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Published: March 4th 2006
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Me and the Glacier
This is a photo of yours truly and the Perito Moreno Glacier. Well hello again. I´m currently in El Calafate, after a 27+ hour bus ride from Bariloche to Rio Gallegos, and then a 4 hour ride to El Calafate. But it wasn´t terrible. It is decently easy to amuse yourself for that long if you know in advance it will be that long. Plus, I had Scott with me, and the benefit of meeting Hugh, an Irish guy, as well as Cody and Sean, two American kids from Seattle. They´ve all been great to talk to, and Scott and I are sharing a hostel with Hugh while the other boys camp. On the bus they showed four movies - one bad film with the Rock; an equally bad film that I did watch called Shriek if you know what I did last Friday the 13th; Analyze That; and an illegal copy of Brokeback Mountain, which I have been really wanting to see and was thrilled to see on the bus. It was good but hard to hear Heath Ledger mumbling cowboy talk over the bus´s air conditioner. But I think I got most of it.
Last night we stayed in Rio Gallegos, and we headed over to our first all you
Chunking
Here is an attempt of mine to catch a piece of the glacier chunking off. can eat buffet, that included Chinese dishes as well as classic Argentinian beef products. Very nice. A bit lacking on the chocolate for dessert, but...
Today we arrived and got a hostel and some information on seeing the Perito Moreno glacier, the reason for coming here in the first place. There are several glaciers here actually, but this is the most commonly (and no doubt cheaply) visited, though it is said to be spectacular. With any luck I´ll be able to post some of Scott´s pictures up here shortly, so you´ll be abel to see for yourselves. And no doubt go out and buy a ticket to Argentina immediately thereafter.
Seems the five of us will be renting a car and driving to the glacier at the ungodly hour of 5:30am in order to hit the park before they open at 7am, thereby avoiding paying the entrance fee. We will see how this plan goes off, but I am game.
Ok, well, the plan went off, but not without a hitch. We all met up at the car at 5:15am, remarkable in and of itself, and then Cody drove us to the glacier. It was dark, as
The bunny killers
Also known as Jenn, Scott, Hugh, Sean, and Cody you can imagine, and there were lots of stars out. Unfortunately there were also lots of Patagonian hares out as well. Cody did well avoiding them for the most part, but there was one bunny out to end it all, and end it all he did. For a bunny, this thing was the size of a small deer and we hit it good. We kept on driving, but Cody felt terrible for the hare. We arrived at the glacier before 7am and were therefore, ahem, exempt from the park fee. We were also there in plenty of time to beat the crowds that didn´t show up until after 10am. We spent many an hour walking among the various catwalks and walkways from which you view the glacier, staring in rapt attention. The glacier is continually creeping forward, and it stops right at the lake edge, where hugh pieces of ice continually chunk off into the water with a tremendous thundering sound. It is really amazing. It´s hard to explain in all here, but it was just fantastic to see and hear this massive sheet of ice. And it´s a fabulous color - all different shades of white and blue as
Serenity
This is just a beautiful place. the ice compacts down. Once the sun hit it, it was amazing.
At 10am or so we took a break from staring and went back to the car for lunch. Hugh was hungry. Hugh was also the first to see the after effects of the hare on the car - and it left a mark. It fact, it broke the car. The fiberglass front was split and hanging with pieces of hair stuck in the grill. Quite a masterpiece. Cody no longer felt bad for the bunny, and I think it got off lightly with a quick death. We had gotten insurance for the car, but insurance in Argentina is not complete and only brought our responsibility down to 600 pesos, or $200 dollars. We spilt this between the five of us so it wasn´t too bad, but it was in no way the cost effective plan we had imagined.
We stayed a few hours more to gawk with all the rest of the tourists and then headed back to town. We looked into cheap fixes for as to hide the broken parts, but in the end we just took it back and sucked it up. Cody bought us a 3 liter tub of ice cream to drown our sorrows and we cleaned it out in no time. We spent the rest of the night shopping around for various camping food items to bring with us for camping in Torres del Paine in Chile for the next week and then got some sleep before saying good bye to Hugh the next morning and getting on a bus to Puerto Natales, Chile. Hugh would be getting on a bus to Mendoza, a harrowing 47.5 hour adventure which I hear he has since survived. You go Hugh!
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