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  El Calafate, Argentina
Saturday, January 21, 2006

The last few days we´ve spent in El Calafate and the stunning Los Glaciers National Park - basically a huge national park full of glaciers as big as mountain ranges.

Our journey to calafate was an interesting one. Without a golden bus ticket (we needed to wait until the next day) we decided to try our luck hitchiking from gallegos to calafate, since we have been told that argentina is one of the safest counties to hitchhike around in the world. Realising that it would be impossible to hitch as 4 (french couple alix and humbert as well) we split up with seperate signs and tried our luck on the road side.
Amazingly within the hour, we found a really nice truck man that could fit all four of us in his truck and could take us 150km of the way - LUCKY!

Now the tough part was the second part of the journey. It was already relatively late (6pm) and we were worried since the road traffic became sparse. To our amazement and luck, we found another argentinian family that were happy to take the four of us the last 200km in the tray of their ute.. YAY! The stunning ride to calafate was made even more intersting as humbert and samson attempted to play a game of chess in the ute as the wind attacked us contantly from all angles.

upon arriving in calafate we realise that the accommodation issue was even worse than in ushuaia, and after calling 30 hostels to realise that none had even a bed spare, we went to enquire about hiring a car to spend the night in. Fortunetly at this stage humbert got chatting with some construction workers who helped us find dorms in a hostel that is primarily rented out long term to workers! YAY!

We spent the next few days in los glaciers national park seeing the most stunning glaciers. Glacier perito moreno was especially breathtaking. Not only is a huge 14km mega glacier, its a pretty angry one that contantly creaks and chunks of ice crash down into the milky waters every now and then. The icebergs are increadibly blue - almost highlighter blue, even more so at upsala glacier.

Surrounding upsala glacier for km were huge basketball sized icebergs with myseterious shapes and incredible brightness - we really felt like we were in antartica. It was almost as if our ship were navigating through the icebergs, which at times we were in fact since they were sooo close to us.

I could keep trying to describe the beauty of the glacier, but i think ill just uplload a zillion photos instead since i dont really know where to begin.

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