Glaciers and Grocery Stores

We left Puerto Natales a few days ago for El Calafate. The bus ride was about six hours long. A couple of those hours were spent on dirt/gravel roads going about 20 mph. This was the first town we had arrived in without arranging for a place to stay beforehand. We wondered around for a little bit checking out some decent looking hostels that were either full or out of our price-range. We eventually settled on one that cost $10 a night per person. I think it probably should have cost about $5 per night.

El Calafate is a tourist town that seems to be here just for access to the glacier national park where Perito Moreno is located. It is very similar to any other tourist town we have been to and not much different from those in the States. There is one main street with restaurants, bars and over-priced souvenir stores and that’s about it.

The first day we just hung out in town and tried out some local liquors. We had some drinks made from the calafate berry that weren’t very good and some locally made vodka that was pretty good. We also had some Argentine grappa, which surprisingly was kind of all right. The grappa I’ve had in the past tasted like an old leather shoe sole. The stuff we had here was much more pleasant.

The second day in El Calafate would have been our last, but the bus we’re taking out of town leaves at 8 pm. That’s the same time we got back from the glacier Perito Moreno. Perito Moreno is on of the only advancing glaciers in the world and it is much larger than the glaciers we saw in Torres del Paine. Because it is moving so much more, you can hear it creak and moan and you can see a lot of chunks break off. Some chunks are quite big and send out waves spreading across the lake. The big chunks usually break off at some point after I’ve been staring at the glacier through the viewfinder on my camera and then get bored and start messing with the camera settings. I did catch a couple of pieces crashing down and they are in the El Calafate photo section.

Aside from the glacier trip, the most interesting thing we’ve done in El Calafate was go to the supermercado (grocery store) to buy a beer. We grabbed a liter of Quilmes and took it to the cashier. As she started to ring it up, the cashier said something in Spanish that was met with blank stares from us. She then said something else that got the same result. A few seconds later, another woman working at the store came and took our Quilmes Cristal away. She returned with a bottle of Iguana beer. This would have been a very puzzling turn of events if the guy behind us in line hadn’t informed us in English of what was going on. Apparently, the first bottle we tried to buy was a returnable bottle. I guess the lady was telling us that we had to return it after we were done and when she couldn’t get that through to us, she had someone go get a non-returnable bottle. They didn’t have any non-returnables in Quilmes, so we wound up with the Iguana. I didn’t mind drinking the Iguana beer, but it did cost twice as much as the Cristal.

Tonight we head out on another long bus ride (30 hours). We arrive in El Bolson at 4:30 am and hopefully there will be someone to let us into our hostel. I’m sure the other people in our eight-person dorm will be pleased with our arrival and 4:30 am wake up service. El Bolson is a small town that was formed when a bunch of hippies tried to start some sort of utopia society in the ‘70’s. It should be less touristy than the places we’ve been going and we’ve heard that it is a nice place to spend a couple of days. From there we head on to Bariloche, which is a ski resort town where we might spend some time studying Spanish.