Sally Cinnamon - The Stone Roses

So after a long and generally very pleasant stay in Buenos Aires, we flew down to El Calafate in Patagonia to see the Glaciers. And it´s been brilliant - one of the most beautiful natural spectacles I´ve ever seen. The landscape around El Calafate is fairly bleak, looking a bit like a lunar landscape, and obviously it´s a lot cooler down here than in BA, but it´s all about the Glaciers. We took a boat ride out yesterday to get up close to three of the Glaciers - Upsala, Spegazzini and the most famous one, Perito Moreno. The ride out to them was fantastic, dodging icebergs in varying shades of white and blue, but getting up close to the Glacier face is the best part. They´re huge, much bigger than the ones in New Zealand and the sound of them creaking and groaning really gets the hairs on the back of the neck going. Then every 20 minutes or so a chunk of ice will shear off and crash into the water below accompanied by a sound like thunder. It´s quite an experience.

Then today we went out for a trek on the Perito Moreno Glacier itself. Clearly it´s in a fairly safe part of the Glacier a long way from the face, but there are still deep crevasses all over it, so it pays to watch your step. There are impossibly blue small lakes and mini-waterfalls all over the Glacier (I think the colour has something to do with the density of the compacted ice) but it was brilliant to be out there on such a vast, constantly shifting ice Field.

It´s definitely been a highlight of the trip so far, and it´s a shame we´ve got a non-changeable flight to Bariloche tomorrow as I´d have like to spent a couple of days trekking in Torres del Paine, but hey ho...

written by

phileasdogg on January 24, 2009 from El Calafate, Argentina

from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs

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