which was really good; I had a tuna sandwich with tomatoes, spinach, onions, and mushrooms. Brett had a steak sandwich and we shared fries. The town is really little and there isn’t all that much to do here in terms of sightseeing in the actual city so we booked our trip to go trekking on the glacier tomorrow. After that we plan on laying low on Thursday and then spending a couple days in El Chalten which is a city a few hours from here were we can do even more trekking and outdoorsy types of things. At the moment the Wi-Fi is on the fritz and we are trying to book our tickets from here to Buenos Aires so it’s mildly frustrating but that’s nothing a liter of Quilmes can’t fix. I don’t think this is worthy of a blog entry because I don’t have any pictures yet so I will update in a day or two. I also just heard a sweet Patagonian band called La Kandonga, I am trying to find their music on iTunes but I haven’t had much luck yet. Wish me said luck. So we ended up just buying the cd from the reception because we liked the music so much, we’ll have to find a way to get it onto my computer one of these days since I don’t have a disc drive. We stayed up a little later and talked with an Aussie girl and her gay buddy for a while, they were mildly entertaining but I was getting a little drunk and was also very tired, since had to get up around 7am I hit the sack around midnight. We got up and had breakfast which was really good, cereal and a sweet cake with coffee and juice, and then the bus arrived at 8am to collect us. We made some stops around the city picking up other trekkers as is the norm with these excursions and finally we were on the road to the National Park. The Glacier National Park is about an hour from the city and it was established in 1937. The park contains more than 300 glaciers however Perrito Moreno is one of the biggest. In total the ice mass at the Glacier National Park is the third largest ice mass after Antarctica and Greenland. The glacier itself is situated on Lago Argentino which is the biggest lake in all of Argentina. Seeing the glacier for the first time was awe inspiring. We were told before we came here that this was a highlight of any trip to South America but I wasn’t so sure. I was proved wrong quickly. It was unreal how huge and just massive this ice block is! They told us that in square footage it is bigger than the entire city of Buenos Aires!!! How unreal is that? I sat next to guy on the bus named Ignacio, he was from Madrid and he was with his buddy who I didn’t realize until Brett pointed out to me how flaming they were and that it was his life partner. They were cool guys though and we talked in Spanish and he was obviously really nice and well-dressed haha. I thought it was funny since we were going on a trekking of sorts that these guys had on skinny jeans and designer shoes, Brett and I were decked out in our mountain gear. Oh well to each their own. When we arrived at the first lookout point the weather was awful. It was cold, windy, and raining hard. That’s about the worst combo a man can have when trying to view a glacier for pleasure. At any rate though it was still marvelous and we took many photos and stared out at this huge blue abyss for nearly an hour. We saw a few large pieces fall off of the side and that was really cool because it makes a booming sound like a bomb is going off and then you see this massive wave form and hit the shore from the ice displacing the water. After we looked at the glacier for a while we broke out our food, ham and cheese sandwiches and had some lunch under the roof a nearby shelter. We boarded the bus once again and drove about fifteen minutes down the road to a port where a boat was waiting for us and said boat took us to the southern face of the glacier where we got some great photos from above deck. We docked on the other side of the lake and everyone got out and we met our new trekking guides who would take us up on the ice. We walked through the woods for a while to a set of tents where some of the other guides were helping trekkers put on the cramp-ons that we used to grip the ice with our feet. I got mine on and we made our way onto the glacier! It was pretty cool, walking on this mass of compacted snow for an hour and a half. There are all kinds of crevices that are roughly 70 meters deep filled with fresh water. The water however is so pure and fresh that it has no minerals at all in it, if you were lost and needed water you could survive only a couple days because the lack of minerals would start to wear you down. We took lots of photos and met three Canadian travellers, Emma, Jen, and Jas who were on holiday down here for a couple weeks. They actually were staying right across the road from our hostel so we decided to meet up later and have a drink. Before we got off the ice mass and got back on the boat and boarded our bus for El Calafate, the guides had a surprise for us, we came over a ridge and there was a table set up with glasses and Famous Grouse bourbon! It was a welcome drink after a long and chilly day out in the elements. Everyone was falling asleep on the bus; it was a decently long ride after a long day. We got back to our hostel and I tried to purchase our plane tickets from here to Buenos Aires however the website wasn’t working properly so I couldn’t do it! We had to high tail it to the airline office and got there just before it closed at 19.30. We got our plane tickets for Monday at 14.30 and we get to BA around 19.00. We’re getting pretty excited for Phil and matt to come down here in just over a week!!! We made some ravioli for dinner and had a beer, I uploaded some photos and we ate, it was a good meal. After that we met the girls for a drink at a place called the Libro Bar which was full of books, hence the name. They were tired so they went home and Brett and I went to the casino and promptly lost 25 bucks. But hey that’s what happens when you’re having fun, sometimes you lose money. We walked around the city for almost an hour looking for some bar or club to be open, traversing dark streets behind the main square and finding just a whole lot of nothing. We came back here to the hostel, had another beer, chatted online a little more and went to bed. Today is beautiful out and I think I may go for a run in a few minutes here. We have some mild chores to do today and I may get my hair cut but we’ll see, I don’t want to get carried away, haha. Talk soon.

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Comments

[Sean]

let the good times roll
Tom, I'm inspired when I read your posts. I'm living vicariously through you, I have to admit. Thanks for your travel log--I love your sarcasm. You crack me up. Beautiful glacier pics. And good call on taking a pass on that ham and mayo "sandwich" at the gas station.