Sunday, January 06, 2008
Patagonia Trip One – December 2007 – Buenos Aires and El Calaphate:
We started by spending many hours in the air. Because Erik flies United for business we are able (at the moment) to upgrade our coach tickets to Business Class, (though we got bumped to First Class on the way back, which was a little sweeter,) – we had to fly from SFO to Washington D.C. then D.C. to Buenos Aires. It takes a lot of traveling to get to "the end of the world," (or very near it.)
So we had a day in Buenos Aires before we went to our first stop, the glacier at El Calaphate. BA is a wonderful city, beautiful at the center and terribly poor on the outskirts, (much like many big cities in the world.) After a night of much-needed, post-travel sleep, we had lunch at a nice meat-oriented restaurant, then went to the cemetery where Eva Peron is interred.
Why go see a cemetery? Because this place, aside from being the burial site of a very famous person in history, has been built like a small city for the dead. Every family tomb is a small building and the paths seem like streets for the dead residents to move around. I took a number of pictures of these small houses for the deceased because they were so ornate and interesting.
(It will take a while to get through them and add them to my web site, but that's how I like to do things. You can see some of the images at Erik's Flickr Site.) Look for "EoW" boxes on the right-hand side of the web page.
Erik went to the Galleria Pacifica to see the Frescos painted on the ceilings and I went back to the hotel for a short nap. I took my time on the walk back to observe just how much BA was like any other big city. I thought to myself that I could live there if I spoke better Spanish, but it would not be high on my list. Auckland, Sydney and certain other places in New Zealand and Hawaii are much higher on my "I could live there" list. Still, "taken for all in all," it was a nice place.
The next day we had a short flight to El Calaphate. We stayed at a working wool ranch on the shores of Lake Argentina, (the largest fresh-water lake in the country.) We were there to see and walk upon the Perito Glacier, (our second walk on a glacier in a temperate zone.) I wouldn't say, "seen one glacier you've seen them all." It's a new experience every time. You can only walk on the glacier for a couple of hours before you start getting tired. I exercise and hike a lot, so I'm in pretty good shape for a 43 year-old guy – but even with the ice clamps on my hiking boots walking on ice is a tricky thing. At the end the guides served us scotch with glacial "rocks," which was pretty cool, but I'm not a big hard-alcohol guy in general.
After lunch they took us up to a vantage point above the back side of the glacier. Very pretty, but also two extra hours on the bus. Good photo point, though.
That night was a big dinner after a sheep herding and shearing demonstration that Erik took but I passed on. At the BBQ we met a very nice family from Palo Alto, (my hometown and just down the road from us here on the SF Peninsula.) Just goes to show you what a small world it can be. (More on this subject later.) The daughter is going to Palo Alto High School so we hit it off immediately, plus she loves to read so we had that common ground. She looks very Persian, so they get "randomly selected" by the fucking racist TSA at the airport. "I've never seen a blond, blue-eyed person selected for extra screening," she said to me.
That kind of shit really pisses me off. The whole TSA is a bad joke being played upon all of us who fly. Fascism=Security in the eyes of the Bush Administration, and they make other countries perform the same "bad theater" through pressure. It doesn't make me feel any more or less safe than before 9-11. Most of the really effective changes have taken place outside the public sphere, like reinforced cockpit doors – but I digress.
The next day was a 12-hour bus and van trip to the Eco-Camp in Chili. That experience was unique, and not in a good way, so I'll save that for tomorrow.
I loved Argentina and would go there again, but Chili was the start of seeing parts of Patagonia that really blew us away.
We started by spending many hours in the air. Because Erik flies United for business we are able (at the moment) to upgrade our coach tickets to Business Class, (though we got bumped to First Class on the way back, which was a little sweeter,) – we had to fly from SFO to Washington D.C. then D.C. to Buenos Aires. It takes a lot of traveling to get to "the end of the world," (or very near it.)
So we had a day in Buenos Aires before we went to our first stop, the glacier at El Calaphate. BA is a wonderful city, beautiful at the center and terribly poor on the outskirts, (much like many big cities in the world.) After a night of much-needed, post-travel sleep, we had lunch at a nice meat-oriented restaurant, then went to the cemetery where Eva Peron is interred.
Why go see a cemetery? Because this place, aside from being the burial site of a very famous person in history, has been built like a small city for the dead. Every family tomb is a small building and the paths seem like streets for the dead residents to move around. I took a number of pictures of these small houses for the deceased because they were so ornate and interesting.
(It will take a while to get through them and add them to my web site, but that's how I like to do things. You can see some of the images at Erik's Flickr Site.) Look for "EoW" boxes on the right-hand side of the web page.
Erik went to the Galleria Pacifica to see the Frescos painted on the ceilings and I went back to the hotel for a short nap. I took my time on the walk back to observe just how much BA was like any other big city. I thought to myself that I could live there if I spoke better Spanish, but it would not be high on my list. Auckland, Sydney and certain other places in New Zealand and Hawaii are much higher on my "I could live there" list. Still, "taken for all in all," it was a nice place.
The next day we had a short flight to El Calaphate. We stayed at a working wool ranch on the shores of Lake Argentina, (the largest fresh-water lake in the country.) We were there to see and walk upon the Perito Glacier, (our second walk on a glacier in a temperate zone.) I wouldn't say, "seen one glacier you've seen them all." It's a new experience every time. You can only walk on the glacier for a couple of hours before you start getting tired. I exercise and hike a lot, so I'm in pretty good shape for a 43 year-old guy – but even with the ice clamps on my hiking boots walking on ice is a tricky thing. At the end the guides served us scotch with glacial "rocks," which was pretty cool, but I'm not a big hard-alcohol guy in general.
After lunch they took us up to a vantage point above the back side of the glacier. Very pretty, but also two extra hours on the bus. Good photo point, though.
That night was a big dinner after a sheep herding and shearing demonstration that Erik took but I passed on. At the BBQ we met a very nice family from Palo Alto, (my hometown and just down the road from us here on the SF Peninsula.) Just goes to show you what a small world it can be. (More on this subject later.) The daughter is going to Palo Alto High School so we hit it off immediately, plus she loves to read so we had that common ground. She looks very Persian, so they get "randomly selected" by the fucking racist TSA at the airport. "I've never seen a blond, blue-eyed person selected for extra screening," she said to me.
That kind of shit really pisses me off. The whole TSA is a bad joke being played upon all of us who fly. Fascism=Security in the eyes of the Bush Administration, and they make other countries perform the same "bad theater" through pressure. It doesn't make me feel any more or less safe than before 9-11. Most of the really effective changes have taken place outside the public sphere, like reinforced cockpit doors – but I digress.
The next day was a 12-hour bus and van trip to the Eco-Camp in Chili. That experience was unique, and not in a good way, so I'll save that for tomorrow.
I loved Argentina and would go there again, but Chili was the start of seeing parts of Patagonia that really blew us away.
# posted by Phillip T. Alden @ 11:50 AM 
