Patagonia: El Calafate

After that we headed to Puerto Madryn, a pretty dirty industrial town on the coast who's biggest attracting is an old rusty tugboat beached and broken near the city center. We spent the night in cabins, and made a day trip in the morning to a national park where llamas and penguins lived together on the coast. 'National park,' I've found, means something very different in Argentina than in the United States where it is common to find cabins, visitor centers, rangers, and some sort of improved infrastructure. From what I've seen, a national park here qualifies as a national park when there is land that you have to pay to see, and not much else. Many of the parks we went to (with some exceptions) were a single dirt road lead from one point to another without any trace of civilization inside. In this park in particular, we drove to the end of the road, and spent several hours walking near the ocean, trying our best to touch a huanaco, and watching penguins that lived in little holes in the ground.

After another night in Puerto Madryn we made another considerable push south (about a change of 9 °) to El Calafate, a town geared to hard core tourists, back packers, and mountain climbers, many of whom come to either trek the glacier or climb one of South America's most difficult peaks, Monte Fitz Roy. Hence the streets were lined with more 'rugged' tourist shops, selling big locally knit socks and hats made of llama wool. In our first of 3 days in Calafate, a couple of friends and I woke up early to head out to a massive blue lake that we could see situated at the base of the mountains from the 2nd story of our cabin. We set out walking, hopped several barbed wire fences, and quickly realized that we had seriously misjudged the distance to the lake. 

Not only that, but what appeared to be large flat tundra-esque plains actually turned out to be covered pretty consistently by about an inch to 5 inches of water, all hidden by the grass clumps, and at times a good foot of mud. That made the journey very difficult, but we came across some interesting things along the way, such as a group of apparently wild cold-water flamingos (we had seen flamingos in the previous national park which were identified by our guide, so no we were not foolishly misidentifying pink birds), and several dead animals. After several hours, the hike began to get a bit frustrating when 'It looks like the lake is just over than next creek' had to be repeated for the 6th or 7th time, and we found ourselves encountering numerous deeper water crossings, all flowing with near freezing melted snow. We settled for 'almost there' status, and sat down in the wet grass for several hours of conversation.

Come morning, we woke up early for the 2 hour bus ride to the Glacier national park, the worlds 2nd oldest national park (Second only to Yellowstone), which was at the time in the midst of a harder-than-normal spring snowstorm. The majority of the bus, being largely from Scandinavia, Northern Europe, and the North eastern US was not so impressed with a half meter of snow covering everything in sight, but I was. We drove through alpine forests up in the mountains past a large mountain lake which harbored giant blue blocks of floating ice for a long while until coming to the point where, cradled between two large peeks, the Perito Moreno glacier poured out into the lake, ending abruptly with a 7-story tall ice shelf at the water's edge. We had a free morning to explore as we liked, so I walked a good while with some friends through the snowy forest, but it got fairly miserable after a while when the hardly suitable converse sneakers that I was wearing became thoroughly saturated and I began to lose feeling in my feet.

The real adventure came the next day, when we returned to a erratically different scene, as all the half meter of snow had melted away the day before, to take a barge from the shore of the lake to the base of the glacier, from which point we dawned spiked crampons on our shoes and made about a 3 hour trek up to a point disappointingly close to that from which we started. Walking on ice is a considerably slower and more aggravating process than walking on dirt. When we got to the end of our trek, we were served a special whiskey made in the nearby town and chilled with ice chipped freshly from the glacier. 

Atop Perito Moreno Glacier