Verdeta Journey

Early wake up, 6am, packing last bits we left out from the evening and we are ready at 6:45. Going to get our food from the fridge and the door to the kitchen are locked. They are supposed to be open from 7am. What a pity! No breakfast, no lunch. Okay. Maybe the pickup will be late, so we can still get it. And yes! Pickup is not coming. 7:10am and I’m nervous. Did they forgot about us? So I dialled the bus company office and asked if they are coming. Yes, they are, I was told. 7:20, bus arrived, but the kitchen is still locked! With our food in the fridge. In a meantime another two people tried to get into the kitchen.  The bus tickets we bought: Marga Taqsa, 480 pesos each, pickup at our hostel. The bus left the terminal nearly at 8am. It’s really cold on the bus, air con blowing freezing cold by the window seat. Views from the bus are nice and we reached El Chalten at 10:10 - first stop in a national park centre, got information about trails and the weather and then the bus...

I’m not sure if I mentioned, but in this hostel Las Carretas, the breakfast is very basic. We rather just have coffee and then we use their kettle to boil water for our porridge. So we did today, porridge and then waited for a bus to pick us up at the hostel.   They (Hielo&Ventura) arrived almost on time. We continued to pickup more people on the way and soon the bus was full. The scenery on the way to the national park reminded us USA somewhere around Utah or Arizona. Perfectly suitable for shooting of westerns as well. Wide valleys, hills, no trees, no buildings, no roads. Apart of farm houses (estancias) which are lonely in between fields in a good distance from the main road. Often they have trees planted closely to the houses. We could also enjoy views of Lago Argentino lake and some other lake. Around 10:30am we reached a gate to the Los Glaciares National Park. Two guys from the park boarded the bus and asked about our nationality, we paid 500 pesos each (you can ...

Doing nothing. We just picked our laundry up, dropped it in our hostel and hanged up bits which needed to dry. Then we went to withdraw some cash - found that Banco Santa Cruz charges only 115 pesos for 3000 pesos withdrawal.   Bought two wooden rings, had a coffee with a shot of cognac (95 pesos) and fernet with coke (100 pesos) and pancakes with dulce de leche (120 pesos) in Borges & Alvarez. Then we changed our Hialo glacier trekking pickup to our hostel (instead of their office) and bought bus tickets to El Chalten (Marga Taqsa office in the centre, 480 pesos per person one way, pickup at our hostel at 6:50am). Then we shopped in la anonima for dinner and cooked something simple at the hostel. 

We got up early, “cooked” porridge for breakfast and went to the bus terminal to catch our bus at 7:30 (Cootra Ltda, 17000 Chilean pesos per person, tickets bought at the bus terminal one day in advance). Our seats were downstairs. The way to the border is quite short and soon we got off the bus to get an exit stamp from Chilean border. Straight after leaving the migrations office, our driver gave us a customs declaration form for Argentina (the same one as you get on a plane to Argentina). We filled the form in during the way to the Argentinian border and there we got an enter stamp into our passport. Then we waited about 1.5 hours. Someone lost their passport or had an issue with their passport and we were waiting (the whole bus) to get it resolved. After the 90 minutes (around 11am) we finally left (without that person).  At 3pm we reached El Calafate and asked for a map of the town and then walked from the bus terminal to the centre to book Perito Moreno Glaciar trip...