Tag 12 - Puerto Natales/El Calafate

The alarm clock rang way too early again and woke us up at 6:00 a.m. Today we had a five-hour drive to El Calafate in Argentina. We had a quick breakfast and quickly went to the bus station, as the bus was leaving the parking lot at 7:30 a.m. The first stop was the Chilean border station for leaving Chile after a good 1.5 hours, then half an hour later we reached the border station for entering Argentina. The latter looked more like an abandoned hut in the middle of nowhere, located on a gravel road. The border police dog was only busy fetching sticks and petting the people entering the country, and the border officials were also very friendly. So everything went smoothly and after another break at an Argentinian rest stop we reached El Calafate in the early afternoon.

The small town on Lago Argentino, the largest freshwater lake in Argentina, is home to around 21,000 people and is located not far from the Perito Moreno Glacier. The place has become very touristy and we also took a taxi from the bus station to the center.

Due to the high inflation in Argentina, cash is in extremely short supply, so we tried to withdraw money several times in vain.

The only problem was that the taxi driver didn't have a credit card reader - of course. Luckily we still had euros in our luggage and were able to get a few Argentine pesos at a bad exchange rate so that we could at least pay the €7 for the taxi. We were able to put aside our initial concerns that our credit cards wouldn't work when we picked up the rental car and paid with a credit card both there and everywhere else.

In the afternoon we took a little stroll through the center and in the evening we used the hostel kitchen to do a bit of cooking.