El Calafate and Perito Moreno Glacier

Yesterday we left Buenos Aires. We really enjoyed our time there and kept very busy. Everyone says this about Buenos aires but I will repeat the statement. It felt like a European city. Santiago last year felt like a South American city while Buenos Aires really didn't. Talking to the Uber driver on the way to the Jorge Newbury airport only confused me more. He spoke passable English and I asked him about wages for various types of workers. I was really surprised by some of his answers. For example, a teacher at a private school which pays more than the public system may only earn 12000 CDN per year. How do they afford to live in Buenos Aires. Crazy.

We flew the 3.5 hours down to El Calafate which is in Patagonia. My initial impression on landing at the airport was flat and windy. We took a cab to our Air BNB and in the part of town we are staying at they have never heard of urban densificaion. All of the buildings are so far apart from each other. There was a grocery store nearby so we bought some food for supper and then walked down into the centre of town to pick up our rental car. The older part of town was in a river valley and reminded me a little of Pincher Creek. The main point of interest in this area is the Perito Moreno glacier located 1.5 hour drive west of town. One can do bus tours to the Glacier but it was about the same price to rent the car for 24 hours. Having seen many glaciers here in Canada and even skied on one, I was unsure whether or not I would be that impressed by the glacier. Cheryl kept telling me facts about the glacier that it was the third largest in the world but then I saw something saying it was the third largest in South America so I wasn't quite sure what the true fact was. If you went on a tour one could combine a boat tour on the lake by the glacier and/or even a climb on the glacier. I found the blog of a travel writer who reported that he enjoyed doing the board walks across from the glacier and didn't think there was much merit for doing the hike or boat excursion so we decided to stick to that. We met two American women in the grocery store who had gone that day and they said that they were pretty impressed.

The advice for people with cars was to get going early to avoid the bus tours which would get going later in the morning. We were away by 7 and were to the park gates by 7:45 with about 20 other vehicles and the odd smaller bus tour. We had to pay a whopping 45 dollars per person to get into the park which we learned later that everyone on the trip had to pay even those on the bus tours. After entering the park, there was a large lake on our left which contained multiple icebergs maybe the size of 2 or transport trucks. Eventually we rounded a corner and caught the first glimpse of the Perito Moreno glacier from several kms away and it was huge. The glacier ends in a lake where it calves icebergs and at the calving face it measures 70 metres in height. As we were so early we got a choice parking spot and started hiking the slightly metal boardwalk a few hundred metres from the calving face. Every 5 or 10 minutes there would be a cracking and huge chunks of ice would fall into the lake, creating large impressive waves. We walked the entire 5 km boardwalk system getting every possible angle of view of the glacier. It was mesmerizing. 4 hours we spent there but by 12:30 had started to flag a little so we heading back to the car to drive back the 1.5 hours to El Calafate return the car and chill out. Cheryl thought it had been the most exciting day on the holiday. It was definitely a memorable experience.Leggi altro