A sewer or the doorway to paradise?

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After the most amazing week trekking around Torres Del Paine my next stop was to be Ushuaia in Argentina. Ushuaia is literally as far south you can go in the world without being seriously minted. It is from here that cruises leave to the Antarctic, but unless you have a spare ten grand you will not be stepping aboard one of these vessels. For slightly less money, and I mean slightly, you can charter a boat to sail around Cape Horn or you can charter a plane to fly you over the Antarctic. Unfortunately, the Citi redundancy package would not stretch to any of these luxuries, but Ushuaia has some good trekking to offer and is the place to buy the “End of the World” T shirts. So I purchased my bus ticket and woke up at 7am the next day to catch the 8am bus. Over breakfast the woman who runs the hostel said there have been problems in getting to Ushuaia due to issues at Frontier. Being completely stupid I thought this was a town en route, turns out it means border in Spanish. So I arrive at the bus stop to be greeted by the bus company saying there are no buses due to the border officials being on strike over pay issues. The next bus will be in 3 days. Not wanting to waste 3 days, I made a rapid change of plans and headed north.

My new plan saw me take a bus back to Puerto Natales where I was to catch a connecting bus to El Calafate in Argentina. To get back into El Calafate the bus took the dirt track used to go into the Torres Del Paine national park and then veered off along an even worse dirt track through border control. The whole border control situation is very strange between Chile and Argentina. You get your passport stamped to say you have left Chile, but you then drive for 15 miles until you reach the control point where your passport is stamped with the entrance to Argentina. So the questions begs, where are you when you are between border control points? If your bus crashes, whose responsibility is it to clear the mess up? Which countries health system do you fall under? But then again, being so far into Patagonia, literally a million miles away from anything you would normally consider as a hospital, I really don’t think it matters, you would be screwed either way.

So, El Calafate. This place was built literally as a tourist stop so gringos like me could go and visit the National park of glaciers, with Glacier Perito Moreno being top of most people’s list. The town is sandwiched between mountains and Lake Argentina. Apart from the main street, which is beautifully filled with log buildings and tree lined paved roads; the rest of the town is bit of a dump, with only a handful of roads being paved. A short walk to the lake front revealed that they must pump the town’s sewage into the ground. In attempting to get closer to the pink flamingos to take a clearer picture, I found out the hard way what appears to be grassland is actually a swamp with sewage just under the surface, it is totally gross. The town has a small nature reserve on the lake side where all kinds of birds live, and this too is just full of sewage. It is amazing why so many birds come here, and after living in and around the water, it is amazing that they are all still alive.

So it was here that I got to spend my 28th birthday, and as a treat I signed up to go Big Ice trekking on the Perito Moreno glacier. The day started early with pickup being 6.30am. The glacier is about a 90 minute drive from El Calafate and the itinerary for the day was manic. We started off by visiting the face of the glacier. The face is split into two sections, the north and south, by the shore of Lake Argentina. If you can imagine this section of the lake being a Y shape, the glacier would be the bottom line, while the lake is the two prongs. It is the junction of these prongs that stops the glacier and separates the face. The Perito Moreno glacier is one of only a few glaciers in the world that is advancing. As snow falls on the mountain further up the valley, the pressure forces the ice to slide down the valley and compress into the lakes junction. As the glacier literally has nowhere to go, and it is advancing by up to 3 metres every day, the result is an incredible display of the glacier wall breaking off and falling into the lake. We were lucky enough on our visit to witness 4 massive chunks falling into the lake. The noise generated when these pieces fall off is incredible, if you imagine a thunder storm and amplify the crash of thunder by about ten that is what it sounds like. It is an eerie place to be when you can hear these noises but can’t see what is causing them. On very rare occasions the glacier forms an ice tunnel with the glacier wall and the lake shore. This tunnels form when the glacier has pressed so hard against the shore that it effectively separates the lake into two. The water in the lake then rises and starts to chisel away at the ice near the shore. As pieces fall off a tunnel is slowly formed that allows the water to rejoin. Eventually the ice on the roof of the ice tunnel becomes too thin or is under far too much stress that it caves in. Judging by a series of photos displaying the formation and collapse of the tunnel, it would be a truly breathtaking sight to behold. Unfortunately these only happen every 4 years or so, and the last one was only a few years ago.

After visiting the glacier wall we drove to the harbour on the lake side and took a boat trip alongside the front of the south face of the glacier, navigating through ice bergs, to reach the shore on the other side. It is here that the ice trekking company operates and keeps all their equipment. We were briefed with the itinerary for the glacier walking before being fitted out with crampons. We then set out on an hour’s hike along the side of the glacier to the point where it is safe to walk. If you are too close to the front of the glacier the terrain has too many crevices and severe slopes which make trekking impossible. Just before we took to the ice we were fitted out with a harness and the guides tied our crampons on. The harness we were told was for emergency use in case we fell into a crevice and they needed to come rescue us, luckily no one had any such mishap.

Walking with crampons is a funny experience. You literally have to place all your faith in the 8 spikes on each foot and go for it. To go uphill you spread your feet like a duck and take small steps keeping your feet parallel to the ice at all times, all spikes must be in the ice for the crampon to work effectively. To go downhill you keep your in a straight line, bend your knees and lean backwards, the only limit being how much your ankles can cope with. It is crazy just how steep a slope you can climb up and down in these things. So after a brief lesson and practice we set off. As the glacier is constantly moving there is no set route that the guides can use. This was clearly apparent when we continuously had to keep turning back as the route we were taking was too dangerous and impassable.

Being on top of a glacier was a totally surreal experience. I never expected the terrain to be so varied. There were crystal clear lakes, deep blue crevices that seemed bottomless, cryoholes which are formed by small rocks being on the glacier and heating up quicker than the surrounding Ice therefore slowly melting through the ice to leave behind a perfectly formed hole with the rock at the bottom, then there were glacier tables, where large rocks were on top of the glacier and the ice had melted away from the rock leaving it suspended above the glacier like a table, and finally there were the deadly wash holes. These wash holes are where all the surface water drains into, the holes go to the bottom of the glacier and the guides are so scared of them they wouldn’t let us anywhere near them. However, they would let one person at a time get to the edge of one of these holes so we could take a picture. The guides checked out the ice surrounding the hole was stable before calling one over at a time and holding onto our harnesses as tightly as they could while we leaned over to take a picture. If we were to fall into a crevice the guides said we could be rescued, if we fell into a wash hole there was no rescue as it was too dangerous, your only hope would be to die on the initial fall. It reminded me of the poor guy being left at the top of Everest to die as it was deemed too dangerous to attempt to rescue him.

In keeping with the trend of massive chunks of ice falling this day from the glacier wall, we were lucky enough to watch a landslide of ice and snow from one of the mountains next to the glacier. We spent a total of around 3 and half hours on the glacier, stopping for lunch next to a beautiful lake. The winds that blow across the surface of the glacier are so cold that you really didn’t want to stop for too long as you totally froze. So from here we hiked the hour back down the path to base camp and waited for our boat to come pick us up. On the boat they provided us with chocolate and a glass of whiskey with ice from the glacier in. I don’t really like whiskey, and most of it went over the side, but I had to have a drink with the hundreds of years old ice in it.

So that was my Big Ice trekking adventure. Such a cool way to spend my birthday. That evening I decided to treat myself and go to the local parilla (grill) for a fancy meal. The place was totally packed and I waited ages for a table, but it was totally worth it. To start I had Patagonian hare, followed by a massive sirloin steak with the most amazing provincial fries, and finished with a dulce de leche pan cake. All of this was washed down very nicely with a bottle of Malbec. After wobbling my way back to my hostel, I had just enough time for a short sleep before catching another early morning bus to El Chalten where I would don the backpack once again and hit the trails for another few days.

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