El Calafate, Mr President’s co-star in his province, was in one way fantastic, and in another way upsetting. This is due to the combination of amazing scenery, nice, simple people, ridiculous prices, Argentine tourism pirates and mercenaries, fantastic bad-tempered climate, wild southern dry and dramatic wind, beautiful roads, small airports, disorganisation and me.
A typical Argentine beginning: three flights of the five that were arriving that day
arrived at the same time, translating our welcome into chaos: no trolleys to carry the bags, and a large crowd in a tiny room waiting for them.
Calafate is a town of 15,000 citizens which seven years ago barely had 5,000. Why? Tourism. You must know (well probably you do) since 2000, El Calafate has been the new Argentine star. Why? Glaciers. Amazing, huge, colourful: Perito Moreno (in my opinion the most boring one) and Upsala, the bigger one, with beautiful and colossal dimensions. You can arrive to by boat via Lake Argentino, on a three hour boat ride, and while you get closer with icebergs the colour of the sky, as the less oxygen the ice has, the more blue they become.
The Estancia Cristina is a recommendable excursion to experience this.
Hotels, there is something for everyone, but everything is expensive at El Calafate. The motive seems to be ‘we are expensive, if you don’t like it go somewhere else’, but you know what? There’s nowhere else to go.
But well, what can we say, they are making money and who knows how long it’ll be, so they want to earn it quickly and they are. It is how we Argentines are, dear Argentina Independent reader.
Yes, you can walk over the ice of the glacier, you can do El Chalten (I have not been there yet, but I understand it’s not that expensive and there are more cool people hanging out there). El Calafate is worth knowing, for no longer than three nights really.
Our young emerging tourism boom has learnt a lot it would seem. But it still must learn a lot more, or it’ll disappear with another three-to-one crisis.