El Calafaté & Our First Glacier

October 30 - November 1, 2007.

On our way south we reached a halfway house in Rio Gallegos where we had to make a decision to carry on to Puerto Natales in Chile or El Calafaté in Argentina. We chose the latter but were questioning our decision when on the bus trip they showed us a scary horror film called Wrong Turn 2 about cannabals in the bush! An easy way to make a bus load of friends in an instant is to wait until they play a really shitty movie for a second time in a row, then walk from the back of the bus and ask the driver to turn it off because we´d rather watch the beautiful passing Patagonian scenery without listening to the sloshing and chomping of the cannabals eating their victims as those being eaten are screaming for mercy.

It was a run of seriously bad movies including one called Moscow something in English with Spanish subtitles, but when they spoke Russian there were no subtitles at all. And another called Peri Peculiar, the name speaks for itself!

The scenery was beautiful and we continued to see plenty of unique wildlife, especially guanacos. A new one to add to the list were the massive condors circling the valleys looking for something dead to eat.

The purpose of visiting El Calafaté was to see the nearby Perito Moreno glacier. Throughout this extensive travel blog we have used the terms ´amazing´, ´awesome´ and ´undescribable´ many times and every time they have been warranted. But this glacier just about takes the cake. Hopefully the photos speak for themselves.

The glacier is about 30km in length and has an average height of 60m above the surface of the water. The deepest part is about 700m deep and at the face it is 5km wide. This thing is massive! It progresses at a rate of up to 2m per day. What makes it special is that every day large framents of ice break away from the face, not because of ´global warming´ but because it´s advancing so fast. It´s also special because you can stand on the nearby peninsula and watch it all happening. The sound that it makes when even a small piece falls away is crazy. It sounds like a very loud, echoing shot gun.

Speaking of shotguns... there was one particularly large chunk of ice just wanting to fall away on the day we visited and we reckon all it needed was Fi´s mum to bring out the trusty 410 and blast the base of it to help it on it´s way! We are real nature lovers.

We were also able to get on a boat for an hour or so which gave us a closer look at the glacier and from a different perspective. It was undescribably amazing!