We have decided to spend another night in El Calafate for some down time as we had a pretty full on day yesterday and the bus for Puerto Natales leaves at 8:30 am, so need to pack at some point!
We arrived by plane into El Calfate the day before yesterday. We are aiming for Peurto Natales as it is the gateway for Torres del Paine national park, the first place we want to do some hiking in Patagonia, and it was easier to fly here from Ushuaua (1 hour 15) and get a bus (5 hours tomorrow morning) rather than get a bus to Punta Areanas (12 hours) and then another one to Puerto Natales (5 hours)!
We ended up being on a flight with Brandy and Brenton, a couple we had met on the Antartica cruise. I think we are now ocker Aussies as we met all the Australian´s on our Antartic trip within the first day of arriving in Ushuaia! As we hadn´t got any accomodation and we were sharing a cab to the city (´it´s cheap!) we ended up staying in the same hostel. And they when we were exploring different options to get to Los Glaciers National Park the best value option was to hire a car for the four of us.
So yesterday bright and early (6:30! - Mick, this early morning stuff is becoming a habit for Roy!) we headed out for the national park. We left that early as a) we avoid all those pesky tourists and b) if you get to the national park before 8 you don´t pay (it saved Peso´s $60 each). So we had a couple of hours looking at the glacier and were rewarded with a massive carving, where a bit breaks off the glacier - it was an awesome site, as the part of the glacier that broke off had come from in the glaicer so forced it´s way out from beneath causing severl smaller bits to break off and a fair bit of wave impact.
Once we had our fill of the glacier we went to another part of the national park to have some lunch (why do cheese and tomato sandwiches always taste so good in the outdoors?) and then hike up a peak. It was only a smallish one and we walked for about an hour up, which was about half way.
We then explored some more of the park and then headed back to El Calafate stopping at the estansia´s (ranches) to see if any did the lamb barbie that is unique for these parts. We didn´t find anywhere suitable to headed back to town and went to a place in El Calafate instead. There was all different kind of meat - including black pudding!
Today we have just done chores, heading to the post office, to send out bulky antartic gear home and stocking up at the supermarket for our bus trip tomorrow.
The bus tomorrow takes us from here (Argentina) to Puerto Natales (Chile). After a few days there we hope to head to Bariloche or Puerto Montt to do the lakes crossing before we get to Santiago, where we head out to the Easter Islands.
I´m off to do some research about all this, so i´ll catch you at the next update x
