It was time to say goodbye to the “W” and the trekking portion of our adventure and switch to the more traditional tourista aspects – an excursion to Perito Moreno Glacier and a few days in Buenos Aires.

They say that getting there is half the fun – the trip from Hotel Las Torres to El Calafate, Argentina was no exception.  After our relaxing day at the hotel and our day hike, we boarded the hotel shuttle at 4pm for the brief ride to the park entrance at Laguna Amarga where we met our transportation that would bring us to the frontier and beyond.  “Scheduled” for roughly 3 hours, this turned out to be a 6+ hour adventure!

Leaving the park (remember the 25 mile dirt road?), we quickly arrived at the border crossing, where we disembarked, and waited.  And waited…  Because of the language barrier with the driver, it was difficult to understand what was happening, but we were encouraged to spend some quality time in the lone tourist/coffee shop, waiting for not-quite-sure-what.    It was a good 45 minutes before we were shepherded into the customs building (the red-roofed building in the photo) to get our passports stamped.

Back on board the bus, we were on the road again, passing through rolling hills of grassland.  Though after only a few minutes, we pulled up to another building, which we came to learn was the Argentina frontier at Paso Río Don Guillermo.  Seems that when you have a whole lot of open space, there’s no particular need to put these buildings next to one another.

And sadly, the pattern that we saw at the Chilean border repeated itself.  We stopped, and sat in the bus, though this time, our passports were collected by the bus driver – it’s always a bit unsettling when you hand over your passport and someone walks away with it!    Again, wait time with little in the way of information – maybe another 1/2 hour rolled by before the bus driver returned with our passports, handing the whole stack to someone at the front of the bus to re-distribute (there were only about a dozen of us on the bus).

FINALLY underway again, following a full-sized bus, we began to settle back for the balance of the trip to El Calafate, only to be interrupted after about 5 minutes, when both busses pulled over and we were told to get on the bus ahead of ours.  Ok, I guess, but it all seemed odd – at least both busses had the same “Always Glaciers” logo.

NOW we settled back and were able to relax for the balance of the drip to El Calafate – passing absolutely NOTHING between the Argentine boarder and the town – nearly 130 miles of wide open, rolling terrain with grasslands, a few sheep, and nothing else. Nothing.  Except the SOS signposts every 10km or so.

We arrived in El Calafate shortly after 10pm, descending from the Cold Steppe into the lakeside town.  It had been a very long afternoon – made longer, perhaps because we really didn’t have a good idea of what to expect.  It wasn’t quite over, because no sooner had we entered the outskirts of the town, the bus pulled over and we were told to transfer to another bus – near as we could figure, the bigger, inter-region buses couldn’t really navigate the smaller (and sometimes unpaved) streets of El Calafate and elsewhere…   Finally arrived at our apartment, Los Ponchos, and quickly settled into, what turned out to be our very comfortable accommodations.

Remember – this was the tourist part of our adventure – the Los Ponchos was definitely on the luxurious side – a 2-floor apartment with maid service and an incredibly helpful staff.  To our surprise, breakfast was brought to our room each day, as if we’d ordered room service – definitely a nice touch, knowing how much we like our coffee first thing!  Coffee early, and it was up and out for our excursion to the Perito Moreno Glacier.   Recommended by our travel guy at Experience Chile, this turned out to be really awesome kind of day.

Words really can’t begin to describe the glacier and this glacial park – the water was an unbelievable milky turquoise, and there’s the sheer magnitude of the glacier and the ice field itself. The pictures only begin to tell the true story. I’d definitely suggest reading about the glacier, though I think the pictures really speak for themselves…

The front wall is 20 stories high! Look closely at the “find the boat” picture, and you’ll get a real sense of how big it is. And then there’s the audio portion of our tour – every so often, a piece of the glacier would break off and you’d hear it crash to the water below – perhaps hitting some of the other large chunks of ice that had had a similar fate. It really was an awesome sight.

Yes, that’s us (really?!), on the boat excursion to the south wall of the glacier.  It really was an awesome excursion – a tiring sort of day, as we traversed many of the catwalk/boardwalk structures that provided all sorts of views of the glacier.   Did I mention that for this excursion, we were picked up at our hotel by a small bus, only to be transferred to a larger bus for the hour drive to the park?    End of the day, we did that in reverse, piling back into the bus for the drive back to town, and the hop off/hop on to a local bus on the side of the road. Definitely an unusual custom.

And as if we didn’t have enough walking, we walked into town (about 1.5 miles) to scout out a highly-recommended steak/chop house for dinner – Don Pinchon.   Took us a bit of doing to find the place – up the hill on a dirt road, next to the American hostel – definitely off the beaten path, but well worth the price for a delicious meal and a great Malbec!

And with that, we said goodbye to El Calafate and a bit of tourism.  Though not before acknowledging that the locals take their tourism very seriously.  So seriously, that when we finally departed El Calafate on our flight to Buenos Aires, the pilot detoured the 80km or so to make a fly-over of the glacier part, alternately dipping the wings on the port and starboard sides so that we could all see the glaciers from yet another vantage point!  They’d never do that in the States!

Read more: Buenos Aires