Off for the Marble Caves

In the morning, we woke up a bit late. Melinda prepared a quinoa soup and pasta from the remains of the packets we had been carrying for the last few days. It was almost 1:30 pm when we were done with the food.After that, we went around the town trying to find the options to do the Marble Caves tour and the San Rafael glacier walk. After some searching around, we found that all of the operators were having the same price. We had got prices from 55000 CLP to 70000 CLP per person for the glacier walk from the tourist information office in Coyhaique but we found out quickly that those were for the previous year. Now all of them had ganged up and it was not possible to get it for below 70000 CLP per person. Similarly, the boat operators for the Marble Caves too had ganged up and were not ready to go below 10000 CLP per person. We even tried negotiating with a combined package of glacier walk and marble cave but except one who offered 75000 CLP pp combined, none of the others reduced even a bit. This one offering it for 75000 had groups as big as 14-16 people while the others were capping the groups at 7-8 max. So, we decided to go with the actual ones doing the glacier walk.
After booking the glacier walk for the next day, we wanted to do the marble caves in the remaining time of the day. Here we had a split opinion, Melinda and I wanted to do it in the afternoon since the weather was ok and there was a clearing in the sky towards where the caves were. Maria and Hristo wanted to do it a day after the glacier walk early in the morning since the caves look much better in the early morning sun according to the blogs we had read. Looking at how the weather had been since we started in Patagonia, I didn't want to take a chance for the day after morning and wanted to make the best of the good weather we had now. Before we could make up our minds, Melinda, who was hungry, went to a restaurant nearby and ordered lunch. It was 3 pm now, so we all too ordered food and decided see after the food if we would have enough time to do the boat ride to the marble caves. It was almost 4:30 pm when we finished with the food. We were still contemplating what to do whether to do the marble caves today or after a day when one of the boat owners came over and offered to take us at 8000 CLP per person. This was the cheapest offer we had got so we decided to go for it now.
The boat operators had a fantastic way of accepting payments by card. They would take the person wanting to pay by card to the petrol pump and ask for the fuel equivalent of the total money you owe them. They would fill up the jerry cans with the fuel amd you could swipe your card and pay for them. Neat.. Eh??
After spending another 15 min with Melinda trying to pay with her card at the fuel pump and failing, Maria went and paid with her card. Then around 5 pm, we were off to the marble caves.Read more