Perito Moreno is Radically Dull

Not to be confused with the Perito Moreno Glacier, Parque Nacional Perito Moreno, or the hundreds of Argentine streets named after Perito Moreno, the town of Perito Moreno--which lies partway along the RN-40, an unending dirt highway running parallel to the Cordillera--is incredibly dull. We thought that nothing could quite rival the bleakness of the Atlantic coast's Puerto San Julian, but Perito Moreno manages to.

Emily and I had the amazingly bad luck to pull into town late on a Saturday, fresh off a grueling 14-hour bus ride from El Chalten. While the rest of our fellow travellers fought over a handful of rooms at the inelegant Hotel Belgrano (every one else on our bus would leave very early the next morning), we trudged over to the municipal campground to pitch our tent in a dusty parking lot that proved the least hospitable surface for staking a tent in the entire southern hemisphere. Also, having spent fourteen straight hours staring out the window at vast nothingness, we were perplexed why it was necessary for our fellow campers to pitch their tents six inches to either side of our own. But, we were tired, so we went to sleep.

Our objectives for the next day were fairly straightforward--find food, find someone to take us to the nearby Cueva de los Manos Pinturas archeological site, get the hell out of dodge. By the end of the day, we'd only barely managed to find food. We spent nearly the entire day trudging down desolate Av. San Martin waiting to see if any businesses would honor their posted hours. No dice. We did see a young boy fanning himself with the propeller from his toy helicopter, and some other kids waved at us from behind drawn curtains, shouting "Hello! Hello!" at us in English. In the afternoon, we amused ourselves by pushing a discarded cow backbone around with our boots, and reading political graffiti blaming the U.S. for Perito Moreno's woes. We also spent some time pondering why the town's Burma Shave-style sign was spelled backwards.

The grocery store never did open its doors, but a few other places did open long enough for us to patch together something resembling a meal. The owner of the local fruit stand was unwilling to look away from a TV showing crowd shots from a local soccer match (when you don't spring for the pay-per-view feed, you get this unending footage of fans watching the game, which is like the only thing on the planet more boring than soccer). His wife begrudgingly agreed to sell us apples, grapes, eggs, and avocados. The gas station, which also doubles as the local watering hole, had dusty bottles of $2 wine and cartons of dulce de leche for sale. And a local rotisserie had bread and homemade alfajors. We brought these ill-matched ingredients back to the campground and pondered how it could have all gone so wrong.

Fortunately for our psyches, we were not the only ones to come to grief in Perito Moreno. Our most visible neighbors at the campground were a group of six twentysomethings driving a giant pickup with "Expedition 2007: The Southern Cone" emblazoned on the door. We watched on Sunday morning as they spent countless hours stripping down their site. To give you some idea of the work involved, they had a giant propane tank attached to a hot plate on a folding table, all for the sole purpose of boiling water for mate. They disappeared in the afternoon, however, for what we thought was for good. As we were choking down our dinners, though, they rolled back into the dusty campground to again pitch their tents. They still hadn't learned the lesson that a) no amount of hammering will successfully get a tent stake into the ground in Perito Moreno and b) there are at least 500 more efficient ways to boil your mate water. After our respective preparations, we all turned in early, dreaming about our next day's escape route. -NSH