El Calafate and Bariloche, Argentine Patagonia, January 27 - February 13, 2024

El Calafate, January 27-February 3

Land border crossings are always interesting – We hopped on the bus from Punta Arenas for what appeared to be a ~7 hour drive across the border north and a bit east to Argentina’s side of Patagonia. Oddly, the bus  took a detour pretty far into Argentina (maybe that is where the border outpost is? Not sure) and the drive was more like 10 hours – which, is not too too bad for me on a bus, I can read and look out the window and self-entertain, usually.  But I was seated next to a young woman whose bus- habits  – 6 hours in – began to wear on me. Knuckle cracking, really? No ear phones for your cell phone, really? Listening to what’s app voice messages and then leaving voice messages back, with lots of kissing noises, and then listening to your what’s app message before you send it, to make sure it sounds sultry enough, really?  But! Back to the paragraph topic sentence: The land border between Chile and Argentina is great; they stamp you out in Chile, you are in no man’s land for a bunch of miles on the highway in Argentina, then you get off the bus at a windy windy parking lot with a small building, you go in, they ask you what address you are going to, and they stamp you in.  Put another country on the board, Johnny, we are in Argentina (that is number 12 for this trip, but who’s counting)!

El Calafate is a smallish town, bordering Lago Argentino, the largest fresh water lake in Argentina and just the most spectacular turquoise color (sorry Tahoe). It is only about 6,000 residents and many many backpackers; its draw is the Perito Moreno glacier, located about an hour away from Los Glaciars Nacionale Parque.    

Lago Argentino, such a pretty color in real life, pictures have a hard time capturing it. At least, my pictures.

After that long bus ride, we had a slow day Sunday, walking around the place, getting the obligatory “El Calafate” sign photo along the lake’s amazing shore.  Ooh, Scott and I went out for some drinks and to search around for the 49er-Detroit game; jackpot, we found a bar playing the end of the Chiefs-Ravens game… But oh boy, once the game ended, they switched to soccer and I didn’t have the stomach to try to get them to switch it back, so instead, we went home, and I listened to the game on the radio, more than once, swearing it was all over for my team and I needed to go to bed any way!  As is well known now, the Niners made a tremendous come back in the second half and I stayed up late to hear it all, satisfyingly texting with my siblings throughout the game to share our dejectedness and then, amazingly, our joy..

Monday we rented bikes for a ride along the lakeshore; it was just beautiful. Sadly, my brain had trouble processing the amazing mountains, wild horses, flamingos, unreal azur, lake color because I was so uncomfortable; honestly, how do bikers sit on those hard seats? The bike was also too long for me so I was sort of leaning and reaching for the bars; sigh; no one else had any trouble with their ill-fitting bikes, but gol-ly, my keister was sore for days.

Sibling Love and Respect. 

Alex, on the tiny bike, resting, Luke, relishing getting the big bike. 

Stop on the bike ride along Lago Argentino.

Puppy at the house/bike rental tienda. 

Day 2 in El Calafate! I rented a car and it was time for the big dog – visiting the Perito Moreno glacier! Let me throw some data at you: This glacier more than 100 sq. miles, 3 miles wide, and almost 160 feet tall; it is about 18,00 years old and, interestingly, it is a stable glacier (not retreating), it is actually growing. It calves about ~2 meters of ice into the river in front of it each day, that is nature’s incredible “show” people come to watch.  We come to watch enormous chunks of ice get pushed off of land into water (and, we don’t feel badly about watching this, because the glacier is stable, meaning, it is not retreating [melting], there is at least an equal amount of ice building up behind the glacier as there is falling off and into the water).  

So, we drove through the very windy park roads; all roads lead to the multiple kilometers of walkways built into the mountain, where visitors can stare at the glacier.  We arrived late, maybe at 3pm, to some wind and rain.  It didn’t stop us though, we shivered for hours, watching chunks fall off. We saw two or three good calves that afternoon.  And no picture (or video, if took the time to figure out how to post a video 😊  could remotely capture what this looked, felt, smelled, and tasted (rain fell into my mount a few times!) like.  The face of the glacier was immense; one could usually hear an exciting but ominous cracking sound right before a big calve, the water flowing in front of it from west to east was slowing moving tiny icebergs across its face but they’d softly run into each other and create a little iceberg barrier; the demarcating line between Lago Roca and Lago Argentino was a distinct color line, with the slate grey of the much smaller Lago Roca flowing into Lago Argentino’s turquoise blue and getting swallowed up without any trace of that grey.  The picture didn’t capture this, but the glacier is ~3 miles wide and when you’re on the platform and the clouds lift a bit, you can see far back on the ice sheet about a mile back to the Glacier’s source.

Walkways on the land across the river from the Glacier. 

You can see the different lake colors in this photo! The grey on the left merging with the blue-green Lago Argentino on the right, 

Another Lago-color -melding photo. 

You can almost see just how far back the ice sheet goes behind me; the Glacier face is huge and it just goes on and on back there. 

Lago Argentino behind, I took a lot of pictures like this :) 

Cold and a bit rainy, but we got to see a lot of glacier calving on this visit! 

With a 50% discount on park entry prices (which were ~12,000 pesos each, about $12) if you go two days in a row, we hopped out of bed the next day and hightailed it back to the park (the park ranger taking our credit card was comically counting so so many bills in a money-counter machine; the kids hadn’t seen one before and thought she was printing money; people pay in 500 and 1,000 peso bills, so that woman had a big big stack of cash).  We booked a ferry ride which lasts and hour and takes you pretty close to the glacier face (not too close, because you know, giant pieces of ice fall off of it with no warning at all).  The boat would have been fun, but it was quite crowded and Alex and Luke had a hard time seeing with all the adults in the way, so we spent some our time on board chatting up a British couple, sharing travel stories. Turns out, they had traveled in CA, came for work and decided to vacation a bit there, so they drove from SF to Yosemite and then down to San Diego on the 1 highway; we assured them that they had done many of the top CA things on that trip.

 We realized that maybe it is better to visit the Glacier later in the day (after it’s absorbed a lot of sun) before we spent more time watching it on the second visit but saw less calving.  Somehow, it sort of doesn’t matter that much, though, even rambunctious kiddos can spend hours watching it, big calving or not (Alex and Luke had the longest conversations about whether they could throw a baseball across the river and reach the glacier; they finally agreed that maybe Tiger Woods could clock a golf ball up there, but no one could throw that far).  It’s size, gazing to the miles behind it, where the ice sheet pushes the glacier forward, the crisp air, the narrow river running slowly in front of it. Something a bit mesmerizing about it. 

About to board the small boat filled with people to get closer to the Glacier. 

 

Ah, the boat was very crowded, everyone is looking at the Glacier on the OTHER side of the boat; my little shorties gave up trying to crane their necks and took the comfy seats looking out over the lake. 

Out nice British friends managed to snap this photo of us. 

Luke and I are too cool.

For other El Calafate activities, we checked out -4,000 year old cave paintings at a spot along the lake called Punta Walichu and we visited the Glacier museum.  The glacier museum was interesting, many glacier facts and stories of scientists and explorers roaming the Andes. Most memorable was the museum movie; it was a film narrated by the glacier himself, named Perito Moreno after a famous Argentine explorer, naturalist, conservationist. The glacier’s voice was like a Spanish-language, James Earl Jones and he was describing in beautiful detail  how he grew each winter into an impenetrable mass and then, as summer came, rivulets of water would begin trickling through his form, forming a small river beneath his face that would eventually be his doom.  It was very funny and serious.  There was also a sort of news story movie from a few decades ago, with a news crew watching the river under the glacier, slowing melting its bottom and creating this lovely, ice arch; the news crew is waiting for the ice arch to crumble in a magic, slow-mo video crescendo.  

Listening to the audio tour of cave paintings site; pretty and windy site along the lake, on northeast side of El Calafate.

The cave painting site was pretty spectacular; though the cave itself was small. 

We also tried all the different kinds of yummy pizza in town and made multiple efforts to get cash – we joined the line to the Western Union early one morning; Scott waited a while and eventually, long after the place was supposed to open, employees said there was no dinero.  I tried every ATM around us and, after taking out 5,000 pesos (less than $5) from one ATM, I was never able to take out any cash.  Hmm, this hadn’t been an issue in El Calafate, but it not fun to have no cash at all, makes it hard /impossible to buy street food and quick things at tiendas.  So! We left our first Argentine town with no Argentine cash in our pockets, but we easily dropped off our car at the small airport and boarded a flight to Bariloche, a small city on the north edge of Patagonia.

Alex and Luke posing in front of our El Calafate apartment when we left.  This mural on the outside of this corrugated metal building was just awesome; and they look like 80s-boy banders (New Kids on the Block poster below for reference). 

Bariloche, February 3-13

Bariloche is a city of ~150,000, on the banks of a huge system of lakes (thus the name the Lakes District, set in both Argentina and Chile). The natural setting is the draw here, beautiful lakes, towering mountains (apparently swarmed in ski season), and little towns creeping up from the long river banks.  We stayed 5 nights outside the town, in this little vacation neighborhood, with little apartments in wooden structures set around a nice lake-inlet beach, a small restaurant and pool, with a clubhouse where the kids played ping pong.  And then we headed into the city for the next 5 days, scheduling that stay for the 4-day Carnival celebration.  We did several hikes (which still still bring groans from the kids each time we utter that word, “hike”; though I cannot figure out why, they are perfectly content on the actual hike); went up a ski lift for awesome views, and generally enjoyed the outdoors – The first night, we stayed up late and walked down by the lake beach to look up at the southern hemisphere’s starry night – the first time we’d done this on the trip (having been in cities or had too many clouds in our way). 

We had so much fun gazing up in a semi-dark sky; Scott point out Alfa Sentari, the Southern Cross, Sirius, as  Alex and Luke could not stop talking (something they do when they are tired and excited) and our necks were eventually too tired from holding our heads back so we finally called it a night.

First night in Bariloche, we had traveled far enough north to be awake when it finally got dark outside in the Southern Hemisphere's summer. 

 

Visit highlights:

Cerro Catedral – Very fun and dusty hike (only bad thing, it started in a giant sky resort parking lot and nothing was open in the summer, so, no bathrooms, boo for those of us who drink coffee in the morning [aka, only me]); we walked with several people who were doing multi-day hikes. Staying at refugios that you can reserve in advance, along the mountain.  I loved this idea; then we got home tired and happy to wash our feet and legs, that had taken home seemingly buckets full of sand; then I thought, eh, maybe its nice to have a shower and not be in a hard bunk with no running water for the night.. 

Giant, ski resort parking lot, where the trailhead started.

Viewpoint we made it to on the hike, not bad. We felt pretty good about ourselves but, while we snacked, groups of people with full backpacking packs strolled past us to continue up the next ~4 miles and 1,000 feet elevation.  Eh, to each his own! 

Sunny hike. 

Circuito Chico drive & short walk – The circuito chico is a ~50km drive with excellent lake views; we stopped for one of the two hikes I planned; we made it through the whole thing, but found no pasar signs and found out that that smell we’d noticed in the morning was indeed smoke and that the rest of the hikes in the area were all closed due to a fire on one of the mountains. Very familiar for we Californians; so sad and sobering to see climate change effects everywhere.  We skipped the second hike and just enjoyed the drive and views.

View point on the Circuito Chico route. 

.. Alex and Luke, enjoying messing around and not caring at all about the Instagram-view behind them. 

Luke loves taking photos with me. We are working on his camera-smile.

As Tyra would say, this was our best shot. 

Oh a short hike on the Circuito Chico. 

 

Pampa Linda, failed attempt at Nahuel Huapi – We set out early for the  national park surrounding  the lakes is called Naheul Huap and it was just one of those disaster days that starts and finishes just as it shouldn’t.  Not to air all my dirty laundry, but I woke up in a bad mood; actually, maybe it was a good mood, but by the time I set out breakfast that no one liked and no one said thank you for and packed a backpack for everyone and got in the car with a family that is not made up of morning people and without many kind words coming my way, I had sunk into driving silence.  We also had some “short-cut” directions on google that took us down a narrow dirt road on a cliff that just sort of deadend-ed in someone’s driveway, so I had to make a 12-point turnaround, all the while with stray dogs yapping their heads off while Scott was outside the car, helping keep us from falling to our deaths.

So! We made it to the national park and surprise, that fire from yesterday prevented us from doing all the fun hikes (I had checked the park’s website but there we no trail closed messages, boo).  We could, after painfully paying for entry with a credit card through their website which was not really built for mobile usage but we only take cash so that is your only option, go see some waterfalls.  The ranger said something about catorce that we didn’t totally catch.  I did know that some of the roads in the parks were narrow and had "one-direction only" schedules; the hikes I had planned on us doing were fine, the road was one way up to the hike in the morning and one way down after 2pm (14:00). 

 We set off on the dirt roads; we stopped at river rapids and walked around the flat, pretty area for a little while then headed up to the waterfalls.  There was a medium-sized lot; we walked the 300 meters to the waterfalls; hung out for a bit with another family and they asked if we understood the one-way rules; we said we thought it was one way up until 2pm (14:00) and then we could go down; they had little kids getting antsy and it was about 12:30 so they decided to just leave and go for it (wrong way down).  

 Not us, good rule followers. We hung out in the dirt lot and got an excellent game of ultimate frisbee going (Scott plays all offense to even out the teams).  Katie and I somehow lost to the fast, little shrimps, but we were all pleased with getting a little exercise. We were still a little puzzled about why there was such a parking lot here and not many people; but ventured to the one-lane road to make our way down at 2pm.   Oh, gosh, we had made a tiny mistake.. Turns out the rules for this road were different than the rules for elsewhere in the park (not that there were signs anywhere!). This road, was one way up (against our direction) starting at 2pm and ending at 6pm. No one else was at the waterfalls because we were supposed to have waited at the rapids for hours, until 2pm, to enter the waterfalls; then stay for at least 4 hours (doing what I don’t know, but we think people came in at 2pm to camp).  Oh boy.  Suddenly, the road which had been empty for hours was teeming. Well, I exaggerate, where we had past no cars, we were passing a car a minute…  Hmm. Should we sit around with no food and really no where to hang out comfortably except the car for 4 hours or go against traffic..

 We chose the latter and I just drove slowly and whenever we encountered a car, I would politely pull way over, touching the brush on one side of the car, and stop to let them pass. That all would have been fine, but there was one long part of the drive where the road goes up and over a mountain, with very narrow and winding roads, no room to politely pull over. I was very nervous about this, so we stopped the car before the mountain and Luke, Alex and I walked up the hill so I could look at the road; it turned out there was only about a 40-foot section where truly two cars could not fit; it was behind a blind curve and high on the mountain, so scary, but a short section. We jogged back down the hill and I gunned the car up the hill, holding my nerve around each curve and aiming for the one-car-only-you-are-backing-down-a-curvey-dirt-road-if-another-car-comes spot; mercifully, I was all alone on the turn and we made it down the worst of our illegal driving without passing anyone on the curve of death.  

 To end the loser day, we drove through a lot of Bariloche-centro traffic to get Scott to the western union to try to get cash;  no go of course, there was a giant line and we were coming up on closing time.  Ah, so many fails for the day. It started to rain and we ducked into a cervesaria (bar, bar food), had dinner, and went home to watch some Zorro (amazon prime show we can all watch together, it is set in Los Angeles when LA was part of Mexico, very apropos for Alex and Luke’s California history curriculum!).

  

Fun part of the day, hiking around the rapids part of the Park.

Happily at the Falls in Nahuel Huapi Park; we should have been suspicious that we were one of only two cars in the medium-sized parking lot..

Alex Luke and I stopped for a picture after we left the car and walked up the windy-one-lane-road that was one-way against the direction that we needed to go..

Ignore these smiles, I was able to take the car on a five-minute trip against traffic on the edge of this mountain..! 

Dinner with our neighbors – After that debacle of a day, we laid a bit low the next day; we did go to the nice restaurant for dinner.  After waiting for the restaurant to open at 8:30 (stomach growling), we sat down and not three lines into looking at a menu, this man from a table over came right over to Luke and said, “Do you go to West County Mandarin School?” Luke was wearing his school shirt. The man said his granddaughter goes there and did we know her, Alana. Uh, hahha, we definitely know her and Scott works with her mom and we hang out with her parents at the bus stop every morning. Hilarious coincidence, we move tables so we can have dinner with Daniel and Sharona; they quickly call Alana’s house and we freak them out by hopping on the phone.  I enjoyed chatting with new people, they told us about other places they’ve gone in Argentina where we plan to go (Buenos Aires, Iguazu falls) and the food was great.  They hopped up when their taxi arrived and said our goodbyes; the only bad thing about the dinner is that we cannot put a tip on our credit card and we STILL did not have any cash (we were 10 days into being in Argentina at this point and still no cash).  I felt so badly, the waitress said it was ok, write a google review for the place (I wrote a good one).  

Aerosilla Cerro Camponario – We noticed giant groups of cars and tour busses parked a km or two from our first apartment and investigated. Turned out, it was a ski lift used in the summer for getting people up to beautiful views and a café.  We road up, maximum two to a seat, so I sat alone up and back. Boy, did I (re)learn that I am not a fan of lifts; there is something about that little car, attached to the cable with just a metal finger balancing it that makes me imagine all the ways I would not manage to plunge to my death if the vice came loose. But! The view was fantastic, lakes and mountains all around us.

 

Beautiful view on the Cerro Camponario. 

My view on the way down; Katie and Luke are in the seat in front of me. 

Horseback riding – This time, Scott comes with us; it is the third time the kids have ridden on our trip, my second time. And it is by far the best!  We decided on the 3-hour ride because the price was very reasonable and we figured we were only going to do this once all together.  The horses were big and the saddles cushioned with blush blankets.  We end up with a group including a family with a young buy (maybe 7) and a couple from Maryland; we stuck near them because the woman spoke Spanish.  The ride was as enjoyable as it could have been; narrow but shaded trails, many opportunities for your horse to trot (I managed to trot several times; at first, I just let myself bounce up and down, landing hard on the saddle; I realized though, that that was not good or right and improved a bit at it as the ride went on).  We stopped for a short time about 2 hours in to let the horses rest and walked around this beautiful rocky lake bank. I chatted with the Maryland couple a bunch and learned how they got cash (they just kept buying thigs with USD $100 or $50 bills and then got pesos back in cash). After the ride, we ate at the restaurant onsite; good food and they had chickens, peacocks, dogs, and other animals wandering about. Lovely day.

Luke + big horse.

Stopping point to rest the horses and the humans. 

Katie in front of Lago Perito Moreno. 

Alex and Katie.

Luke and Scott.

Villa La Angostura hike – Last hike in the area, very fun and straight uphill, we hiked up to the top of waterfalls, dozens of other people had brought snacks up. We enjoyed climbing among the rocks for a while.  The top of the mountain was more than double the elevation we had traveled; we decided to skip it because we didn’t have enough water and came down, lamenting missing the top and realizing that we really needed another backpack and the kiddos to start carrying their own water to make longer hikes more doable. Next time.  

Villa La Angostura hike. 

Alex and Luke are so big. But still, I stared and and stared at them on top of this small waterfall, just willing them not to fall.  Of course, they were fine, they are smart.  Parenting is forever! 

Along another high ledge on the hike. 

We ended the hike poking around on a lake beach. 

Too funny part one:  Here is the required-Bariloche Instagram sign; this was the first sign we encountered that had a big line to take a photo; you can see people off to the left of the photo. We sat and watched it for a bit, this one lady organizing people, bringing families up, they took what seemed to us as a rudely-long amount of time to take a photo (people changed letters, some posed with big arms up and then switched to different letters and poses).  Then we snapped this photo and moved along. 

Mamushka. Too funny part two: When we were home in December, we asked the kids to look up all anything at all in Argentina that we might wish to visit.  Luke researched Iguazu Falls (we're headed there late in February); Katie researched Perito Moreno Glacier and Alex told us about... a chocolate shop called Mamushka.   Oh Alex. So we visited this shop in Bariloche and we will find the big one in Buenos Aires. 

Cool kids in Bariloche, with their box o' chocolates.

Just a few words about this tragedy: Scott found a 99 cent app we could use to watch the super bowl (they do not watch it in Bariloche, I checked all over).   I rushed us home to watch the long long long event. Oh Patrick Mahomes you are a heart breaker.  Katie did this during almost all of the game, except for when we told her "Taylor Swift is on TV!", then she'd stop, and turn and look and get back to her high-rise-card-housing project. 

It was 1am before the game ended for us, so, she got a lot of house of cards time! 

Carnival –  For Carnival, Bariloche set up a small stage in a sloped plaza (oddly, the stage was set on the upslope, so everyone watching was looking up and each row was lower than the standing row in front of it, odd layout choice and did not make our 10 year olds want to stand and watch the back of someone’s head).  But! The performances were interesting; nothing religious at all, bands, all of them with a lot of interesting instruments and singing all together (meaning, not high quality voices, but, by singing together, it made the overall sound pleasant).

The fun, small stage in Bariloche for the Carnival celebration. 

Carnival Bariloche. 

And... we finally got money! 

We finally managed to get some Argentine pesos cash! Here I am holding bills equal to less than $3; and holding the 100 peso note with Eva Peron on it. 

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