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Published: October 12th 2007
From the lush green jungles and 30 degree heat around Puerto Iguazu, we flew in a day to the more barren landscape, and rarely higher than 5 degree temperatures around El Calafate in Argentinian Patagonia. It looks quite bleak here with only tufty grass and low shrubs growing on a mixture of flat and hilly surfaces. The land is mainly used for cattle and sheep farming, though the estancias around El Calafate cater mainly to tourists these days. These Patagonian Steppes are bordered to the west by the Snow capped peaks of the Andes, which with glaciers, forests and bright blue lakes presents a completely different landscape altogether, just 70 km away. It is the glaciers that we have come to see and after landing at 7:00 in the evening, we roamed around town trying to plan the next couple of days tours. We decided to spend one day more than planned here to see as much as we could.
The next day, we headed off to the Perito Moreno glaciar. This glaciar advances at a rate of 2 metres per day. Chunks of ice constantly break of the front making sounds like thunder or rifle shots. Quite a spectacular
sight! The glaciar is 30 km long and 5 km wide, and rises 60 m above the lake surface. We spent hours just watching the glaciar (much better than watching ice melt!). You can take a boat trip up to 300 metres from the bottom of the glaciar, but by then we had run out of cash so had to skip on this, but didn´t miss out too much because the next day we took a boat trip exploring the various arms of Lake Argentina, at the ends of which are more glaciars. One of these was giving just as spectacular show as the Moreno glaciar did the previous day.
The largest of the glaciars is the Upsala gaciar - 4 times as big as Buenos Aires city. This is retreating. To get to it we had to sail past enormous icebergs, all of which had broken off the front of the glaciar. We had our picnic lunch by a lake fed by about four other glaciars (the lake was also full of icebergs) before returning to the boat and back to El Calafate for our last night in Argentina, which we spent cooking for ourselves and abstaining from
alcohol (a first so far!).
This morning we caught an early bus to Puerto Natales, from where we are planning to go trekking in the Torres del Paine. Tomorrow, a lie in (also a first!).
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Ben
non-member comment
What a change
It looks fantastic and totally different to the iguazu bit. I didn't even know they had so many glaciers.