Still raining. We got up at dawn but there was not much to photograph because of the early rain. After a while we drove to El Calafate. We dropped in on a very rustic café on the way where a couple of people cooked empanadas on a wonderful old wood stove.

As the sign says, the residential quarters behind the café

GPS reference….

Earlier, when travelling in the opposite direction, we stopped at a different café close by and I thought that a group portrait on the wall must be a pioneer family although it looked like a bunch of bushrangers (or outlaws). In fact it was Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, in hiding there in a remote corner of Argentina.

El Calafate is quite bizarre, a mixture of backwoods and boom town. Unlike in El Chalten, where pedestrians gave no concessions to cars, here in the centre of town cars gave no concessions to pedestrians and even pedestrian crossings were just another target practice zone. To get to our modern new hotel about a kilometre from the centre of town was a mixture of quite rough dirt roads and the 10 lane expressway of the old runway (the airport has moved out of town).

View across Lago Argentina from our Hotel, Design Suites, in El Calafate in the late afternoon