Luca, Oli and I arrived in El Calafate in the afternoon, back to Argentina once again. El Calafate is the gate-way to the national Park nearby named Glacieres. It is called this because the park is full of some of the biggest and most infamous glaciers in the world! The most famous of these glaciers is named Perito Moreno. Ultimately, El Calafate is only a tourist town. The streets are full of log shops, kiosks, restaurants, and an overly large casino. Everyone you see wandering the streets are tourists, poking about the shops, window shopping.
I didn´t much like El Calafate simply because of this. There was much more I would have liked to do there but I have reached the point where I am beginning to hold back on the money that I spend so that I can make it to the end of my trip. That and everything that goes near the glaciers is expensive. The cheapest way to simply look at the thing costs around 50 dollars. Now I think a lot of people, at least youth that travel here are impressed and awestricken at the end of the day although still recognize that it cost lots. When I would ask someone at the end of the day. ¨So Jimmy, how was the trip you did today?¨ Jimmy would respond with ¨It was really cool but it was expensive¨. Jimmy would put a bit of extra stress on the word expensive so that I understand that he had a good time but he definitely doesn´t feel it was a good deal per se.
Now don´t get me wrong, this is one of the highlights of the Patagonia, to see this massive glacier. A view and size that cannot be imagined before visiting it, even if you prepared yourself thoroughly beforehand with google images. The sheer cold that is given off as an aura by this mass of ice that extends as far as the eye can see, sitting casually between snow capped mountains. Endless crevaces and deep cracks can bee seen all over the ice face that stares at the spectators that are teeming on the walkways across the straight, trying to move their bodies or cameras into the desirable position to catch the right shot. I myself took many photos, and in hindsight most of them look the same. There are only so many photos you can take of a piece of ice that doesn´t move. While Perito Moreno doesn´t necissarily move, it makes noise. I believe it is either the only, or one of the only glaciers in the world that is still shifts about. (Don´t know if that is true, sometimes you hear things and it gets stuck in your brain as fact, when the source of the fact was never sought out). Aside from shifting the waters below itself, chunks of varying size frequently break off and crash into the waters below and begin to melt away for who knows how long... By frequently I mean daily, hourly, minutely. This is another reason why people come to see this glacier. To hopefully capture this glacier in action, the action of it slowly breaking up and dieing away. Although the hordes of people who come to see it don´t view it in this light. When they hear noise, the buzzing of the people hushes down and waits expectantly for something to happen, if nothing happens a bit of disappointment can be heard out of the spectators. Although, if something does happen, a cheer breaks out! A toast to the Glacier, what a show it is putting on today! The amount of reaction by the crowd completely depends upon the size of the chunk that has just decided to go for a swim in the nippy waters. I was lucky enough to witness an enormous chunk suddenly break off and crash into the water, submerge itself completely and pop quickly back up to float around with the other smaller hunks that had fallen before it.
The day that I visited the Glacier, it was bad weather... just my luck again... it was extremely foggy and rainy which didn´t help my mood. As soon as the sun came out. The weather was still not on my side throughout this southernly excursion. The next few days were spent sitting about the town, waiting to sort out bus issues over the internet which further battered my spirit. Things continued to bother me throughout these days and I was seriously ready to simply put Patagonia behind me and head to the next stop, which I had decided would be Bahia Blanca on the Atlantic coast. I was planning on staying with a friend from El Bolson, one of the guys that I did the hike up to Hielo Azul with.
Patagonia was exciting, although it took a lot out of me which I am still recovering from. I lost several objects, some of them being very important to me. As well as being absolutely exhausted physically from the near constant walking and camping. From this I chose to scrap another stop down in the Patagonia and move on while I was still half sane. To me that has been my best defense against anger, frustration or lonliness is to simply move onto the next step, take a bus to the next city and start fresh. I am doing one long trip down here in South America but to me it is broken up and segmented into many smaller trips and experiences. Moving onto the next step has really assisted me throughout the course of this trip with staying on top of things and especially put things behind me, geographically and mentally. To keep going with a clear head. Anyone can make mistakes but a foggy head is what makes a person more likely to make several consecutive mistakes.
So I left El Calafate, alone and looking forward to the next step. While I felt I had been cheated of a few things there I didn´t worry about it. I will definitely return there, maybe when I can be less conscious of the money I am spending, when I am old and retired and have nothing better to do. Like most of the tourists down in that area of the world, taking cruises and being catered to in every manner.
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