South America Day 55

This morning we were packed up and driving for 8am heading south again along Route 40 just over 200km to El Calafate.  El Calafate is located on the shores of Lake Argentino, Patagonia's largest lake at 100km in length.  The town is best known as the main southern starting point to visit The Glaciers National Park, a world heritage site and home to 13 glaciers including the famous Perito Moreno Glacier.  We arrived at our hostel, Hostel del Glacier, just before midday so had a free afternoon/evening. A very nice hostel, very warm with underfloor heating throughout, we opted to upgrade to a private room rather than a dorm. 

We had a wander into the town in the afternoon, a nice town lots of restaurants and tourist shops along the main trip.  We needed to withdraw more cash from an ATM, we found a few in town but none of them would give us money.  It did say in Lonely Planet, ATM's sometimes run out of cash on a busy weekend so we're hoping tomorrow, Monday, they will be restocked again.  We had our cook groups breakfast to buy for which we'd been given cash.  At the supermarket we thought we could pay by our card instead for both our own personal supplies and the groups and keep the cash but the supermarket didn't accept chip and pin style cards so we ended up paying using our last $50 note converted at a very poor exchange rate.  With Argentina's economy in a mess, withdrawing cash in Argentina had been a bit of a problem for a lot of us, when the ATM's do have money in them they often limit withdrawals to the equivalent of £50 or less. South america has also proved more expensive than we thought, Chile and Argentina especially with western prices for most things.