El Calafate

Our next stop in Argentine Patagonia was El Calafate, which is famous for a) the Perito Moreno Glacier, b) to be in proximity of Puerto Natales, the gateway to the Torres del Paine National Park (and having an airport) and c) for all its daytours to el Chaltén. As expectex, it’s a busy tourist place with all the luxuries you’d imagine it to have: A lot of Parrillas with whole lamb racks slow-cooked over a fire (and 💸), a lot of otherwise very lamb-heavy restaurants because this apparently is the thing to eat in Patagonia, and lot of bars. Luckily, our hostel was quiet and featured a beautiful and spaceous garden which in combination with the good weather that we had (now we were not hiking 🙄) was our own little refugio to come back to every day ✨🌺
Of course we also had to visit the Perito Moreno Glacier, but as there are two more big glaciers in the (let’s call it) fjords of the beautifully turquoise waters of lake Argentina, why not see them all in one go?! So we did a ‘Gourmet Glacier Cruise’ for quite a bit of money and were - apart from the lunch, which was definitely not gourmet - not disappointed: Cruising around on a catamaran and seeing not only three amazing glaciers but also a lot of icebergs wasn’t bad at all! We were also thinking about kayaking a nearby river or doing a small glacier trek, but honestly, 200$ for 1.5 h of kayaking and 350$ for 2h on a glacier (per person)? Thanks, but no thanks! We anyways had a good time in el Calafate and it was nice to unwind for some more and really start to think about our upcoming 5-days W-circuit in Torres del Paine in some more detail - not to mention the time we spent reading in the sun in our awesome hostel garden (accomoagnied by the house cat and the typical birds of el Calafate) 🥰
Another big plus for the hostel we’ve stayed in were the hosts: their daughter Denisse was the only one speaking some english, but all of them were super cute and helpful and even took us on a trip along the Routa 15, which is very beautiful but also passes the Monumento a los Caídos de las Huelgas Rurales. This is a memorial in memory of the 1500 rural workers that were shot and buried in (self-digged) mass graves at this place in 1921, following their protests for better working conditions - one of multiple massacres on protesting rural workers that took place between 1921 and 1922 in the Patagonian areas…
Thank you Mamman for the tip, and now you’ve all learned a bit of history as well :)Read more