Iceberg…dead ahead
So we are now in Argentina! After a very painless border crossing on the bus between Chile & Argentina (the highlight at the Argentine border was watching the officials trying to get a sheep out of the building!) we ended up in El Calafate.
The main reason this town exists is to feed tourists into Los Glacieres National Park. As the name suggests there are lots of glaciers near El Calafate!
We treated outselves to two day trips to visit some of them. The first day we headed to Perito Moreno.
This glacier is probably the most famous one in Argentina, as it is continualy losing bits of ice into the lake. We went on a boat trip here, but because the ice is so volatile you can´t get very close to the glacier and it is impossible to get an idea of the scale of the ice. The face is generally about 50-80m above the level of the lake (c. 20 story building) and we were about 300m away from the front on the boat, but it felt like you could reach out & touch the ice, it didn´t feel like it was towering above you as a tower block would.
We saw a few bits of ice falling off, and the noise it made was incredible, but both Nick & I were a little disappointed. Not sure why, probably because we´d heard it was “amazing” we had higher hopes.
The second day saw us on a big catamaran (there were 3 catamarans going that day) with about 100-150 people on it, zooming up Lago Argentina towards the Upsala & Spegazini glaciers.
Again, it was difficult to tell the scale of the glaciers (Spegazini reached 130m in points and was our favourite – very spikey & looked like it had lots of ice flowing into it), but the highlight was definately the icebergs.
We spent time zooming at 50km an hour through bergs bigger than us (the captain wasn´t going to slow down for anything and thankfully the boat had slightly more manouverabilty than the Titanic) and also time very close to the bergs with the boat. The glass ice turquoise blue was truely spectacular – as were the shapes & circles in the ice.
Tags: Argentina, Perito Moreno, Travel
Jenni
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