Dogs and Desserts.... There were many of both :)

When we got to El Calafate we spent the rest of the day exploring the town, which had one main street and a lot of dogs. El Calafate is a very interesting town in the way it’s set up. As you drive in from the airport, you’re on a really wide road. The road is actually an old runway from an old airport or some such, so when the snow melts you can see the “runwayness” of it. This road ends at a plateau above the town, and there’s a road that goes around the cliff like edge winding down. It’s not too steep or too high, but there’s a lot of really loose dirt. To walk down into town from up here (our hostel was right at the end of the runway) you could walk right down the edge. Obviously this was not always successful – loose dirt, snow, slush, you get the picture. We also walked up it quite a few times. The winding road was long and dirt anyways.


Our first supper there was eaten at La Lechuza Pizza. (This was our first experience with La Lechuza in El Calafate. They have 3 locations, all different.) We picked some very tasty pizzas, though I don’t remember what they were, and we forgot to take pictures of them. That night, we scheduled a boat trip to see the glaciers, and the guys went to get food so we wouldn’t have to buy food on the boat the next day (Friday the 25th). The only problem with this plan is that my food somehow got lost. They’ve promised me that Jeremy made my lunch and that it went into the box in the fridge, but sometime in there (probably when Steven spilled the box taking it out of the fridge?) my sandwich disappeared. This resulted in Steven buying my lunch on the boat. The glaciers were beautiful, as were the icebergs, and we did get to see the glacier calving off into the lake. That night we partook of La Lechuza #2 - the original La Lechuza, which happened to be a bit fancier than the pizza establishment. Tasty things were eaten here as well.


On Saturday we went around looking for souvenirs and things again, and Jeremy and I ended up walking up to the highest part of town and walking a little bit out there. We randomly decided to eat at La Lechuzita (a La Lechuza with a more relaxed feel, more for families with small children) and found Russ and Steven there as well. It had been sunny and nice for most of the day so far, and we decided to go ice skating that afternoon. The town is right on Lago Argentina , and the ice skating area was on the opposite end of town from our hostel. As we were renting our skates it started raining, and we thought it would just pass. But it didn’t. We wound up being the only idiots out there ice skating in the rain. I will admit this would have been TONS more fun if it either A) hadn’t been raining or B) had been closer to the hostel. Anyways, we went just fine, just being soaked by rain for quite a while, and then Russ and Steven ended up falling down at various times for various reasons (snowball dodging, that sort of thing). I was still up just fine, as was Jeremy, until a little bit later. I don’t know what happened, but I wound up sitting on the ice in a couple inches of freezing cold water in the only pair of sweatpants I had. After this, we turned in our skates and got some of the tasty food next to the lake (chocolate dulce de leche cake for me that was supposed to only be one piece but might have been a quarter of the original cake, some kind of sausages for the guys). The walk back was not a pleasant one. Turns out my feet were NOT wet when we left the rink. They were when we got back. Also leaving the lake we picked up a couple of stray dogs, and the number grew to 5 or 6 before we got back to the hotel. They decided that they should hang around outside the hostel waiting for us for quite some time. That night I went to bed early and the guys went out again to try out the librobar (book bar) that they’d seen.

On Sunday (27th) we took a taxi up to P. Moreno Glacier. It was supposed to take an hour to get there and an hour to get back, but the horrible weather made it take 2 hrs to get there. We didn’t get nearly as much time as we had allowed for, because of this, but that was ok – the weather was still kind of gross and it’s mostly outside. When we got back we had time to watch the Argentina vs. Mexico soccer game (with the Argentines that ran the hostel) which was thoroughly satisfying. When the game was over we took a taxi back to the airport and flew out for Bariloche.