Giant Blue Glacier

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If you have read, or just skimmed through our last entry, "Gone with the Wind at Torres del Paine", you might think we would have had enough of the great outdoors, let alone journey out of our way just to look at a big piece of ice. However, we had already written Perito Moreno Glacier into our calendar book, and Eva still had much enthusiasm for going back out and looking at that particular piece of ice. So what could we do? We arrived in the town of El Calafate, Argentina via bus from Puerto Natales, Chile on Saturday, August 13th, around 3 pm. We checked into our hostel, Los Glaciers Hostel II, and hit the downtown for food. El Calafate proved to be a fun, medium-sized toursity town, with many restaurants, craft shops, chocolate & ice cream shops, and some street music. After a pizza dinner, we went back to our hostel to do laundry and turned in for the night.

The next morning, we took the bus at 8:30 am to the Parque Nacional los Glaciers. Here's what we saw: a large clear lake with a huge glacier at one end. We walked along the boardwalk to get a closer look at the glacier. Then we took a boat along the edge of the glacier. We were in luck and caught a huge chunk of ice falling from the glacier not far from the boat. We got off the boat and did a little more walking on the trail. Then we got tired of looking at ice, so we found a spot to lay down for a little nap. Our bus back to the town of El Calafate came and picked us up at four.

As you should have noticed, this was Valentine's day. By coincidence, it was also Chinese New Year's Day, year of the tiger. That night we celebrated both our love and our hopes for the New Year at Mi Viego restaurant. Happily the pleasures of wine, beef steak, and lamb (our common Argentine indulgences) were proving harder to saturate than the pleasures of looking at ice.

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