El Calafate & the Perito Moreno Glacier

18 hours down the road we made it to Rio Gallegos, which is a fucking hole.

20 minutes later we were on a bus towards El Calafate, a small town on the edge of a large glacier-filled national park in the very south of Patagonia in Argentina.

Bizarrely, as you get further away from the wealthy, classy, cosmopolitan north of Argentina things get more and more expensive (much the same in the UK) and so, rather than face the prospect of paying 140 argentine pesos (about triple what we´d be paying thus far), we decided to have our first experience of dorm living at the more reasonable price of 20 pesos per person. The only gamble is what kind of weirdos you end up with as room-mates.

First night we had a perfectly nice and normal woman of vague hispanic origin (ie i forgot where she´s actually from) but she was leaving the next day and was up at the same time as us when we left on our trip to see the Perito Moreno Glacier, in the nearby national park. Which, i will let flo describe below:



That is from the boat trip which made up the first section of our day and the rest of the day was basically an opportunity to see the glacier from a number of different angles and lead to the excessive number of glacier photos that are now on my flickr account! and yes, it was fucking cold, hence the clothes-almost everything i own!

Back at the hostel we thought we were going to be gold when we saw that no one had moved into our room, so we cooked ourselves some dinner (feeling frugal due to the crazy ski resort-level prices) and after chatting to a few people we'd met we made our way to bed at about 11 feeling smug that we´d have the room to ourselves.

Pride, fall and all that, we were beaten to our room by a guy carrying his massive bag ready to move in. This guy resisted all attempts at conversation and we were left to determine that he was Israeli by his hebrew lonely planet. All further attempts at communication were further stifled by his insistence on trying to insert as much of his body as possible into the storage lockers provided for rucksacks. He was gone by morning. No one knows where. (probably just down the corridor)

I cant really remember what we did the following day. not much i think. We did however return to find some new room mates - a very nice and talkative couple of Germans, Daniel and Danielle, very sweet matching names.

so we spent the evening chatting with them and a few more of our new friends about places that they'd been and watching daniel, not the biggest guy in the world, take a comment from his girlfriend that he was drinking a lot as a challenge to drink even more and see off the best part of 3 bottles of wine in a couple of hours.

the next day we left for our first new country - chile!