Ice ice, baby

The glacier tour necessitated a relatively early start, with a pick-up from the hostel between 8 and 8:30, ahead of the trip out from El Calafate into the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, which takes about 2 hours or so to get to by the glacier face. I had decided to pay the necessary additional Ar$35 to take a boat trip of about an hour out on the lake itself, giving a chance to see the glacier from below, at lake level, as well as the normal views from the hillside facing the leading edge. This was properly chilly, but pretty spectacular - the only downsides were that it was quite overcast at this point, meaning the photos perhaps lacked a little of the magic a clear blue sky as background might have given them, and that we didn't actually see any icebergs calving at this point on the trip.

However, both these factors were remedied as the afternoon wore on - despite the light drizzle which disfigured my otherwise stunningly picturesque picnic lunch, the sun came out after a while, and we saw numerous blocks of ice breaking off from the face of the glacier, accompanied by detonation sounds, and tumbling into the lake below. I saw a couple of chunks which were maybe two or three stories high fall off, although not the most spectacular type, when chunks the whole height of 70m or so of the face, plus potentially a fair bit below the waterline, go off with a real bang.

On return to the hostel, I asked Patricio, another of the staff, to ring up and book me a bus ticket out of town to Rio Gallegos on Sunday. This was intended to link in with the ticket I had already booked for myself up from there to Puerto Madryn, my next stop. I didn't anticipate this being a problem. Unfortunately, at this point I was reminded that it was Friday 13th, when I discovered that of the 3 companies running services on my desired route, one doesn't operate on Sundays, one only has a service at 4am, and the last was already full on the noon and 2:30pm departures. Bugger.

I either accepted leaving El Calafate at 3 or 4 in the morning with a layover of 12 hours or more in Rio Gallegos (really not a good thing) or I had to try and change my other ticket. The latter option, unfortunately, had to be done directly with the company involved as I had booked online, and they only worked 9-6 on weekdays and 9-1 on Saturdays, and I was already too late to get it changed that evening. My sole window to fix this was the following morning, at which point I would have to also get my Calafate-Rio Gal ticket set up, and change my reservation at the hostel I had pre-booked in Puerto Madryn. Oh, and I needed a bed for Sunday night in Calafate now. Luckily, despite the inauspicious date, my luck was at least in on the last front - there was precisely one bed left in the hostel for that additional night.

The faintly ironic thing about all of this was that this type of situation was precisely the kind of thing I warned people about when I worked for TF, and they asked me why they should book with an agent rather than doing it all themselves over the web. Had I, for example, got the guys on the travel desk in my hostel in Bs As to book both my tickets, I could have had it all sorted, but no, I had to do it myself and try and be clever. Part of the upshot of this was that, though I tried not to think about it and just go and enjoy my time in town (there was a concert that evening as part of the town's birthday celebrations), I was too worried about whether I could get it all sorted the next day to relax, and ended up coming back after a burger and a pint of beer from a Chilean microbrewery and having a fairly early night.