My kingdom for a car

When we got back from El Bolson, we again were struck by that good old American need for some iron, rubber, and petroleum-burning machinery. As a result, we spent a couple of days shopping around for a car to ferry us around Patagonia and hopefully leave us stranded in remote locations for hours on end as we vainly pounded on the engine with whatever tools we had like monkeys trying to decipher the enigma posed them by a typewriter. After days of looking, talking to prospective sellers, and hacking out whatever questions we could come up with in our broken Spanish ("Car make brakes good?"), we finally accepted the inevitability that we simply were too lazy to make any sort of purchase. Our motivation gauges firmly wedged on "E", we decided to head south by bus, and see what sort of adventure we could have in the far reaches of Patagonia. First destination: El Calafate, for the Perito Moreno glacier (one of the 8 natural wonders of the world, the other 7 including Mt. Everest and J. Lo's ass, probably).

Forget the Iraqi prisoners, let me tell you about torture . . .

We boarded a bus in Bariloche at about 3 in the afternoon, bound for the town of El Calafate roughly some number of kilometers to the south (again, laziness affecting my ability to calculate distances). The bus of course can't go in a straight line, because the main North-South route through Patagonia on the West side is shut for some reason, probably blocked by too much emptiness. Our route took us all the way over to the Eastern Seaboard, to dump us at 6 in the morning in the town of Comodoro Rivandava (spelling is horribly off, but then again so is the town).

It still being dark, we sat in the bus station for 3 hours, waiting for it to get light, watching the police poke at passed-out bums who just wanted fifteen minutes more. At first light, we ventured out into the thriving craphole that is Comodoro Rivandivandara.

In all fairness, the town isn't that bad, just boring, surrounded by nothingness in all directions, lacking any beauty whatsoever, and apparently plagued by horrible duststorms that fill your eyeballs with 6 pounds of grit per second squared.

We spent the morning wandering around, our lower eyelids being dragged lower and lower by the accumulation of most of the dirt in the surrounding plains and hills. A high point of the day was when we climbed a giant dirt hill to the north of town, to look out on the splendor that is Comodoro Rivanadvaernzzq, before stumbling back down and finding yet another cafe to pass some time in.

The only thing keeping us going at that point was the promise of a movie that evening at a local cinema, the only one not dubbed into Spanish being Van Helsing, which looked radical. We waited and waited, until the appointed hour arrived and we approached the ticket window as eager as school children attending their first WWF Main Event. We soon learned we had more waiting to do, as the movie was to be delayed for a half hour. We stood in the lobby, talking to all the other travellers stranded in Comodoro Rigomortis who'd had the same idea as us. After the half-hour wait, we learned that the movie was indeed to be delayed further, but this time until the next day. That being a little longer than we wanted to wait, we disgustedly refunded our tickets and slumped back out into the waiting black hole of fun that is Comodoro Rr84093'049825.

At this point, we had about 4 hours to kill, and nothing to do, so in desperation we turned our backs on our WeightWatchers plan and headed to a Tenedor Libre (all-you-can-eat buffet) and payed to sit and eat for 2 hours. As-much-time-as-one-can-possibly-spend-in-a-tenedor-libre-before-the-evil-stare-of-the-proprietor-drives-you-out later, two rotund and ready-to-burst young travellers, Ty and your's-truly exited and tried to find something else to do.

At 12:30, we boarded the bus, and headed off on another overnight journey back across the continent to the town of Rio Gallegos. Rio Gallegos is also not particularly high on the all-time best travel destination lists of anyone except maybe Hitler. Luckily, we only had 3 hours there, before boarding another bus to El Calafate herself (4 hours away).

At around 8 in the evening roughly 53 hours after leaving Bariloche, we exited the final bus in our destination, delirious and weird. We found a hostel, which would prove to be an excellent choice for reasons yet to come, and dropped our gear.
- posted by Micah @ 1:50 PM