Breaking this long post up into two in case I don´t finish before we have to leave on our next adventure...

The next morning we were supposed to get up at like 6:45, or some really early time. And, as it´s becoming winter in Patagonia, in doesn´t get light out until 8 or so, and waking up in the dark to get out of your warm sleeping bag and pack in the cold morning darkness is really hard. So we ended up waking up closer to 7:15 and scrambling to take down our tent, pack our bedding, and pack our huge bags in like 20 minutes so we could run through town to catch our 8am bus to the Glacier Perito Moreno.

This was an expensive visit to a chunk of ice. The bus was all tourists, so pretty pricey, and they didn´t tell us about the 35 dollar fee to enter the park on the bus, which was paid about half way along the busride so you didn´t have much of an option there. Fortunately we had the last of the squash bread to eat for breakfast on the busride to keep our sprits lifted. When we did get to the entrance of the glacier viewing area, we could tell right away this was touristy and not so much up our alley. There were 4km of boardwalk that zig-zagged its way along the cliff across the water from the glacier. It was fairly cold, but since we had taken the earliest bus there, mostly so we could catch a bus later that day to El Chalten, we did have the viewing area mostly to ourselves in the beginning of the day. What makes this glacier unique is that its one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, at about 2 meters per day. Tons (literally) of ice fell off this glacier, and it made the loudest noises echoing against the cliffs we were on. At one point we heard some loud creaking and moaning from the glacier, so sprinted to a good viewing spot and saw a chunk of ice as big as a seqouia fall off into the glacial lake. It was a pretty amazing siting, but the only one of epic proportions that we saw all day. As it got later in the morning, busloads of tourists began to fill up the viewing area, so we made lunch with some hardboiled egg and cheese sandwhiches and then headed up to the cafe at the top. We got ourselves some Irish coffees in the warmth, played some cards, and waited for about an hour and a half for our bus back to El Calafate. We jumped back on the bus, and in El Calafate connected with a bus north to El Chalten.