Advertisement
Published: December 14th 2005
Electric blue lake in the ice wilderness
In the heart of the Perito Moreno GlacierEl Calafate is a one horse town. It's pretty much been solely built on the back of one tourist attraction - the Perito Moreno glacier. Why such a fuss over one glacier when there are hundreds of them spreading out from the South Patagonian ice sheet? Why indeed does the glacier have the honour of bearing the name of one of Argentina's most revered pioneers, Francisco Moreno? Well, it's because the glacier is a stunner. OK, it's not the biggest glacier, but it's probably the most dramatic in South America.
The PM glacier lurches out of the mountains and out into the milky meltwater of Lago Argentina, the biggest freshwater lake in the country. Its face is between 40 and 80 metres. It's an awesome sight to behold - 80m of baby blue sheer ice wall. However, underwater there's another 160 metres. Sitting next to the glacier is a humbling experience. The scale of the glacier makes you feel like an ant under a skyscaper.
The face of the glacier is constantly calving off into the lake below, emiting a huge roaring rumble. From most vantage points the falling ice might appear to be on the small side but
the scale of the glacier is deceptive. You certainly wouldn't want to take a hit on the noggin. When a big bit goes - everyone knows about it.
The top of the PM is a maze of jagged ice peaks and deep crevasses. It looked just too good to miss - we had to get into the centre of the glacier and so we did. We trekked for an hour over the lateral moraine before donning a harness and crampons and stomping out onto the ice. PM puts the eeny weeny glacier in Ushuaia to shame.
We walked over the rolling ice hills at the side the glacier and then on into the more central region.... and straight into a dead end of crevasses. No-one wanted to go back so we took a deep breath and jumped over a deep crevasse. It must have been 20 or 30 metres of dark blue deep. If you fall in you can get wedged and there's not a lot of time to get you out before your body heat melts the ice around you and you start slipping deeper into the glacier. PM moves at 2 metres a day so it
Teetering on the edge
Tom and Snooze grin through fear (there was quite a drop on either side and the ledge was only the width of our crampons) wouldn't be long before you were entombed in the heart of the glacier. You would eventually fall into the lake a few decades later, no doubt to the surprise of a future generation of tourists.
Two of the guides were annoyed at the leader for having got us into a pickle, but they took good care of us, each standing perched on the edge of a precipice so that they could give us a hand. However, the margin for error was small. Putting your foot a few inches the wrong way could lead to a rather painful slow death. As our guide cheerfully pointed out, these things aren't fun if you're not just a little bit scared.
We trekked into a central bowl of the glacier, which is criss-crossed by numerous azure streams cutting through the white ice. After about 2 hours we reached the crescent of a hill and descended to the shore of an electric blue pool. The photos look unreal, and that's what it actually looked like - absolutely unreal.
There are also drains through the ice where the streams disappear, swirling down to the base of the glacier. Some of them are huge
Dancing with death
Stepping over a crevasse(with some assistance...) and lead to the formation of massive caverns under the ice. Last of all we went down into a cave of brilliant blue ice. You felt that you were deep inside the glacier. It was hard to resist rushing off further down the cave into the mesmeric blue to see what was in the deep. Just an incredible experience. If you ever get the chance to do a glacier hike - jump at it, it's like nothing else on earth.
We took another bus overnighter (sleeping in a chair is just a normal activity now) across the Patagonian steppe. My god it's flat. The horizon is a ruler's edge in 360 degree panoramic wide screen. There's just nothing there at all (except a few lonely scabby sheep every now and again). The lack of land just serves to emphasise the sky, which was full of fluffy clouds trailing off into the distance as far as you can see. At sunset the clouds were gilded with the gold of the dying sun.
In Rio Gallegos bus station we started chatting to Slyvia, a holidaying porteño. Within about fifteen minutes she had given us every possible contact detail and told
us to get in contact should we need anything at all once we got back to Buenos Aires. There really are some great people in this country.
The next day we turned up in Trelew in the Rio Chubut valley. After numerous attempts by the Spanish to colonise Patagonia it was the Welsh who made the first real inroads! They emigrated in order to avoid persecution by the English (the English? persecute? never...), to keep their language and way of life alive. Indeed, Welsh is still taught and used in Trelew and the other settlements in the Rio Chubut valley. The Welsh have a very good reputation here as being honest and hardworking fellows. Their success (which was hard fought) was facilitated by the assistance of the Tehuelche indians, whom they befriended rather than fighting, as had previous visitors to the area.
Just down the road from Trelew is Punta Tombo, the largest penguin colony in South America. It's a penguin metropolis of nearly half a million of the waddling squawkers. You can sit on the rocks above their beach and watch them jetting around at high speed - until they get onto land, where they transform from
Ferrari to shopping trolley with two wayward wheels. There were loads of youngsters idly sitting around the house with typical teenager apathy. They are pretty cute though - they have weeny heads and big dumpling bodies like a mini furry Jabba the Hut (without the slobbering). However, we resisted the urge to p.p.p.p.pickupapenguin.
Last up was Peninsula Valdes and the Golfo Neuvo, which is where the Southern Right Whale comes to breed. We hired a car and set out for Puerto Pirámides, the only settlement on the peninsula. The roads on the Peninsula are gravel and there are a few sections that are absolutely lethal. Many a tourist has come over all Colin McRae and ended up cartwheeling. Coupled to this is the fact that Argentines are notoriously insane drivers (traffic accidents are the major cause of death for Argentines between the ages of 5 and 35). We proceeded with caution, and it turned out to be well merited. There were deep pools of stones that slewed the car all over the road, sections of reverse camber and hill crests followed by huge angled bumps and ruts - all of this while the locals careered at high speed over
Ice face
Perito Moreno in the Parque Nacional Los Glaciers the slippery track around us. Opposite the police station in Puerto Pirámides there was a nice collection of write-offs that rammed the point home. We felt a bit sad going around like we were auditioning for the chauffeur's part in Diving Miss Daisy, but there was a thousand pound excess to think of dammit!
Going out to see the whales was fantastic. It was the very end of the season so there were hardly any around (most had already set sail for Antarctica) but we managed to find a mother and calf who hung around near our boat for half an hour or so. We don't need to tell you that they are big but it was amazing to think that that was a juvenile we were looking at. At one point it (we have no idea how to tell the sex of a whale and would rather not know to be honest - the whole idea is just too scary for words) raised out of the water and had a peek at us over the side of the boat. We were eyeballed by something from a different world.
The peninsula has got some interesting inhabitants. This is
Punta Tombo
Costa del Sol for Penguins what we came across - guanaco (deer like antelope thingies), rhea (big emu-like birds - no Rod Hull around fortunately for them), Armadillos (soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside), Sealions (roaring tub-thumping bigamists) and elephant seals (observing them crawl down the beach is rather disgusting but after a while watching their rolls of blubber ripple is strangely hypnotic).
Anyhoos - everyone's on the downhill track to chrimbo now and we're no different. We've come back to Buenos Aires for a few days before we make the trip over the water to Punta del Este in Uruguay for the festive period. We're missing everyone back home of course and it's going to be very strange to be away over christmas, especially as we're going to have a Southern Hemisphere beach chrimbo, which is a bit of a novelty. I'm pretty sure the jokes in the crackers will be similarly poor, if we can understand them at all...
All the best guys. Don't get too drunk at the office party. We'll be in touch before xmas.
T&S
Advertisement
Tot: 0.181s; Tpl: 0.023s; cc: 22; qc: 97; dbt: 0.0988s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Jezz and Pen
non-member comment
Amazing
What wonderful photos and experiences! Keep on truckin!