Well now I am really south. I spent most of yesterday and today on various buses, getting as far south as Rio Gallegos before getting another bus for El Calafate where I am now. It´s the nearest town to the Moreno Glacier, which I´m going to tomorrow.
So I forgot to give the BMC update from Argentina last time. (For those of you who are new, every time I go to a new country I look up the price of a Big Mac Combo. There was some economic theory that says you can tell how expensive a country is by how many hours it takes someone to work in order earn enough money to buy a loaf of bread. Well, my newer theory is that you can do the same thing by figuring out the price of a BMC in the equivalent US$. A while ago some economist actually published something along these lines, and won the Noble prize for economics or something (well I know they were published at least). So far the cheapest has been El Salvador at something like $2.30 US. The most expensive is Europe, almost $10). So anyways, here it´s $3.99. I didn´t actually have anything there, so I didn´t get to test my other theory which is that one of the universal phrases is ´Big Mac combo with Coke´ (I only eat at McDonald´s when I´m travelling if I´m having stomach problems).
It´s been getting colder. Some sign said it was a high of 6 degrees. I went out and bought a scarf just now because I´m going to be down south for a while. Some other observations, Argentina is one of the cleanest countries I´ve ever visited, kinda like Toronto used to be... The LP says that the Patagonian wilderness is supposed to be amazing, but to me it´s not that different from say the altiplano in Peru or even Mongolia. Actually, the only difference between here and Mongolia as far as landscape is that there are no fences in Mongolia... I haven´t seen any other extraneros (foreigners), only local Argentinian tourists. That´s okay, it´s better for my spanish. Mostly I´m understanding, except some locals talk with such a thick accent I have no idea, just nod my head and say I don´t understand. Which doesn´t seem to perturb them, they just keep on talking... The biggest thing on tv today (I had some time to kill in the bus station) was a big debate on whether Diego Maradona and his wife (?) were going through a bad time. This would be like Canadians debating whether Gretzky is appearing in too many commercials. (well, I guess we do debate that)... Lotsa people have cell phones here, and there´s a lot of DirectTV dishes. It looks like the whole country skipped the wire phase and moved straight to wireless.
Well anyways, tomorrow I´m off to the Moreno glacier. The LP says it´s one of the top two sights in South America, but I´ll reserve my opinion. It´s up against some pretty stiff competition on this continent.