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Published: February 28th 2018
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We left Ushuaia ready for our 0905 flight to El Calafate only to find that it had been delayed by a couple of hours to coincide with the 1130 flight. Suspicious eh?
Anyway we arrived in El Calafate and checked into our America Sur hostel. What an amazing place - it made us feel very “down with the youth”. We organised to go on a tour to Perito Moreno glacier, picked up at the hostel at 0815- very touristy for a change! We then went into town to hunt for an empanada and for Pete to have his beard trimmed.
Early this morning the boat took us first to a hanging glacier and some amazing geological structures before we approached the Perito Moreno Glacier itself. We learned that most of the things that we had seen already that were called glaciers were actually peripheral glaciers because as everyone knows (daaarling) you can only be a proper glacier if you are actually attached to an ice field.
So the Perito Moreno Glacier is attached to the South Patagonian Ice field and apparently is the only advancing glacier in the worId. It is very rare ( as most of you
will know) that I (Jan) am lost for words but Perito Moreno Glacier just took not only my breath away but left me speechless. It is absolutely HUGE – 40 m high as it hits the lake and runs for 31km from the Ice field to the lake. Bits are constantly falling off it into the water with enormous crashes and waves in the lake. Our boat was within 150m of the vertical face as it towered above us. WOW !
We then got off the boat and walked around the impressive walkways that the Argentinians had built along the face and above the glacier so that we could get some sort of idea of the scale of the thing. Totally amazing.
BUT the Perito Moreno was not the only amazing thing that day. When we returned to our hostel, we were greeted by an enormous Argentinian chef who wanted to show us his barbeque. WELL, never being ones to appear rude, off we went out the back to sample the delights he was grilling. We have played Argentinian meat roulette before and have always lost (can’t eat anywhere near enough) so we thought we would be clever
and share a Ladies (half price) barbeque and a steak. What we thought was the steak turned out to be course number 1 of infinity of the Ladies barbeque. After we had made reasonable effort with it between us, there appeared before us a piece of steak that looked like a roast dinner to serve 6 people. It must have weighed a pound a half and would have been delicious if we hadn’t just eaten Course Number 1 of infinity of the Ladies BBQ. Course Number 2 then appeared, a sausage with a diameter of about 2 inches and a length of about 9 inches. With courses 3 to infinity being prepared we waved our white flag, to the consternation of our lovely chef who wanted to share with us his lamb skewers, his half a chicken and a pork chop. A bowl of chips had us whimpering in the corner and we retired to bed dragging our tummies behind us.
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A sad old boring life indeed
Wow wow WOW - those photos of the Perito Moreno (possibly related to Jose?) are AMAZING. It MUST have been extraordinary to reduce Jan to speechlessness - something I have rarely known. Mind you, it feels like there’s a glacier, peripheral or otherwise, is about to creep over the UK at the moment. It’s certainly verrrry chilly, but the fuss over 4 days of admittedly interesting weather is bonkers - as someone said on R4 (obvs) today, ‘20 years ago this would have been called Winter’. Wot no photo of the Ladies Barbecue to infinity? Not like you two to pass up a chance of a food photo. Px