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Published: April 6th 2010
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I'm in El Calafate now, apparently it's named after some sort of local berry (the "El" is the Spanish equivalent of "The", not anything Arabic). The scenery is very different from anything I've ever seen. Coming in on the airplane everything looked like a desert. From that altitude it's hard to see the low scrub that covers the surface. After landing I got a first look at what it looks like from ground level. The open distances are almost too much to contemplate. It's just as well that there are mountains otherwise the pampas would seem to stretch on endlessly, not something that an Israeli can easily get used to.
El Calafate is pure frontier country. Some of the roads are still unpaved and the houses are very basic. All around the untamed wild stretches for miles. The colors are very primary: blue and white sky and clouds, brown mountains and yellow scrub. It's hard to convey the feeling of how small and isolated El Calafate is in this sea of grass. The only thing which interferes with the impression of El Calafate being a 19th century frontier town somwewhere in the New World is the main street which is
very touristy. The prices are as well, everything costs about as much as it would in Israel.
Yesterday we visited El Calafate's claim to fame - the Perito Moreno glacier. The mountains here provide a "rain shadow" to the clouds coming in from the Pacific Ocean. El Calafate gets 200mm of precipitation a year but the mountains themselves get 2000mm so the almost continuous snowfall on the mountaintops keeps forging new glaciers which slowly cascade down into the plains. Perito Moreno itself is a great river of ice stretching 30km from the mountains and into a lake. Every day it advances about 2m.
Our first glimpse of it was from the road coming into the port where tourist boats ferry passengers to see the glacier from up close. It looks exactly like a frozen river. Two great streams join in flowing down from the mountains and then fusing into one huge torrent that spills into the lake. Frozen waves on top decorate the river of ice.
We got on a tourist boat and sailed to a distance of about 100m from the glacier. I've never seen anything like it. It's a huge blue-white wall of ice that
emerges from the water and towers 30m above the surface of the lake. Below it it stretches all the way down to the bottom, more than 100m. It looks exactly like a rock cliff, except for the colors and the knowledge that it's a huge block of ice. Ominous creaks, groans and cracking sounds presage explosions as huge shelves of ice break off the glacier and fall, majestically slow, into the water and splash enormous fountains of water where they hit the lake.
Almost forgot to say, we saw much wildlife on the way. Condors, eagles, choique (looks like a species of small lama) and some others. For such a barren landscape the area is surprisingly alive with animals. The tour guide also told me that there are pumas, although the farmers have hunted them almost to extinction, of course. He claims they may sometimes kill up to 50 sheep in one day when teaching their cubs how to hunt. Then they leave the carcasses, being unable to consume such a large amount of meat.
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