From El Chalten we head around Lagos Viedma and Argentino to El Calafate at the other end of Parque Nacional Los Glaciares. It is a beautiful drive along the lakes. As the drive is not too long, we have a late start of 9 AM and drive straight through arriving in El Calafate at 2 PM. We set up camp at the municipal campsite just on the outskirts of the town.
We wander into town and look for a place to have lunch. We have limited amount of local currency, so we need to first find a place to change money. We have no luck at any of the conventional places such as foreign exchange bureaus (closed) and the banks (they are not allowed at the moment to exchange money due to central bank regulations). So as we have limited choices for lunch (not enough funds and the restaurants were giving lousy exchange rates), we headed to the supermarket to buy some bread and cold cuts. Well, that turned out to be an excellent idea - they would accepts dollars and give change in Pesos at the official exchange rate. So we bought about 4 dollars worth of groceries and changed $50 at the same time.
We did not do too much the rest of the day. Went to the internet cafe and wandered the streets. We hung out at the campsite, had dinner and then spent the rest of the evening sorting out some of our stuff.