El Calafate

Other than being the principle gateway to Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, there isn’t much else to El Calafate. Situated on the southern shores of Lago Argentino, the city is another prime-time touristy setup that caters to the more than 1,500 tourists who visit the dynamic Perito Moreno Glacier each day during high season.

I arrived mid-afternoon of March 7 on a bus direct from Puerto Natales, Chile. The border crossing was uneventful and without incident.  Arriving to Calafate, I hopped in a taxi for a quick ride up to the Marco Polo Inn, a very modern hostel with intriguing architecture and a horrible internet connection (which I understand is pretty standard for this very rural part of Southern Patagonia), where I’ll be staying for a couple days and using as a base to get to Parque Nacional Los Glaciares and the Perito Moreno Glacier.

And then there’s Cathy. Around 3pm on the afternoon before my departure for El Chalten, I was sitting on the couch in the lobby of Marco Polo with my BOSE Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones (which completely rock out…thanks to the family for hookin’ me up a couple Christmas’s ago) on, listening to music and working on writing for this blog…when a cute blonde sat down next to me, opened up her laptop, looked over and smiled at me and said, “So you’re from California?”

After checking in, I ran into Sarah and Andrezj, who I had met in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine and who had just gotten engaged in Valle Frances while in Torres del Paine the same day I was trekking up there (I passed them en route but had no idea what Andrezj was up to until we met up for beers later in the day in Refugio Paine Grande).

El Calafate is a gung-ho Patagonian destination for the same gore-tex clad travelers populating Puerto Natales, and a prime stopping point between Torres del Paine in Chile and Cerro Fitz Roy in El Chalten…which means most people pass through en route to somewhere spectacular.

The town is filled with fine restaurants, outdoor gear shops, and pleasant boulevards (perfect for a late afternoon stroll)…set up mostly on Avenida Libertador, the main drag running through the center of town. If you like window shopping, it’s a good place to poke around for a few hours…but all the goods (sweaters, hats, t-shirts, postcards, etc.) are very touristy…and I’ve heard many a traveler complain about the lack of authentic Argentina in this place.  I’m sure I’ll get more than enough “authentic” travel when I get up to Bolivia…for now I’m just fine here in super touristy El Calafate.

With only 8,000 inhabitants, El Calafate can easily be walked and explored within a few hours or so. My own little stroll around town included the Laguna Nimez (wildlife habitat) along Bahia Redonda, and Parque del la Bahia (complete with a currently underwater playing field of some sort) and a walk down the shopping district of Avenida Libertador.

No personal restaurant recommendations here, although I was told that La Tablita serves up excellent Asador & Parrilla (BBQ’d Argentina meats), while the La Lechuza pizzeria has a varied and tasty menu of nothing but pizza.  I just got takeout from the local supermarket, La Anonima, each day (beef, chicken and ham & cheese empanadas along with some very fresh and super juicy peaches) and headed back to Marco Polo to hang out with fellow travelers and have a few bottles of my now preferred Quilmes Stout (a very nice dark drew from Argentina’s Budweiser-equivalent brewery) at the hostel bar.

My fitness truly has reached a new level after Torres del Paine; I cranked out a 13-miler while in Calafate at about 7:45 per mile pace in very windy, hilly conditions along the shores of Lago Argentino and felt very comfortable the whole time…a running feat I haven’t been able to do in years, either in distance or pace…probably not since Ironman Coeur d’Alene back in 2004 have I been in this kind of shape. And I’m actually probably in better shape now than I was even then…a fact of which I am very proud and very satisfied.

I passed the rest of my time in Calafate time drinking beer and shooting some spirited games of pool (8-ball, 9-ball, cutthroat, we played it all) in the hostel lounge, and hanging out with Dan & Daniel, two blokes from London who were wandering about in South America before heading into real life after their university studies and who also both love a heavy night on the town, usually until 6am, as well as George and Corette (from New Zealand and Ireland, who now live in Sydney together…but have been traveling for 10 months, Leo, a former accountant also from London who is on a 7-month trip with “an option on 2 years”, as he says. Also chatted for a bit with a portly aborigine who works as a plumber in Sydney named Peter…and watched him power down 5 Fernet & Cokes without blinking; Fernet is a specialty alcoholic drink loved by most Argentines that tastes like Robitussin cough syrup – and the coke doesn’t help it taste any better.

And then there’s Cathy. Around 3pm on the afternoon before my departure for El Chalten, I was sitting on the couch in the lobby of Marco Polo with my BOSE Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones (which completely rock out…thanks to the family for hookin’ me up a couple Christmas’s ago) on, listening to music and working on writing for this blog…when a cute blonde sat down next to me, opened up her laptop, looked over and smiled at me and said, “So you’re from California?” We spent the next hour or so working on our respective laptops and chatting, getting to know each other. She’s a former high school Spanish teacher from Sacramento on a 4-month jaunt around Peru, Bolivia and Patagonia…who can’t decide if she wants to go home or keep traveling for a bit. Cathy definitely and immediately intrigued me. As it turned out, she was planning on heading north to El Chalten in a couple days. And despite my having knocked over and broken her wine glass the previous evening (nice move, Casanova!), she agreed to my invitation at breakfast the next morning (before I rushed off for an 8am bus) to meet up with me at the Rancho Grande Hostel in El Chalten when she arrived and maybe do some hiking together around Cerros Torre & Fitz Roy.

Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/timothyshoup/sets/72157604244029245/

So despite Marco Polo being very comfy and despite Cathy being very cute, I can’t take the ridiculously slow wifi internet connection (the google homepage takes over 10 seconds to load…so you can imagine how arduous goes the photo uploading…but I still managed to get over 50 photos online in 36 hours…but there’s still a few to go, as of the initial drafting of this blog entry).

So I’m moving on El Chalten (not that moving will help, the only internet access the town has is via satellite, very expensive and not wifi)…