Argentina Day 14 - El Califate day 3

Day 14: Thursday January 18, 2007

A day with nothing to do. How odd! the city of El Calafate is host of thousands of tourists per week, but still very few people live there, and it was just in the past few years that an airport was even built! There is construction everywhere - all the fancy hotels starting to build, and the town is growing, but until that construction catches up with the tourism, it remains a small town. So, what to do when you've seen the tourist site of the town?

2 options:
there were sheep shearing (or the accented man at the reception desk says: Jeep Jearing) demonstrations - since a lot of wool comes from this region - I guess they get all the wool they can, and then eat the sheep. OR we could go horseback riding - ranches are very popular in this vast area of land.

We opted for the horseback riding. It wasn't anything spectacular, but the scenery is beautiful, so it was fun. My horse had a baby horse that followed us the whole path. It was pretty cute. We went up to the top of a high hill, and saw some birds and took some photos. When we got back to the ranch, we tried some traditional fried bread, and they passed around a Mate cup. Mate is the national drink here. It is basically cup filled with this type of grass, and you pour hot water over it and drink it through a straw with a strainer at the end. Apparently, it is a form of hospitality to offer a cup of Mate to guests, and for all guests to partake. Upon leaving the ranch, we realized that we'd killed a fair amount of the day, and once we returned and had lunch, it was time to head to the airport.

Aerolineas Argentinas is the airline both that I flew with to Iguazu, and that we flew with to El Calafate. in total, there were 5 flight (one had a stopover), and the snack for every flight was a ham and cheese sandwich. yum. so we had to bring our own food for all the flights, which stank, but at least we had better food than the crappy ham and cheese sandwich. Also, after seeing all the processes of food provisioning on Delta flights after my last project at work, I was somewhat impressed with the simplicity of the drinks on Aerolineas - they had a few 2.5 liter bottles of coke, Diet coke, sprite, water, etc. ; coffee; red and white wine, and beer. And that is what you had as options. No individual cans, no 47 different drink options. simple.

We arrived back in BA at 11:00 and headed to the apartment.