After 3 days of getting up at 6am and 48 hours of transition, our first day in El Calafate was particularly exhausting.
The plan was to take a tour bus to see the Perrito Moreno glacier, take the boat ride out to the glacier for a closer look, and then see the Glaciarium museum and hit the Ice Bar (a bar made completely of ice where you can drink whiskey and glacier ice in sub-zero temperatures) on the way home.
Not my pic, but doesn't this look fun?!
I made an 8pm reservation for dinner at La Tablita, the one place I heard we HAD to try in El Calafate, and then I thought we’d walk the lake, or blog back at the hostel while drinking wine and watching the sun go down. A pretty nice little Saturday.
But of course, due to the challenges of traveling during high-season, instead of leaving for the park at 8am via bus, we ended up in a car by noon. (But we still were up at 6am, which was not helpful for any of the activities that followed.)
Breaded meat sandwiches are a great idea
We were in such a rush to get out of town by the time we finally got transportation, that we didn’t have our guidebook with us, and so we didn’t know a good place to get take-away food. The car rental guys told us there was a deli, but when we got there, we realized it was just a place for gas station-style ham and cheese.
I felt like there must be something better on the other side of town, so I made us take a detour across town. After 10 minutes of walking, we didn’t find anything open except for another pharmacy with even weirder sandwiches, and packaged, gas station cookies. At this point, I felt like an idiot, so we just bought what we could, and went to the car.
Lines are more fun the second time around!
We had already bought a bus ticket to go to El Chalten the following morning, but because everyone told us the Glacier Park was open until 10pm, and could consume the better part of the day, we decided to move our dinner reservation to 9:30--the only available slot--and take the 1pm bus.
(Of course on the way to the bus stop, we saw an awesome looking sandwich shop, but we were committed to our breaded meat sandwiches, so we had to pass it up.)
At the bus station, we waited in the slowest one-person line I've ever seen, only to be told by the attendee that we were trying to exchange the wrong bus tickets. Turns out, Dan had grabbed the tickets for the Glacier Viedma tour by mistake. Oops.
So, another 15 minute trip back to the hostel. I run in this time, grab the other tickets, wait in the incredibly slow line at the bus station--again--and finally, off we go.
We visit the Glaciarium, are not impressed
On the way out of town, we decided to stop at the Glacier museum. It was kind of cool. Mostly from the outside, but a little from the inside too.
Honestly, there were parts that were VERY cool, but because it attempts to be bilingual (with English being the second language in this case) it ended up not being as informative as I'd have liked.
However, I was still really excited to do the ice bar. When we bought our tickets for the museum, the woman at the front desk told us to come back at 10 till, and we could buy tickets for the 1pm show.
We showed up at 10 till 1pm, just like we were told, to buy tickets, but a different guy was there, who told us we couldn’t buy anything until 2pm, so there was no way we could go to the ice bar.
Of course . . . if we wanted to, we could hang around for an hour and wait.
I wanted to drink whiskey with glacier ice, but not that bad, so we left.
The peak of awesomeness—I lose $50
At this point, Dan and I were pretty bummed out. We missed our tour, missed the bus, paid ultra premium for the car, missed the ice bar, at this point, we were looking forward to just getting to the glacier.
At this point, for some unknown reason, I was refilling my water bottle while driving, and I accidentally dumped water all over my jeans.
Like, a lot of water.
So that’s how I ended up driving down the Patagonian highway pants-less, with my jeans flapping out our back window to dry.
This was awesome, until I realized I had left about 500 pesos in my jeans pocket, which were now about 20km down the road.
Right then, was the exact moment Dan chose to start a conversation about the exchange rate. We’d been estimating that it was about 10 pesos to 1 USD. (Not entirely true, but we were getting 9.5 on the blue market so it was an easier to estimate prices using that figure.) But somehow, me losing money made Dan remember that the official exchange rate is closer to 6, so, really, I lost $80.
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!
Glacier Perrito Moreno is cool enough to almost make up for the rest
By the time we got to the glacier, we were tired, hungry, carbo-loaded for a lifetime, and cranky. But I have to say, seeing something on this scale close up was absolutely amazing.
