Perito Moreno and El Calafate

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Fresh from finishing the W trek on Monday afternoon (and happy to have managed to shower and clean some clothes before leaving), I bid farewell to Chile and left for El Calafate, Argentina at 7am on Tuesday morning.

El Calafate is really just a base for trips out to see the glacier, Perito Moreno, which until recently was one of the world's last advancing glaciers. Unfortunately global warming has now even got to this one and it is neither advancing nor receding now. Anyway the town has really only grown because of tourists coming for the glacier and I think our guide said the town has had 500% growth in population in the last 10 years and loads of jobs have been created from the tourism. So at least that´s one good thing, I suppose.

We had around 2 hours to spend at the glacier and were hoping that we might get lucky with the date and that the glacier might ´rupture´. This is when the water from one side creates so much pressure that it forces its way through the ice and out the other side. We were led to believe that we might be lucky as we were visiting the glacier on the exact date that it had last ruptured (I keep meaning to check this on Wikipedia as I am sure they say it to everyone!) - March 11th. Anyway we were fortunate (?should global warming be fortunate?!) that a few bits fell off in front of us while we were watching but I was too slow to capture any of it on film. You´ll just have to take my word for it!

The town of El Calafate is very expensive and touristy and only really exists for the glacier tourists. It is very much like a ski resort and has log cabins everywhere, I even managed to find a huge log cabin hostel to stay in which was described in the guide book as a 'log cabin on steroids'! I went to El Calafate with one of my trek companions, Seth who is going on to do some ice climbing and glacier trekking whilst I am off to Buenos Aires on Wednesday. I thought i should help him get his energy up for the strenuous climbing ahead so we went to an all-you-can-eat BBQ where they literally bring you plates and plates of meat and then you have a buffet of sides all for about 5 quid. Lovely. We then found another log cabin which is a bar and had a couple of cocktails before needing to return to the hostel for some sleep as the fatigue from the trek finally caught up on us!

PHOTOS TO FOLLOW!

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