Just like in Ice Age. For Real.

We arrived in El Calafate, Argentina after a short and fairly cheap plane ride. Apparently, the roads are still not all paved in Patagonia (much less built) and so what is a one hour flight is also a 20-hour bus ride that only leaves once a day at 5:00 am and only on odd-numbered days of the month that begin with the letter “T” and is insistent upon dumping you off at your destination circa 1:00 am. Because that's convenient. So what with the flight costing approximately one Argentinian steak dinner more than the bus ticket, I made an executive decision and off we flew.

El Calafate is quite charming. Reminiscent of a Colorado ski town and a hint of the wild, wild west we had the best of both worlds: big mountains, lots of open space, dogs running around like they own the place and I wouldn't have been surprised to see a tumbleweed passing though. And yet, there were still restaurants and shops, grocery stores with fruit and vegetables that weren't rotten and sodas that didn't cost two dollars. It was lovely, actually.

We settled in and booked a trip to go to the famous Perito Moreno glacier the next day. It was quite a site. The glacier itself runs from the Andes mountain range to El Calafate. We stopped at a couple of lookout points and then took a boat ride right up close to the glacier. Similar to watching paint dry, most of the day was spent staring at the glacier, camera in hand, waiting for house-sized chunks to fall off into the river below. Only, it was a lot more fun than watching paint dry because our efforts were rewarded several times throughout the day when indeed, huge mounds of ice and snow took the plunge into ice cold sea.

Later in the day we hiked on a trail to a couple of other fantastic lookout points where we had lunch and watched for another couple of hours as global warming did its thing. Actually, Perito Moreno is one of the only glaciers in the world that is stable and not receding from the effects of climate change.

With a long way to go to get back up the west side of Argentina, we booked a bus ticket for the next day to El Chalten about three hours north of El Calafate.