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A Walking Tour of Old Town Montevideo

Our free walking tour with Rodrigo from Free Walking Tour MVD was great. We met him at the Plaza Independencia at 11am, and as is characteristically Uruguayan, he was holding his guampa piled high with maté leaves and a bombilla sticking out. He explained that Uruguayans take their maté very seriously, unlike the Argentinians who just like to drink it. There’s a specific process one should use to make sure the maté retains its flavor for the whole thermos full of water; otherwise, you are just drinking warm water.

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Our Life in Buenos Aires

We arrived in Buenos Aires late on Wednesday night and our first introduction to the city was through a taxi driver from the highly recommended Tienda Leon taxi company. We discovered that lane lines are just a suggestion. If there are only two lanes, why not make three? Turn signals are definitely only for turning – why waste a good signal on a lane change? Our taxi driver pulled out a magnifying glass to read the address of our apartment, and then definitely went through a red light before stopping at a handful more. There are some places where stopping at red lights is unsafe late at night, but this didn’t appear to be the explanation here. Apparently some red lights are optional.

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More Glaciers!

Today we are taking a boat trip on Lake Argentina to see a few other glaciers that come off the Patagonian ice field. The boat is a large catamaran with a couple outdoor decks and an inside section with big viewing windows. It is very windy on the upper deck, so we spend most of our time inside – a lot of it playing Tichu. The views from the boat are spectacular – mountains everywhere with the beautiful turquoise water of the lake. Along the way we encounter blue icebergs just floating in the lake.

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Walking on Perito Moreno Glacier

On day two, we met our tour group at the office of Hielo y Aventura for mini-trekking on Perito Moreno glacier. The bus drove us to the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares where we got on a boat to travel to the glacier. The entrance fee is 700 pesos ($19) per person, but you get a 50% discount off the second day if you pay for two days up front. Since we are coming back into the park tomorrow, that works for us.

The ride out to the glacier is about twenty minutes and the view out the window as the glacier comes into focus is spectacular. We have definitely never seen anything like this before.

Perito Moreno Glacier – first view from the boat
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Hiking in El Chaltén

At 7:20am, we were picked up at our hostel in a funny-looking, bright yellow bus that resembled a cross between a dump truck and a school bus. We were headed to El Chaltén, which means “mountain of smoke” in the native language, to hike. El Chaltén is about 215km from El Calafate and it took us nearly four hours to get there with a few stops along the way.

The first stop was for a view of Lake Viedma, which is technically the smaller of the two lakes in the area if you count the arms of Lake Argentina although Viedma definitely looks bigger on the map. 

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El Calafate

After a six-and-a-half hour bus ride from Puerto Natales to El Calafate, including a one hour process to leave Chile and twenty minutes to enter Argentina, we arrived in El Calafate at 2pm. Sol and Travis kindly tried to pick us up with a welcome sign at the bus terminal, but we were early and they were late, so we missed each other entirely. Only a brief stop for coffee at the hotel on our way out again delayed us enough to connect with them. Since we can each only communicate when we have WiFi, finding each other once we were out and about might have been a bit tricky.

Puerto Natales was the first place Eric and I saw dogs chase cars in real life. They do it in El Calafate too. The dogs stand in the road as the cars come by and bark and try to bite at the tires. The first time you see it, it seems certain the dog will be run over, but pretty soon you see they have this game figured out, and they love it.

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We are on Instagram!

We have set ourselves a minimum goal for both showers and blog posts of one per week. Some weeks, we will have lots of adventures, and blog posts (and showers) may be more frequent. In those cases, the limiting factor is time and access to WiFi, so we will be posting with the date on which the content of the post occurred when the stars align. For more current updates, check out our Instagram. We are JE_United.

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Mirador Cerro Dorotea

We decided to hike up to the Mirador Cerro Dorotea which boasts spectacular views. We had deciphered from TripAdvisor reviews that the taxi would cost roughly 7000 pesos each way and the entrance fee would be 5000 per person. We decided to walk there and taxi back to save our pesos for something more interesting. The walk just to get to the hike was about 5.5 miles, but it gave us an opportunity to see more of the scenery of the surrounding area and we weren’t in a hurry. 

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