Day 52 – El Calafate, Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina
Well I accidentally added another country to the itinerary! In the van and across the border to Argentina to check out a super cool glacier. We piled out at the border, exited Chile and entered Argentina. The first sign in Argentina showed a map of the Maldives with a simple but poignant, They are Argentinas. It seemed a little out of place but I guees just to remind everyone, especially any brits stopping through of the little injustice they feel they suffered! We had to make a beeline to the ATM because the national park on this side only accepts Argentinan pesos for obvious reasons. So another 5$ transaction fee to get my own money. My whole life I would walk 1 mile out of the way if I had to to get to my own bank and not pay withdrawal fees, I think it is criminal to charge people for access to their own money and well on this trip I am trying to forget the 5$ each time I get money nevermind the 1%-3% charge. Ergg, makes my blood boil, but moving on. The journey was 5 hours each way. We started out on paved roads, moved onto Primary gravel roads and then secondary gravel roads! It was flat as far as you could see here in the Pampas region. You sometimes caught a glimpse of gauchos riding alongside the road on horseback rouding up their stock. There were 6 of us on the trip and fortunetly the long journey was significantly shortened with the good company. There was a couple from chile, a woman form France, 2 guys from England who spoke at least spanish and french and lived in Reston VA. From chatting we discovered, the french lady and I will overlap for a bit in Easter Island and are on the same flight to Tahiti. As my strange fate would have it, she is, yes of course, in aviaiton. A flight attendent on my baby, the 747. Bizarre.
The last 50 km the scenery began to develop into mountain and lakes. Autumn is approching so the leaves on the trees were starting to turn the mountainside into red. As we entered the park we started to get a glimpse of the glacier up ahead. This iceflow moves forward each year until it finally it touched land on the otherside, dividing the lake into 2 halves. We got on a boat to go check out the massive wall of ice up close. Words can not even describe this behemoth. The is 200 feet high and 14,760 feet across! No I did not mess up that number. Huge. Pieces would occasionally break off and it would take what seemed like forever to drop into the water below. The fresh scar left behind would shine like a blue aquamarine crystal in the sun. The glacier holds a bluish tint due to refracting the suns UV spectrum. The more dense, if I understand it right, the deeper the hue. You could stand there and stare at the thing all day, it was incredible. After the boat, we went to a mirador up above and you could see where the glacier extended far back into the mountains. We all had a hard time leaving this wonderful spectacle.
We stopped in the town of Calafate on the return. It was an uppity, yuppy tourist trap and reminded me of Vail or Jackson Hole. We set out for the journey back and reversed the political process of the morning but reentering chile once more and going through customs to make sure we were not carrying back any fruits or vegetables from the evil next door neighbor.
Tags: Travel
dunlewey
Interesting, but the Maldives should not be confused with the Malvinas (Falkland Islands). The former are a nation of a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, while the latter are in the Southeast Atlantic just a few hundred miless from Patagonia in Argentina.