Perito Moreno - January 17th

The main reason for stopping in Perito Moreno, other than breaking a really long journey, is to see the nearby Cuevas del los Manos, a UNESCO world heritage site.  We arranged pickup at our hotel  from a local tour agency yesterday, but decided this morning to go to a local bakery for breakfast instead of eating in our hotel.  But we made it back in time for our 08:00 pickup.  We then had a two hour transfer to the caves, mostly back along the same road we were on yesterday.  But at least it was the paved part.

The caves themselves are actually quite interesting, taking longer to see than I would have thought.  They aren’t really caves as we would think, more like rock faces underneath an overhang.  This has protected the 8000-3000 year old paintings, which are mostly of hands and guanacos.  The hands are silhouettes which were presumably some form of ritual, and the guanacos and other symbols are the usual markings to indicate where the wild herds must have been at various times of the year so people could hunt them.  There is quite a lot, about 1km of them.

The setting for the caves was equally dramatic, as we walk halfway along a cliff side in a canyon.  So as a second part of the tour we get to trek down into the canyon and back along it.  It adds an hour to the trip but makes it a bit more of a day out.  Otherwise the driving there and back would be longer than the visit.  All we can do on the journeys to stop ourselves from being bored is play spot the guanaco or nandu (the flightless rheas).

We get back to town there is not much else to do except sort out photos on the extremely slow internet.  In the evening we go to one of the local restaurants, where you have whatever is on the menu (it was beef or chicken milanesa that night, like schnitzel, with chips and salad) and it was probably our best value meal so far.  We also took a picture of the statue of Perito Moreno, the famous Argentinean naturalist and explorer after whom so much in this region is named (glaciers, lakes, a mountain, and of course this town).