El Calafate

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(Photos now added!).

After the Torres Del Paine trek and the dormitory living of Puerto Natales it was nice to get back to El Calafate and a slightly less frenetic pace of life (God, it does get wearing having to get up each morning and be places for a particular time).

El Calafate is a small, pretty town tending towards the twee, nestling on the shore of Lago Argentino. Like Puerto Natales it is another town of lake and wind. In addition to the road connection it is also home to the main regional airport making it the principal point of entrance for tourists wanting to visit the glaciers national park, and more precisely the region's leading attraction, the Perito Moreno glacier. Basically as Puerto Natales is to Torres Del Paine so El Calafate is to Perito Moreno. If you're in town you are either passing through or here to visit the glacier. That said I did not find El Calafate as touristy as Puerto Natales. In fact it was quite a cosy place to chill out for a couple of days. This speaks volumes for the friendliness of the hostels at which I stayed.

I returned to the Lautaro, having stayed there on my way down to Puerto. Natales. It's small (6 - 8 guests) and run by a young family - the super friendly, very nice Belen and her husband, the more reserved but no less helpful Dario. Both were a mine of useful information for things to do and places to eat. However, the size and understandable popularity of the Lautaro meant that I had to arrange a third night in an alternative hostel, the Ikeuken - larger, younger crowd with a much greater number of English guests. The difference in dynamic was stark, in the former people were keen to loiter in the common areas and share advice. The latter seemed more cliquey, and when the barriers did come down - we all ate together at a hostel-cooked asado on my final night in El Calafate - people were inclined to tell travel tales rather than pass on advice. Still it was a nice enough place and it was good to catch up on the football banter, but I am getting ahead of myself.

If you want to walk on Perito Moreno in addition to just going to see it there are two options: big ice and mini-trekking. They have broadly similar itineraries but differ in the amount of time you get to spend on the ice - 4 hours as opposed to an hour and half, meaning you get to go deeper into the middle of the glacier with the former. I was very keen to do big ice, having conceived something of a passion for glaciers during my time in Antarctica and on the Torres Del Paine trek. Unfortunately I had only allowed a two day window for Perito Moreno and had to join a waiting list for this option with mini-trekking as a fallback. So I settled down to wait. It's interesting the things you do during such quiet times when you are away from home. Days get structured around laundry and catching up with this blog. You fill in time with holiday activities, which you would never dream of doing at home. So I took advice from Belen and Dario and fellow guests at the Lautaro and popped off to the town museum (dinosaurs and history of local indians), visited the glaciarium ( a newish, very impressive installation on, yes you've guessed it, all things glaciers), and went to the local wildlife reserve/bird sanctuary (a lagoon on the edge of Lago Argentino, whose prize attraction was some very pink flamingos). All good fun but falling very much into a stopgap category.

In addition to waiting I also settled down to eat. Maybe I was lucky with my choices (certainly I had some good advice as to restaurants) or maybe this was delayed carbo-loading after Torres Del Paine but the food was superb and without any more significant purpose it seemed rude not to keep eating. I had a Patagonian lamb casserole, which featured half a dozen lamb steaks cooked in deep iron dish with onions, tomatoes, sweet peppers and fried potatoes, finished with cream and served in the dish it was cooked in. The portions were ridiculous - the menu had specifically advised against ordering starters if going for any of the traditional mains and looking around it was apparent that most diners shared these dishes - more fool them I thought as I tucked in but by the time I had ploughed through to the end I had seen the error of my ways. Equally tasty but on a less epic scale was a country chicken pie, which came with fresh baked bread and a spicy dipping sauce. I had expected Patagonian food to be all steaks and lamb asados, but in fact these dishes were surprisingly English all be it with a twist and on a scale it is probably just as well we don't see at home. In fact on my final night in El Calafate I did have the authentic Argentinean barbecue experience and it was great. I was told that the custom here is to work through the different meats building from sausage to chicken through lamb to finish with steak - quite an experience and again not for the faint-hearted.

And finally to Perito Moreno. Alas it was not to be big ice for me, mini-trekking would have to suffice. I was disappointed but on arriving at the glacier realised that I was splitting hairs. I'd read about Perito Moreno's size but very little prepares you for the physical reality. It's a huge 60 metre high slab of ice stretching back 35 kilometres and 3 kilometres across the mouth of the lake and whilst it looks static and immovable it is actually creeping forward at 2 - 3 metres a day at its fastest moving point. Simply immense. And of course the more you look at it the more its size impresses itself on you and simultaneously the more you notice individual characteristics. The pressure of ice further back in the glacier, water running along fissures in the ice, the different relative rates of flow within the glacier all conspire to throw up spikes and spires of ice tens of metres tall, sharp peaks and valleys, canvasses andp cracks that gleam blue as they reveal ice deeper in the heart of the glacier. The sheer face of the glacier is a mass of fault lines and every few minutes pieces insignificant to the size of the overall whole but in reality the size of a house splinter and crash into the lake.

So we walked on the ice. My first experience wearing crampons. The ice is not a safe and secure place for a novice and we were closely coralled into groups following a guide. It was a short hike up steep slopes and down into plunging valleys, pausing for viewpoints across the ice and to admire crevasses and drainholes.The colours were fantastic and the experience of being on the ice was strange and extra-terrestrial, a strange other world where your preconceptions about water and ice no longer apply.

Having walked we lunched and avidly watched for more ice calving into the lake. We then moved onto the gallery of balconies that overlook the glacier on the far shore. If anything this gave an even better sense of the glacier than walking on it. Close enough to the face to hear the ice crack and fizz under the pressure but still with some perspective that made it possible to look along its face or up the valley where it stretched out of sight.

No two ways I will have to return and next time it will be big ice.

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Photos

Perito Moreno
Only show in town

Flamingos at Laguna Nunez, Lago Argentina
Not in the albatross class when it comes to grace and beauty but somewhat easier to photograph

The bottom of the glacier
I got a bit carried away by the depth of the colour when I was on the glacier. Apparently this is a result of the blue end of the light spectrum having more energy hence penetrating deeper into the ice

View Across the Peaks and Troughs of Perito Moreno
Fantastic natural sculptures that despite their monumental size are always in a state of flux.

Trek across the peaks and valleys of the glacier
People included for perspective

Perito Moreno from Viewing Balconies
An awesome sight