Two Beers and a Pretzel

Never take a day bus when you have the option of a night bus.

The bus from Ushuia back to Rio Gallegos left at 5 am.  I barely slept the night before.  Some drunk guy stumbled into the dorm at 1 am, made a huge racket getting into the bunk below my bunk, and somehow kept kicking my bunk.  I’m just glad he didn’t puke, because my shoes were really close to his bed and my bag was leaning against the wall nearby.

So, at 4:30 I packed up and walked down to the bus stop.  Ushuia doesn’t really have a bus station, just a parking lot where the buses all pull in.  We took a cramped bus back to Rio Grande, then a slighly larger bus back to Riio Gallegos – revisiting the Argentina – Chile – Straits of Magellin via ferry – Chile – Argentina border crossings.  This time I noticed an interresting sign on the Southern side of the straights near the ferry dock:

I assume the landmines were there because this is a perfect landing spot to smuggle things into Chile.  I would have rather walked thru that minefield than watched the videos they played on the bus.  “Disaster Movie” made me believe that I should be able to walk into Hollywood and get a movie deal in 5 minutes.  It was the stupidest movie I’ve seen in a decade.  Then we watched music videos from 80′s bands that weren’t quite hits.  It was painful.  I tried to read a book I traded with a Canadian guy in Puerto Madryn – I gave him my copy of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy book for a biography of Horatio Nelson – which fits nicely into the post-US revolutionary books I’ve been dabbling in for the last year or so…  I’m still trying to trade the Harry Potter book for something a little more substantial.

Other than bad movies and border crossings, there’s not much to see on Route 3.  Sheep, Brown land and grey skies.

We made it to Rio Gallegos around 5 PM.  I watched Soccer and traded stories with a Czech couple, an Irish couple, 2 more Irishmen, and 2 Americans.  We had a 3 hour layover until the double decker bus came for he relatively short trip to El Calafate.  This bus had 4 seats per row, and only semi-reclining, so not as luxurious as other buses I’ve taken, but not bad for a 4 hour trip – except for the old guy next to me who smelled like ham.

We pulled into El Calafate around 1:30 AM.  The Irish couple and I ventured off and found a hostel with dorm beds available in decent rooms for 30 Argentine Pesos (about $9) per person. I woke up around 10:30, took a shower, paid for the room, and walked out to the town.  I found a really nice hostel for AR$42 per night with 4 bed dorms, heated floors, in-room bathrooms, and offering tours of the glacier and surrounding areas.  I booked a tour for tomorrow that gives you a private guide around the glacier, 2 hour hike near and on the glacier, lunch, and a boat trip on the lake – right up to the edge of the glacier.  It should be pretty fun.  Then I went out and walked around town for a while – running into pretty much everyone I met on the bus last night.  It’s pretty touristy, like Gatlinburg, but smaller and not as crowded.

…and everyone is really friendly…

Oddly, his mom wasn’t there…