ivan the not so terrible

The flight stopped in Bariloche, a magnificent landing, and as we took off again, a pair of eagles followed our path. When we arrived in El Calafate there was no other bus (the first one was full, that was it) and there wouldn’t be a taxi for 40 minutes. As we made our way into the town, we had the impression that it was being constructed in front of us, a frontier town. The steppe continued south to Ushuaia, the southernmost settlement on the planet, and then that´s it. El Calafate and El Chalten 4 hours next door were established in a rush to mark political territory; the land was still disputed between Chile and Argentina in the 60´s, and its township urbanism has an air of a gold rush community, but the commodity here comes wrapped in North Face and Lowe Alpine. Half the tourists on the continent spill in here to get away from the other half, presumably, and the town replies accordingly – there are mountaineering shops everywhere, the hostels are called Last Stop, Adventurer, etc. How this will change as time goes on is hard to guess.

The main reason we came here was to see the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the only advancing ice fields in the world, and the third largest reserve of freshwater on the planet. It is 1.25 times the surface area of Buenos Aires. It is unfathomable; even when a boat sails close to it there is something strange about it, something off, as if it is a unconvincing piece of CGI. It rips the valley asunder, slowly. We took a boat out to get near it, and the colours of the glacier are seen more clearly – these colours are blue-violet, cerulean, and teal, among others. Bits fall off and collapse into the lake; they don’t look like much till they hit the water, and you realise that this one was the size of a truck, this one a house. Later, when we were about to leave, there was one massive collapse, a storm of noise, all around us – terrifying for a second – then we went back.

Ivan in the hostel was great, he told us to get in, see the ice-cube and head off as soon as possible. He proved to be the benchmark for sound hostel workers, and we would later end up meeting his best friend on the other side of the continent. We took a late bus to El Chalten and rolled into the Rancho Grande at 10pm that night.