Enjoying Perito Moreno

We have a temporary home in Perito Moreno at the municipal campground. At seven dollars a night with hot showers in a heated washhouse seems like a deal. It’s high season now with families on summer vacation so it can get crowded in the evenings. 

Sunday (today) with clean bodies and clean laundry we plan to hang around and be idle and tomorrow drive 40 miles to the border with Chile. This poses a problem as we have to plan to give up fruits and vegetables as we enter Chile and they are about as strict as the US is on the subject of prohibited items. So we need to not over shop and hopefully a day of rest will give us time to eat the fruit rather than have it confiscated at the border. 

Rusty is good to go as his Chilean border permit is valid until February 10th so we will just have to get it stamped on both sides as we cross. Then when we arrive in the town of Chile Chico we have already noted the location of the supermarket and a fruit stand. After that we will drive west on the gravel road out of town. We wanted to see if there is room on the ferry to cross the lake at the town of Chile Chico but it only runs once a day early in the morning and we won’t make it so we drive around the lake 130 miles on gravel to our destination, a cave tour. 

We have a date Wednesday morning to take a boat ride to see some marble caves at the far end of the Chilean lake and with a hundred miles of gravel to drive we’ve given ourselves a day, Tuesday to get there. Bit Sunday will be a day of reading and resting and enjoying a breezy sunny day in camp. Even retirees need a day off every now and then. 

It’s been cold at night but Rusty doesn’t care because when he hears me wake up he starts yowling for me to let him out. And so at 6:30 we were out there walking Swan Lake as the sun came up. 

Daytime highs get near 70 but at this hour it’s nowhere near that warm with a cold west wind lowering temperatures significantly. 

There’s a laundry with a great reputation so we got our smelly rags dropped off and went food shopping at the La Anonima outlet, the supermarket chain that owns Argentine Patagonia. When we picked up our clothes twenty four hours later they were perfectly folded and fresh. 

Perito Moreno is a funny little town but I like it. The streets are broad and even though the paving is dreadful there is lots of greenery, lovely gardens and lots of poplar trees (alamos) shimmering in the wind. 

I asked the lady cleaning the campground if she’d lived here all her life and she smiled and admitted as much. She was sweeping the sidewalks and I said you know the wind will blow it all back and she looked at me. “The people are far worse than the wind,” she said as she swept. 

You know I went on, there are places in the world where  the wind doesn’t blow everyday? She looked surprised, “You’re not used to it?” No I said emphatically and she laughed. My hat is off to these people, they are tough. 

La Anonima: 

I was surprised to see they take Euros and dollars and no doubt Chilean pesos in the supermarket. We pay with a credit card and get a good rate of exchange without having to deal with a cash economy that only uses dollar bills. 

It’s hard to believe but there are only one thousand peso bills in circulation which are worth about a dollar. There are 20 and ten thousand peso bills authorized now but you never see them on the street. Can you imagine function with dollar bills only? Me neither and thank god the card exchange rate is so good. Below you are the Axion gas station with the station dog snoozing on the right and a windbreak wall on the west side of the station: 

I see travel trailers everywhere and just like in the US they make perfect sense for family vacations. This one looks well used: 

We parked GANNET2 in the shade and paid a visit to the local museum, pictures tomorrow. 

The Layne and I went for a walk. In case you were wondering and I was after I saw the mural, abortion is legal in Argentina up to 14 weeks. Now we know. 

There are quite a few street dogs so Rusty prefers walking on his leash when we go into town. Many of the dogs are strays but not in bad shape. You just know from the hopeful looks they’d like a home.  Rusty is not interested in sharing. 



General San Martín was the George Washington of Argentina in the fight to get rid of Spanish rule. Juan Perón was a polarizing president made famous by his glamorous wife Evita. You can spend hours looking them up online. 

The town is full of bakeries, butchers and hardware stores. 

Argentines are always celebrating their maté, a dried leaf shredded and stuffed into a cup. They then add a little hot water and duck the fluid up through a filtered straw. It tastes like creosote to me but what makes it worse the experience is supposed to be social; people share the foil brew from a common cup. During Covid things got a bit hairy but you’ll see people walking around with thermos flasks and the cups filled with rotting leafs. I love tea but maté is not my thing. 

It’s a charming quiet desert town like any you could see in the US southwest. 

Yes we got some cookies. 





City hall:

And there is always one good reason to stop an extra day and take a pause:
He’s an old boy now and needs his rest. 

Perito Moreno

I admit: it was a long dreary drive to the town of Perito Moreno from our wild camp outside Gobernador Gregores. It was only a hundred miles but it did not go well. 

Ruta 40 has a reputation for being a tough drive up the western side of Argentina. I had thought pavement had defanged this road but boy, was I wrong. Most of it is paved but a hundred mile drive beat me into the ground.  Sleep, tired nature’s sweet restorer as the bard put it; I needed lots of sleep when we got to the town of Perito Moreno Thursday night. 

We dawdled horribly in our wild camp south of Las Horquetas (the pitchforks) enjoying the sunshine and the protection we got from the wind. We exercised and enjoyed Starlink. We had lunch and finally pulled out at three in the afternoon. Of course the fact that it gets dark at ten meant we had plenty of daylight to drive by… 

We drove along the Rio Chico (small river) in a valley watered into swamp status. It was a pleasant drive on a well paved highway. We could be in Perito Moreno comfortably by 5 pm.  

That was until we had a patch of gravel. We groaned…not again. It’s absurd how abandoned this highway is even today, as it’s the only artery down this side of the country.  

The road became a patchwork quilt of crappy pavement and stretches of gravel that appeared without warning. Even where I was tempted I couldn’t go fifty miles an hour for fear of hitting a pothole (bache - baa-chay) or dropping off pavement into gravel.  

Cats were slaloming or driving the shoulders to avoid the black spots that were deep dangerous potholes. You couldn’t drop your attention for a second. 

Even the holes half heartedly filed in were showing signs of wear and caused GANNET2 to bounce horribly.  

There were ripples and dents and holes and patches for miles.  

The scenery picked up with desert vistas and mountain ranges but I was ready to arrive.  

We cave finally on the approximate half way mark the villages of the bizarrely named Bajo Caracoles (under snails). This weird name comes from prehistoric snail fossils found in the area. In the early 20th century this place was built to be what it is today: a roadside stop in the desert of western Patagonia. 

There is a small hotel and restaurant with hot showers and WiFi for travelers but not much in the eating empanadas or food to go Layne found.  34 people live here with a school and police station prominent alongside the hotel and fuel pumps. 

I can’t imagine living here. 

We wanted to continue north but it’s marked as RV stop for those that want to be in the company of others.  

We had thought about checking out some caves with prehistoric paintings but the road was terrible, :0 miles of washboard to get there and we weren’t in the mood to take on any more difficult roads. Highway 40 was bad enough. 

There is a national park around here (no dogs) offering hikes in multi colored canyons and we got to see some of the colors from the highway.

And finally Perito Moreno, an oasis. 5,000 inhabitants live in the town founded in 1910 and which has been through three nave changes which I find bizarre. Nacimento gave way to Lake Buenos Aires in 1944 after the nearby body of water but in 1952 it was named for a national hero.

He has a glacier and a national park named after him and you’d think that would be enough but he got this town as well.

They say Perito Moreno is a center of ranching and fruit and vegetable growing and has a cold high desert climate. I have heard it has a decent laundry and supermarket and a low cost municipal campground. 

On brief acquaintance it looks pretty enough in this odd modern style of a town with no central attraction. 

We shall have to do a bit of vehicular  exploring as we do our chores. 

We paid seven bucks for a night in the quite crowded campground. 

Rusty got to walk on grass. We ate and slept hoping to forget the struggle to get here. Laundry, showers, shopping and getting ready to re-enter Chile 45 miles to the east, probably on Sunday. 

A break from Argentina for a while and I’ll enjoy that.