El Calafate

Tuesday – January 4

This was our first exploration day. After a good buffet breakfast we boarded our bus at 8:00 for a trip into Los Glaciares National Park to see Moreno Glacier. Our day guide, Carolina, set up a great tour. We took a secondary gravel road for most of the way and stopped several times to get out to watch and take photos of lots of birds. We saw Andean c ondors, black chested buzzard eagles, crested caracaras, chimango caracaras, American kestrels, lesser rheas, rufous-collared sparrows, Chilean flamingos, black-necked swans, coscoroba swans, black-faced ibises and southland lapwings. (Eat your hearts out, Suellen and John). We also saw some animals including foxes, horses, cows, sheep, goats and hares.

 

At the glacier we took a long scenic walk on a well-constructed metallic trail with banisters. It was constructed this way to keep people off of the delicate terrain. There were several observation decks where we could stop, watch the glacier and take photos. The glacier is across a narrow part of the lake. The trail has lots of ups and downs. We saw and heard many calvings two of which were huge. It was much more intimate that our Alaska glacier experience. The weather was partly cloudy with a few periods of showers.

The trail ended at a visitors’ center where I finished my box lunch. There were lots of people there and I heard several languages – English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

At 2:30 we got back into the bus for the ride back to our hotel. The main diversion on the way was a scene from the wild south. There was a sheep and a lamb running loose next to the road. Three dogs were trying to round them up. They chased them back and forth across the road eventually ending up next to one of three gauchos on horseback. He picked up the lamb, threw it over his saddle, took it away from the road, dropped it onto the ground and rode off.

A little about the terrain – The land is fairly flat here similar to the high desert in California. There is very little vegetation – good only for raising sheep and goats. To the west are the snow-capped Andes. The elevation was 900 – 1400 feet.

We were back at the hotel around 4:30. I took some downtime working on my photos and blog. Ann went to an optional movie called “My Favorite Enemy” a semi-comedy about a boarder conflict between Argentina and Chile.

Dinner was on our own. Ann and I went to a small cafe called Viva la Pepa. We had quiche, pizza and local beer. On the way back to the hotel we stopped to have some dulce de leche ice cream.

We wanted to get to sleep fairly early but at 10:00 it was still light outside (El Calafate is way south and it is summer in the southern hemisphere). I finally put on a sleep mask and ear plugs and went to sleep. Did I mention all of the dogs around us that like to bark in the night?