Calafate ice cream!
Walked into town for breakfast and coffee. El Calafate was surprisingly big with plenty of places to buy food, get money out and choose the most tacky souvenir from each shop window. It was probably the cleanest and greenest town we had visited so far...but there was still a lot of stray dogs and I made the mistake of giving one eye contact. It followed us down the road and into the shops.....trotting along between the bookshelves and staring with us at the maps. His noisy claws tapping along the floor gave away his presence and he was rugby tackled by a member of staff and buddled outside. Bought our first 1:50,000 maps which made a pleasant change from the 1:1,000,000 we had been using for emergency blankets! We decided to visit the local Laguna Nimez Reserve which seemed to be located next to an old land fill site. It was a lagoon/wetland habitat, part of which appeared to be in the process of being reclaimed for development! They even had a pipe (running from one of the wetalnd areas) which appeared to be siphoning off the water to keep the dust down on the adjacent access road! People were wandering around asking each other whether they were in the right place. We eventually found a suprisingly rich habitat that supported a huge variety of birds including flamingos, grebes, southern lapwings, geese, coots, shoveller ducks, pintails, buzzard eagles and much more which we couldn't identify unfortunately. Definitely worth a repeat visit one evening. Cycled back to the campsite and gave our bikes some love after such a long time apart. Packed up the panniers with food and got everything sorted for tomorrows trip west towards the Merino glacier. Dashed back into town when, to our horror, it dawned on us that we had not eaten an ice cream that day!! Found a huge ice cream parlour and, whilst deciding what flavours to try, a lady offered John a taste by holding out a small spoon with some on. Eyes widening he stretched over the counter, mouth open and eyes closed waiting for the flavour to hit his deprived taste buds....the women withdrew her spoon slowly but John followed and, with one leg off the floor to counter balance, she dissolved into laughter and intimated that he might, perhaps, like to take it into his own hand and feed himself. See above picture just after!!
