El Calafate - Patagonia

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The moment we arrived at the airport in El Calafate we knew we were in a different world. The landscape is alien and the colour of the nearby Lago Argentino looks wrong (it's a chalky blue from the sediments produced by the glaciers). We arrived at 9pm and the sun was still high up in the sky and it was surprisingly warm with almost 20ºC. We loved it instantly.

We ganged up with Barbara from Germany and Babaka from Senegal to get a taxi in order to avoid the ridicolous bus queue. Arriving at our hostel we were greeted by a group of local ladies who started kissing the quite surprised Babaka. Apparently touching black people here is thought to bring luck. Anyway, we agreed to meet the two again to go on our own tour to the Perito Moreno Glacier the next morning. Sharing a taxi allowed us to arrive there before all the bus tours. And after Aynur haggled hard (reducing the price from the initially quoted 450 to 280 Pesos) we even paid less then for a bus tour.

So we met the next morning again and set out to the national park with our own taxi driver. It actually takes some time to get there because it's way outside the city but we enjoyed the scenery on the way a lot. And then we saw it: the world famous Perito Moreno glacier. It's just an unreal sight this massive wall, zig-zagged and somehow glowing blue. It's one of the few remaining stable glaciers in the world.

We first took a boat tour (luckily before all the tourist buses arrived) along the glacier which gets you very near to the 60m high ice towers. You can hear the ice cracking while it's slowly moving down the lake and you can see huge chunks of ice falling off into the lake. For quite some time there was complete silence on the boat while everyone was watching in awe.

After the boat tour the taxi brought us to the "cat walk" which is a series of wooden terraces along the glacier giving you a nice overview from above. We spent almost two hours there (of course we had left our sun block at home so we got badly sunburned). The sights were just amazing. Have a look at the pictures.
It's hard to describe how impressive the whole tour was. I hope some of the pictures can at least give you an idea what it looked like although the glacier looks very far away there. I will try to upload some stitched panomara pictures once we are back home.

We had an amazing day, but as there is not much else to do in Calafate than visiting this National Park and Perito Moreno, we moved on the next day to the hiking capital of Argentina: El Chalten.

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Comments

[andrew miller]

glacier looks amazing
Wow! I want to go there!