Diversión en Argentina: June 2012

Old buildings and a clock tower in
Buenos Aires

I recently went to the very South of Argentina, to the glaciers just a few hundred miles from Antarctica and it was very neat. First I had to take a bus to Buenos Aires (because I don´t think there´s an airport in my town, or at least not one that I have seen), and spent half a day there. It is a very neat old city and I saw the Plaza de Mayo, where mothers protesting their lost children during the last dictatorship gather periodically, as well as the Pink House, like the White House except the President doesn´t live there. I walked around Buenos Aires with a girl from New Zealand, a 27 year old elementary school teacher named Joanna, who was here on a grant from her country to learn Spanish and teach English for three months. That night at eleven I got on a plane to go to Rio Gallegos with Hugo, a volunteer with AFS that I would be staying with who just got back from Spain. We arrived at the grand hour of three in the morning and went straight to sleep. The next morning, I got on a bus to go to the little town of Calafate that is like the gateway to the glaciers. There are actually usually penguins here as well but they have migrated to the North of Brazil for the summer because they can´t cope with the cold. Sort of tells you something when the penguins flee the cold. The first day in Calafate I had tea in a little cafe and looked for a market, but found nothing, so bought some little keychains and stickers and such in a little store. I had the free dinner at my hotel that night, and was astonished at what a free dinner entails--lamb chops with an entire seasoned baked potato, sweet meat sauce and raspberry sauce. For dessert, they gave me an entire sundae, and all I had to pay for was my drink. Water. So, you know, a dollar for all that food. Craziness. The next morning I went to the glaciers and they were a glorious shining blue--it was the perfect winter day with sparkling sun and glittering snow and lots of little songbirds chirping furiously at each other and hopping this way and that. However, no one was there to enjoy it but me. At the bus terminal that morning, all fifteen of the bus companies that take people to the Glaciers National Park joined together in one bus because there weren´t very many people. There was me. And one other middle aged Argentine couple. And that´s it. The couple didn´t even walk on the trails; they just took pictures from the top because they thought the trails were too slippery. They were covered with a thin layer of snow but weren´t icy or anything. I was practically jogging on the snow. I saw no one else on the trails the entire morning, and no other tourists even came until two or so, a big bus of Asians who did the same as the other couple and refused to walk on the trails. I walked a lot that day--without seeing anyone. I´ve never seen so few people in my life. The next day in Calafate, I had a free breakfast (slightly smaller than dinner) of tea, cereal, croissants (called half moons here), toast and jam, and juice, then walked about a bit, took some pictures of old buildings, and went to the bird sanctuary by the lagoon and Lake Argentina. These birds certainly didn´t migrate--there were some loons or something hanging about and standing on the iced over lake, seeming from force of habit, because they weren´t trying to peck through for food or anything, just squawking at each other all the time. There were also falcons, ducks, some pink thin bird, cranes, and so on. It was very neat. I went back to Rio Gallegos the next day and stayed a night in the home of the volunteer Hugo and helped him make pizza for a dinner with friends he was having--he told me I was the first one who had ever helped him, even though he had raised two children and had an exchange student for a year. The trip was very fun in all, and definitely a once in a lifetime experience.