Patagonian Grand Adventure

Day Nine – 21 February 2014

Weather: The Sunshine horseshoe was still there with some wind.

But not that kind of wind.

This was the kind of morning where you don’t lie in bed looking at the light creeping in through the curtains and think, “I can sleep another half hour.”

No. You get up, whip open the curtains and go Wow.

The clouds were just turning pink/orange when I looked out, and as I got ready, I was running back to the window to keep checking as the whole range lit up.

Wow.

Then I stepped in a piece of broken glass.

Oh. Wow.

So, I had to finish changing, dress a wound and take pictures.

By 7:30, the sun was up, the light was off the mountains and off I went to breakfast. It had a lovely buffet with delicious eggs, Dilmah tea that was really good (Superior Ceylon) and then we had birthday cake for dessert as the other female solo turned fifty today.

We sang happy birthday, ate cake and then someone shouted rainbow.

Well, you want to see a table clear fast?

It wasn’t over the Torres del Paine but still nice and it lasted a long time.

My eyes were drawn to the lenticular clouds.

There were a lot of them hanging around the formation throughout the two days.

We were off at 8:30 and headed for the Argentinian border. How long that took determined our arrival time in El Calafate. The two hour drive to the border was another snap-fest and we got a chance to pull off the road to take pics of Torres del Paine with Lago Toro in the foreground.

Lake Louise of Patagonia.

Though I doubt you’d ever see this lake without waves.

As we got to the Chilean side of the border, we had a chance to do some last minute power shopping. I got a t-shirt, magnets and a cool penguin fleece hat. I tried to use up all my Chilean pesos but no go. I started with 130,000 but I had almost 50,000 left over.

From there, I walked into the Chilean customs house, cleared it and got aboard the bus. We drove ten minutes to the Argentine customs where there was one very overworked customs guy named Reyes.

It took us an hour and a half to get through. At one point, we let a group of Germans go ahead because they were on our Argentine bus. They had to drive to the Chilean side of the border, get dropped off and then that bus was coming back for us. So instead of standing behind us, Marcelo got them through and done.

Good thinking that saved us up to two hours of waiting.

We were finally done by 12:45 and drove to a parking lot to wait for our bus next to a nice little farm.

And some condors!

Well, if you have to wait, why not wait here.

The bus showed up by 1:15 and the luggage was transferred. We said farewell to Christian and boarded the new bus with cushy seats.

Swanky.

Our new guide was Roseta and our driver was Marcelo #3.

I guessed that the most popular name of men over forty was Marcelo.

Our estimated time of arrival in El Calafate was five in the afternoon. The scenery was a stark contrast to Torres del Paine. Relatively flat rolling yellow plains as far as the eye can see. It went on like this all the way to the Atlantic.

And it had the most amazing cloud formations.

And we could *still* see Torres del Paine after an hour on the road.

Roseta told us there was a festival going on in El Calafete to celebrate the naming of the Moreno Lake in 1871. It was a week long festival.

What she was really telling us was that there was going to be noise outside the hotel. But we were used to that. In Bariloche, it was revving motorcycles, fights and the suspected gunshot (likely a backfire). In Puerto Varas, it was a beer festival. In Puerto Natales, it was the birds. In Torres Del Paine, it was the wind.

The light sleepers were not sleeping through the night.

I had ear plugs.

We stopped at a lookout over the valley where El Calafate was built. Just a huge yellow plain with Argentina Lake and a river meandering its way through the valley.

Marcelo #1 talked about a hike he took on a local glacier and said that in days gone by, they used to use dogs to sniff out the fissures and cracks so that they didn’t fall down into them. Nowadays, dogs are not allowed in the park so they have to use electronic means, but that slows them down considerably.

Granted, falling into a crevasse would really slow you down.

We arrived in El Calafate around five, and sure enough, there was a lot of noise from the festival.

I got changed and went out with the birthday girl for dinner. I treated her to pizza where we got a wave from some of the festival goers.

We shopped a bit and then went back to the room at eight. She went up to the business centre and when she got back to her room, apparently there was a muffin done up with a note wishing her a happy birthday. Pretty cool.