What happened on the way to El Chaltén

A couple days ago, we decided to go look at Mnt Fitz Roy near El Chaltén, which is a 3 hour drive through Arizona* from El Calafate. I attempted to photo-document this trip for you. The full set of pictures can be found in the El Calafate set on Flickr.

There was a lot of this for many hours:


I will not waste your bandwidth with the 20 pictures that I took that look just like that. Pretend that you are bored and looking at dirt. It was like that.

Then we saw this:

(Guanaco. It's like a llama. It's a camelid, which means it is related to Camels. Speaking of Camels, I learned on the ship all about the wild Camel problem that they have in Australia. Apparently, there are enough that it is a "problem". How odd.)

And this:


And this:

(Nandu. AKA Rhea. Like smaller, wild Ostriches.)

Which was pretty awesome. We also saw a Piche in the road, but were so freaked out with a hairy Armadillo that I neglected to take a picture before it scampered off, so I took a picture of the picture that they have in the visitor's center of their National Park. It looked like this:


I found a Hidden Mickey at a scenic viewpoint:


I spent about 30 minutes very excitedly confused by this picture. I understand what the words mean, but I have no idea what the picture is supposed to be of:


And then this sign baffled me as well:

as at this point in the trip, I had not seen a tree in several hours.

FINALLY, we see Fitz Roy, which should look like this:


But actually looks like this, thanks to the fact that is summer, the glaciers are melting and there's lots of water in the atmosphere:


We stopped in El Chaltén, had a pretty good lunch and then hiked up a huge rock to a summit called los condores viewpoint, mostly because I said "that doesn't look that big" before I actually knew what I was talking about. Our car is somewhere in the town below:


We went back down the rock, had a beer brewed in the town (pretty good!) and then headed home. I yelped on the way because I noticed that we had a lago with Flamingos in it, which we did not expect here (expected in San Pedro). Fortunately for us, I have binoculars with u son this trip. Here's a far off picture:


They did not do the dance. That made me sad. Maybe later.

For those of you who have no clue what I am talking about, watch this. Its incredible. I would pee my pants if they did this while I am here:



Then we had an *outrageously* awesome sunset, which my camera cannot capture, but I tried (this was at 9:45 at night):


And came back to the hotel really late, packed up, and went to bed, listening to the music festival that was going on in the town. The next morning, we had to get up early to get to Santiago... and we all know how that went!

*and by "Arizona", I mean "land that looks exactly like Arizona"

I'm still a stranger in a strage land

Weird place-ness continues...

Yesterday we got picked up before the sun came up to go out for 10 hours, 7 of which were on a boat to experience the crazy Glaciers of El Calafate. We got to the port, got on a catamaran (boy, do I love a catamaran), and set sail for a long haul over the weirdest water that I have ever seen. It's called "glacial milk" here because it is glacier water, and the sediments are held in permanent suspension. Here's a pretty good representation of what it looks like against a wall of rock, which is what this whole place is made out of:


We started to see some icebergs, which were small after seeing the ones in Antarctica, but still very pretty:




check out the water dripping off of this one:


Eventually we rounded a corner and were shows way off in the distance, Upsala Glacier, which is packed in with bergs, so we could not get very close. They wheeled us around the corner and we saw this, flowing like an avalanche (in slow motion), coming down the mountain (thanks Pepper). This is Seco. Check out how the trees roll right up to just before the glacier line:


And then round another corner to see Spegazzani, which rolls into the lake:


(that wall of glacier, up from the lake surface is about 100 meters tall, just for scale).


I think this piece of ice is proof that there are Decepticons hidden in there somewhere, waiting for Megatron to find the all-spark and return them to service:


ANd then a long haul over to another finger of this impossibly huge lake (like, you sometimes cannot see the other side, big) to see Perito Moreno (also really huge), but it was really sunny out and very difficult to photograph. I bet Chris has better ones:




And then back through the desert (this is right outside of the port)


for a bus ride home through every crazy steep, dirt road in this town in a huge bus to drop everyone back off at their hotels. I'd tell you more about that, except that it would make my mom concerned for my safety and I'd have to get an email about it about not getting on buses like that again.

Today we are off to El Chalten, where we hope to see Mount Fitz Roy. I'm not sure what the big deal is about this mountain, but Chris wants to see it, so 3 hours of us driving through Guanacos is what we will do!