Perito Moreno Glacier

Slept great in a real bed again, and then afternoon 5hr bus across the tiny border office into Argentina. Made it to El Calafate, a town on the edge of Lago Argentino. Kind of an annoying evening trying to figure out the best way to do things.

Argentina has a bizarre economic situation where there is high inflation but the bank exchange rates are set really low, so if you take money out of the ATM or pay by credit card, you get about 200 Argentinean Pesos for 1 USD. But if you exchange it on the “blue dollar rate” (kind of like a legal black market rate) in currency exchanges or Western Union offices, you get nearly 400 pesos to a dollar, nearly double! The only problem is that calafate is a small town with only one western union and one currency exchange, and none of them have much money to give out… so I’m kinda stuck. I had read about it before so I brought some USD which you can usually pay with, but then you get a random rate depending on what they want to give you. Weird! Also annoying because I want to just spend one day here and move on to el chalten, so it’s tricky. But anyways!
Hostel was meh and I got up early to catch a bus to Perito Moreno Glacier about an hour away. It’s pretty famous and pretty awesome! You can walk along a bunch of viewing areas and platforms for some great photos pretty close to the ice shelf. It’s almost 70m above the water level at the point where the ice comes down to the lake! Enormous. Every few minutes you hear a huge rumble like thunder as a piece falls off, and sometimes see the splash from a chunk the size of a car. Also got a ticket to take a boat ride up to the base of the glacier, where we got up to about 100m away and could really see the scale of how huge it is. Pretty cool! Got beautiful weather aswell. If you hiked over the glacier about 30km you would reach Torres del Paine, it’s really close.Читать далее