El Rocio Estancia and the glaciers

  San Miguel del Norte/El Calafate, Argentina
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

The two days at the Estancia El Rocio were a delight.  Fellow guests included Argentine Hans with his wife and son.  Hans told us that his parents had come to Argentina from Germany after the war, and although this immediately raised my xenophobic antennae, I quickly put it behind me and got on with enjoying their excellent company.  Not a single John Cleese/ Laurence Olivier moment, honest.



 
Although the delights of Polo clinics were open to us at El Rocio we declined, but Jane did go riding (for the first time in twenty years) along with Bill and Petie from the USA.  Oilman Bill, a nice Republican (oxymoron?), had come to South America for the fly fishing, leaving Petie to follow him a couple of weeks later, but only after digging her way out of six feet of snow on their Colorado ranch.  Now that's what I call equality.  These were serious hardcore frontiersfolk.  I told them that if there was so much as a snow flurry in London, I was on the phone to Islington council to have the pavement outside the house cleared and gritted.  Soft? Me?

 
Patrice, the owner of El Rocio, had greeted us and promptly left for a friend's sixtieth birthday party in Bariloche.  As the 'party' involved taking over the Llao Llao hotel for three days (look it up, it's gorgeous), we forgave his absence.  He left us in the capable hands of  Karina, who made sure that our two day stay was perfect,  in everything but the weather.  The food, drink and ambience made us feel totally relaxed and at home, and the company was very much enlivened on our last afternoon by the arrival of Annie and Kevin.  Annie, a barrister from Chelsea ('I do murder sex and money dear, it's all so sordid') was hilarious yet completely discreet.
 
All too soon it was 5.30 Saturday morning and, courtesy of the only really crappy bit of planning yet (I mean, 5.30....really), we were up and on our way to the airport to fly south to El Calafate in Patagonia.
 

I never knew that the Patagonian icefield was the third largest mass of ice in the world (after Antarctica and Greenland).  Or that it took four hundred years for the Andean snowfall to make its way to the snout of the Perito Moreno glacier, to crash into Brazo Rico.  In other words, the ice that we saw melting into the lake had fallen as snow when Shakespeare was writing the stuff that Charles was now teaching.  Or that glacial ice was blue (trick of the light - still don't really understand that bit - will have to ask son James when I get home).
 

Apart from learning loads of new stuff like that, and seeing what goes on at a glacier's snout, we also had the experience of trekking across the ice - which I thoroughly enjoyed (mental note....must take up skiing or something similar in the near future).


 
We were based at the Hotel Los Notros for three days, right opposite the snout of the Perito Moreno.  All the positive noises I've made so far about Argentine hospitality were to be amplified by the way we were treated at Los Notros.  Given the superb location and views (see pictures) it would have been understandable if the staff has rested on the area's laurels a bit, but none of it.  The welcome we received, the standard of the rooms, the food, wine and service were all second to none, and all delivered with a genuine warmth.
 


A lot of our fellow guests were from the USA, which surprised me at first, as we hear so much about how they don't travel so well.  They were all great - good company, invariably intrepid and with a good sense of fun.  The exceptions that proved the rule though were the three couples from New York that arrived on our last day.  We didn't have to be introduced - we could hear all of their conversation quite clearly from the other side of the restaurant.  Without wishing to appear too prim, I found this together with their habits of ordering the staff about without a please or thank you and talking with their mouths full of food a bit too much to take.  Watching them was like watching a scene from a Woody Allen movie; unfortunately for the viewers, without the humour. (Jane thinks I'm being grumpy/obsessive here.  I think it's good manners.  You decide.)


 
On our last day we took a catamaran trip to see ......more glaciers!  Upsala Glacier- after the Swedish town - was a lot wider across the front than Perito Moreno, with a much rougher lake in front of it and it threw off icebergs like there was no tomorrow.  Whilst on this trip I discovered a lecturer from that venerable institution, the London School of Accountancy, where I would have qualified if they hadn't gone bust whilst I was busy failing my exams.  Happy days.
 
Next stop, Bariloche, and Argentine driving.....