10. Friday, 29 January 2010

Does Anyone Want an Ice Cream?

After a week in Buenos Aires th etime is ripe for more news…..

We have otherwise had everything great: a look at many important places; hours walking around in the different neighborhoods/areas of the city and enjoying a coffee or beer on one of the many plains or sidwalk cafes; went swimming in a GIANT open air swimming pool, with first a medical control to see if you had any athlete’s foot or head lice. The pool lies right under the runway of the domestic airport (spectacular!); enjoyed the BEST ice cream of all time with flavors such as tiramisu, banana split, Tramontana and still other wonderful flavors which I have no idea how to translate from Spanish to Dutch. In short, Buenos Aires is a wonderful city, a world city!

BUT because we nevertheless had no desire to stay there for 6 months, we took a local flight to El Calafate. This is a town in the far south of Patagonie where according to the taxi driver--who picked us up at the airport---it almost never rains. We stayed two days….and we had two days rain, luckily with once in awhile during the two days a bit of clear weather. The weather actually was not predictable; you could sample all four seasons in one day (what a few days later was proven with a few hours of sunshine followed by cloudy skies, heavy hail, rain and once again a beautiful blue sunny sky).


The city of El Calfate itself it really boring, ugly, touristy. The former water purification station has been rebuilt into a casino (you don’t want to know how ugly---no , we don’t have any photos) and there is a wide avenue with one tourist shop after another. Geert and I had the same raction: leave as quickly as possible! But in the area of this dragon of a town is the most beautiful glacier in the world; therefore, we disregarded the town itself and remained there. Now a few impressions of El Calfate; Perito Moreno is the name of the glacier. Formed out of snow that is blown through a small pass in the Andes Mountains, this huge ice has formed slowly over innumerable but many years. The glacier flows through a long but small lake to the other side. The lake therefore splits the glacier in two parts and because of this there are differences in the water levels between the two lakes, which action continuously affects the glacier itself. From that there are really fanciful forms in the ice and you hear the glacier literally cracking and thus on a regular basis big pieces fall and thunder into the water. The biggest piece that we saw falling down was so high as the glacier itself---about 60 meters---and at least 10 meters wide.
S-P-E-C-T-A-C-U-L-A-R!!!!!!!

Beautiful, breathtaking, this is one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen in my life!!!!(Other than Kapu, who is more beautiful J . The whole day we stood looking and listening and looking and listening….and we also took a boat ride along the glacier. On the photos uyou get only a small idea of what we saw. In reality it is 1000 times better.

And now we are in Chili--in Puerto Natales--and it suits us here great. Argentina was nice, but Chili is really very COOL!!!! Here they cook good, they are much more warm and friendly, they have the feeling to make a restaurant decorated in a way that makes it enjoyable and warm, and also the landscape is more varied and colorful. Now we will go a week walking with our backpacks. So long as we are not during this eaten by a puma, you will hear more from us later.