Get Your Kicks on Ruta 40
El Calafate began as a way-station for sheep farmers´ wagons in southern Patagonia. Its proximity to some of the most fantastic glaciers outside the (ant)arctic regions has caused it to reinvent itself as a tourist village, complete with boutique artisan shops, chocolate stores and repackaged sheep farms, with sheep-shearing demonstrations, etc.
It was also the first town since Buenos Aires with an American chain hotel (Best Western), which looked incongruous sitting by itself on a dusty road above the town center.
We ate at a traditional Parilla (BBQ) restaurant with 4 whole lambs splayed over a fire pit, which, oddly enough, was run by Chinese people.
From El Calafate, we took a day tour to see the most famous of the glaciers, Glaciara Poreto Moreno. The bus stopped first at an estancia (ranch estate) for a break in the long bus ride to the park. Here we met a baby guanaco. We´d seen guanacos running free on the scrub grass that covers lower Patagonia, but this was the first we saw kept as a pet. It liked to suckle on Patty´s finger!
The park itself was amazing. We went on a boat right next to its mile-long edge. Every few minutes a chunk of the ice would just fall off with a tremendous crash as it hit the water.
From El Calafate, we took a bus to El Chaltén, a haven for climbers and trekkers build expressly for this purpose in 1985. Here we did our first real Patagonian hiking. We took a couple of day hikes up into the northern parts of Los Glaciares Park, where the winds are consistently quite high, creatign mists over beautiful lakes containing seemingly everlasting rainbows.
This is also where we met Martin & Martin, two friends from Switzerland who were traveling Latin America together. They were our hiking and dinner companions. Owing to their height difference, they became known to us as ¨tall Martin¨ and ¨the other Martin¨ :)
They introduced us to ¨Dog¨, a game with a board, marbles, and a double ¨french¨ deck of cards (just normal playing cards to Americans). It´s a kind of 4-player backgammon, or Sorry. Our evenings were spent eating in at the hostel and playing with them.
We didn´t do any eating out in El Chaltén, because the town had no ATMs, and none of the restaurants took plastic. We spent most of our cash on lodging and transportation to Barioche, our next port of call. One of the few small grocery stores took Visa, though. So, we were in no danger of starving, so long as their meager stocks could fill our modest food needs.
The bus north out of El Chaltén followed route 40, which is only partially paved. It was a slow, bumpy ride up to Bariloche...
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