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The 10 1/2 hour flight between Houston and Buenos Aires is an over night flight, so after they served us a late dinner, they turned off the lights in the cabin. I have a difficult time sleeping on planes, so I only dozed a little. Mostly I read my book (In Conquest Born by C.S. Friedman) and played Trivia and Shanghai on the in-flight entertainment system. When dawn came, we were flying over the Andes mountains. Our flight to El Calafate left from the domestic airport of Buenos Aires (Aeroparque Jorge Newbery Airport - AEP), but we were landing at the international airport (Ezeiza Ministro Pistarini International Airport - EZE). The two airports are on opposite sides of the city, so after retrieving our bags and going through customs, we took a hired car across the city. It took us 45 minutes - fortunately, we had landed on a Sunday morning and there was little traffic congestion. Our driver told us that sometimes the trip took 2 hours. The AEP airport is constructed on the shores of the Rio de la Plata (River of Silver). This is the mouth of a gigantic river - it is so big that you can not see across it. I thought we were looking at the Atlantic Ocean, but you can tell it is river water because it is full of sediment washed down from the Amazon. The Rio de la Plata is formed by the merger of the Uruguay River and the Paraná River (the second longest river in South America). We flew on United down to Buenos Aires, but to get to El Calafate, we took LAN airlines. El Calafate is about 2600 km south of Buenos Aires; it took about three hours to fly there. Once we collected our bags at El Calafate airport, we joined the other tourists hiring the shuttle service, which took us the 20 km into El Calafate for 100 Argentina pesos each. After dropping off our bags, we walked around in El Calafate. It is a bustling tourist town - many restaurants and souvenier shops. There many companies offering excursions. We split a pizza for dinner and then went back to our room and went to bed. It took us 24 hours of traveling to fly from Seattle down to El Calafate, but which is a long time, but I wasn't too wiped out by the experience. Maybe I was just excited to be starting our trip.
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Click on any thumbnail to begin the slide show at that photograph Patagonia Photos
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