First impressions or El Calafate straight from the horses mouth, or journal which have made a huge effort to not forget these last couple of months!! “love at first sight with Patagonia, flying onto El Calafate was amazing. Unbelievable mountains, desert land, and glacier rivers. Air is cold, but the sun is hot, and CLEAN air!! (smiley face!)”
El Calafate made a huge impression on me, it was unlike any landscape I’d ever really seen before, its space dwarfed what I’d thought was space in New Zealand, everything was amazing, shiny and new!
So back to that morning, were up by 3am?! Hailed a taxi easily enough in the street that never sleeps. (did we mention that the very normal dinner time is midnight, anything before that is considered early?!!) James wasn’t feeling well, one of us had to be ill the day we had travel plans! We had a good flight = we slept most of the way through it! Despite it landing somewhere in literally the middle of nowhere en route! We got in a minibus from the little airport, felt small and quaint, a little like how I’d imagine a local airport in the mountains to feel in Switzerland?! First impressions as you can see from above were only good things, loved it! It was the kind of scenery I felt I really had wanted to get to see, and felt like something had clicked. We spent the rest of the day trying to do some planning, work out what we wanted to see do and go. We couldn’t do Upsala glacier as there was several kilometres of icebergs blocking the passage there now, so we decided to get the bus ourselves the next day to Moreno Glacier.
We were up early the next morning for the bus. Dropped off we followed everyone else (generally a good idea when the bus driver gives you directions in spanish that you don’t understand!) We bought tickets for the boat trip and a few minutes later were standing right infront of it! It was absolutely beautiful. We saw huge bits of ice fall off, which made a great noise just like thunder or a gun shot, and while on the boat saw a piece of ice surface, 3x the size of the boat, which had broken off from underneath the glacier and come to the surface. This was absolutely incredible!! For most the day we had pretty nice weather, apart from a bit of rain and cloud, and walked along all the trails, spending most the day literally just watching it waiting for a piece to fall off! It really was amazing, and could have quite easily stared all day! We arrived back into town and and found the horse riding trip that people we’d met the previous day had recommended and booked it up! Very happy! We had one of our best meals since being away that night, a Patagonian lamb (their specialty) and steak bbq with Santa Julia wine….. YUM!!! It was absolutely incredible!!
The next day I woke up feeling a bit unwell so we postponed the horse riding for a day, had a little bit of a chill out, and in the afternoon went to the nature reeve to see Flamingos! Saw them from a distance with soggy feet! We had great fun in the freezing cold entertaining ourselves with daisies and local horses more than the small amounts of wildlife there! Shared a pizza for dinner…. (cheap night!)
We were picked up at 11am (another decent thing about the trip – one of the few not to start at 8am!) by the most Argentinian looking Gaucho ever!! We had an absolutely amazing day, words definitely wont do it justice but the pictures may come a little closer! It was just 2 of us and a guide, surrounded by a pack of dagga that sprinted off chasing hares (caught 2!) The scenery was incredible, felt too good to be true! Just the kind of day I’d love to have again and again, and a highlight of traveling. We had a great lunch picnic, with a bottle of wine! He took us back to his house after, (after being overtaken by a couple of local small kids galloping past on their horses!) which was very traditional and shared a mate’. Pretty perfect day!
The next morning we got the bus, just, (wrong date on the ticket….) to Puerto Natales.
One Comment