El Calafate

Argentina

January 2007
4 days

El Calafate
19th to 24th January

Argentina is a very big country and we now found ourselves at its bottom with the intention of working our way up to the top. The best way of doing this is to travel by bus and here that isn´t such a bad thing. Argentina puts USA and their pathetic Greyhounds to shame by offering luxury coaches with massive seats, movies and a guy serving drinks and food.

Our first bus journey up from Ushuaia to El Calafate was going to take us over 20 hours but once we boarded and realised how nice the seats were, we didn't care! To get there, our bus had to exit Argentina, enter Chile and then back across the border again via a river boat which all added disruption to our busy schedule of afternoon napping.

We finally arrived during the graveyard shift at 3am. The bus terminal was quiet with no sign of any taxis. I'd only remembered that our hotel was a Best Western but hadn´t written down the full name and address as I knew it was a very small town.

An hour later we were very very tired but a taxi arrived and we slung our bags in the trunk. 'Best Western hotel please driver' I said... but in return he gave us a shrug of his shoulders, a grunt and a blank expression. So I cranked up the Spanish a little.... 'Best Western Otel Por Favor'..... and from his face we instantly knew he´d never bloody heard of it. Doh!

He pulled away and jibbered something into his CB radio then we heard the name of our hotel.... after much silence he spun the taxi round and took us to the taxi office. In he went and through the glass we could see them talking and scratching their heads whilst reading a map. Groan, it wasn't looking good for us.

He returned to us with no answer so we told him we needed the Internet to check our email in order to obtain the address. We tried a few hotels and finally a guy let Sarah use the PC. Our hotel was called the Best Western Eco Vista and then we could sense a little bulb light up in his head as he put his foot on the gas.... We fell into bed at almost 5am having learned a new and valuable lesson. ZZZZZzzzzzzzz.

Well....El Calafate is a small tourist town that is only surviving due to one key tourist attraction and that is the Moreno Glacier. Its population has increased five fold over the past 10 years. It sits on the globe at 50 degrees 20' south latitude which is roughly equivalent to London's location in the northern hemisphere. Its a picturesque town with red roofed cottages and lush vegetation.

Our first day we simply strolled around and ate a picnic in the park where we made a little friend in the form of a small cute dog who gladly helped us finish our lunch of vegtables, chicken and rice.

A day later we were happy to be going on our first tour to see some glaciers and icebergs. Just to clarify:-

A Glacier....
is a large body of ice and snow, moving slowly down a valley or spreading outward across a land surface.

An iceberg....
is a drifting mass of ice in different shapes and sizes that have detached from a glacier.

So now that's all cleared up I´ll continue. We boarded a huge and luxurious catamaran equipped with a bar serving beers and food. For the next four hours we cruised around the massive lake viewing up close spectacular iceburgs protruding from the waters surface, knowing we were only seeing 10% of their actual size (10% above the survace, 90% below).

If you check out our photos you´ll see what we mean when we say they are so peacful and beautiful to look at. Each with its own shape, size and colours. The intense blue colouration is caused by the compression of the ice.

The boat also took us to the front of three massive glaciers to watch and wait in anticipation for huge chunks to crack away form its main body and crach down in to the lake. It was an annoying process as being so wide, when you heard the crack you weren't sure where to look until it was too late and all you caught was the huge splash. Trying to capture this on a photo was even more fustrating but still it was a superb act of nature to witness.

Moreno Glacier
Albeit a great day out on the boat we didn't get to see the main atrraction here, the Moreno Glacier, so the next day we jumped in a minibus to the national park to go see this famous wonder of the world.

Now this glacier is almost impossible to describe and show on small photos but please please believe me when I tell you that it's probably the most amazing thing I have EVER seen in my life and it beats Niagra Falls and the Grand Canyon easily.

The width of this amazing glacier is 3 miles and its height is 60 metres above the water level, and another 130 meters below the water level. Its length is about 19 miles. In order to get a perspective on the size of the glacier, it's enough to say that it can contain the entirity of the Buenos Aires area.

The ice slides down the mountain and cracks and falls in to the lake but at times it blocks the water from flowing through and causes a build up in pressure. Eventually the water eats it way through at one side causing a tunnel which gets bigger and bigger until the weight of the ice gets to much for the tunnel to hold and it collapses. The last massive collapse was two years ago and was televised and over 1 million people turned up to watch it live insitu.

We were lucky in that we arrived very late in the day and were there with only about another 80 people as opposed to a thousand on a busy day. So it was so so quiet except for these eery cracking sounds almost as loud as thunder. To me, with the grey sky and sharp edges to its peaks, it reminded me of Superman 1 where he throws that glowing stick in to the ice and its builds a city for him.

Even though I stared at this beast for over an hour I still could not fathom or take in its sheer size... it was hard to believe when it looks such an inhospitable environment, you have so much respect for its power..

We were lucky enough to see several huge chunks breakaway, maybe the size of a three story townhouse, crash down in to the lake causing huge tidal type waves. I wanted to just sit there for a whole day but our minibus would only wait one and a half hours so I felt very sad to leave.

That evening we took a bottle of red wine outside the hotel and as we were situated high on a hill we watched the sun set and took a few more nice photos.

I hope that some of you can come to Argentina some day and see this phenomenon, as to die without seeing such powerful natural structures would be a travesty. Its just not the same watching it at home on a David Attenborough documentary.

Jon and Sarah with oh so itchy feet.