back north

we saw the glacier. pretty amazing. and huge. i think 6km by 30 km or something like that. really really big. and blue. and it´s advancing, which means it is still growing. two meters per day, but it also loses three meters per day, so it´s not really getting bigger, just growing and losing bits. lots of bits. we went there with a tour, a little unnecessary, because we could have just taken the bus and looked at it without a guide. anyway, it´s like a huge wall, several storeys high, and every now and then you see giant chunks of ice fall into the water (lago argentino). and you have to stand pretty far away but the noise is incredible. it´s soooo loud to hear the ice fall into the water. that is a pretty good indicator of the size of this thing. amazing. and it´s all blue and icy and makes crackling noises. really cool. also, it´s so far south there are maybe 6 hours of darkness per day. that´s it. i went to sleep with light and woke up with it too.
then the next morning we took the 7am bus back to rio gallegos and then got a 6pm bus to puerto madryn. this was new years day, so nothing was open. so we just sat in the bus terminal, ate fried rice that foo made the day before out of bowls we made by cutting off the top and the bottom of a water bottle. i ate out of the top.
oooh i forgot to write this: we were in el bolson before going to see the glacier, and the last night we were there someone stole one of our backpacks. most of the stuff was in the tent, but we kept the mostly empty backpacks on the side of the tent because it was too crowded with stuff in the tent. anyway, we woke up and my pack was in a different place than i left it, and all the compartments were opened and my stuff was sitting everywhere. and foo´s pack was gone. the guy who worked there told us it was the dogs, because the same thing had happened to some french kids that morning but they found the packs close by.
so we looked for a couple hours around the campsite. nothing. then thought about it for a bit and here´s what happened: that night, someone came through the campground and picked up packs sitting out. one of the french kids´ and mine and foo´s. then they took the packs some yards away and opened everything, threw it all on the ground, took what looked valuable, and stuffed what they wanted to keep in foo´s bag and took off with it. awesome. we are now down one pack. there were two pairs of sandals, one pair of shoes, foo´s expensive rain jacket. all the foreign money she had, other random things that aren´t worth much, but we need them.
so we made a police report. we knew they couldn´t really do anything, but if someone tried to change 500 singapore dollars in a bank there, they´d probably be the first ever, so maybe the popo could find them that way. at the police station, the policeman didn´t seem interested at all, told us it would be impossible to find, and typed up a report which said that foo was japanese. not exactly successful, but i still felt better after making the report.
so that´s why we ate fried rice out of a plastic water bottle.
and we came to puerto madryn, north of rio gallegos and on the east coast of the country. the vegetarian meals we requested for the 18 hour bus ride had giant slabs of processed meat with hard-boiled egg in the middle.
puerto madryn: yesterday i wanted to see the sea lion colony. 17km from here. and you can rent a bike on the beach and 17km isn´t that far on a bike. so we get the bikes and head out. and 3 km down the road we hit gravel. not just a gravel road, more of a sand and gravel mix. let me tell you , riding a bike on sand is impossible. and really loose gravel, next to impossible. two hours later and after two incidents of throwing a bike down and announcing that this is not going to happen, we arrived at the lomeria, where we had to pay 25 pesos each to go look at a sea lion colony. it was neat. not something i need to do again. we ate lunch and rode back, two more hours but infinitely less painful than the ride there. and we got back to the bike rental place an hour early but i was ok with that.
now i´m sunburned and ready to go to buenos aires to eat chinese food and salads.
after that it´s up to iguazu to see the waterfalls. yesssss.