To Calafate for a visit with Perito Moreno (Day 25)

I left Chalten in the early morning (one last sunrise view before I boarded the bus) to head south in the park to the town of Calafate. To be honest, most of what I had heard of Calafate wasn´t all that inticing: over-priced, touristy everything and not a whole lot going on. Except for a few of the biggest glaciers in Argentina.

My plan was to get to Calafate, see the Perito Moreno Glacier, and get out. When I arrived at the hostel, I learned that there were actually a couple of different tour options. Being the anti-touristy snob that I am, I really wasn´t planning on taking a tour- just a bus to the Glacier viewpoint and back to town. But, I figured since I´m here and in the backyard of some pretty incredible history, I might as well take advantage of it. So, since it was only noon and I had lots of the day left, I decided I´d try the Perito Moreno tour.

Unfortunately (or not..) the tour was full. But a couple from North Carolina had just checked into the hostel and was also looking to visit Perito Moreno Glacier this afternoon by rental car. They were kind enough to invite me along and off we went. After we negotiated our way out of town (driving in Argentina is a little...um...different and Tony did a great job with Ursula and I as backseat navigators) we made our way out into the Calafate countryside. The luxury of being in a car was that we could stop for a photo opp whenever we wanted and had a chance to catch some awesome shots:

We arrived to the park and boarded a shuttle to take us down to the glacier lookout. By this time, we had already taken so many photos of the views, but they kept getting better and better.

Now I haven´t even seen an iceberg in person, let alone a glacier. I think I can honestly say that the Perito Moreno Glacier is the most exquisite, fascinating and captivating thing I have EVER seen.


To start, there was not a cloud in the sky and the sun was out in full force- a gift for this kind of weather in this area. I kept looking at this humungeous icefield (55m high above water level and up to 180m in total, 2km wide and 14km long- yeah, that huge) icefield and thinking how this ice has been around for centuries and centuries. We walked along the boardwalk that leads you down three different viewing level, listening to the thundering of the glacier calving and watching huge chunks drop into the lake. Spectacular.

And I took this one through Tony´s binoculars. It made a cool frame...

I could have stayed there forever. It was so captivating that I didn´t even really mind the herds of other tourists, all clammering to get a perfect shot, which wasn´t hard. And the glacier show is constant. I think I managed to capture two calvings: this first one where one of the icebergs burst in two and exposed the underbelly


and this second one where a huge chunk has just been let off the main glacier face.


Totally incredible. And the wave that this chunk created made such an incredible noise as it passed under the whole glacier, echoing and thundering all the way. And the coolest thing about the Perito Moreno Glacier is that it´s the only glacier that continues to advance, when most are receeding. The result is that it continues to dam up the river


until the point where the pressure exerted by the water, the ice and the land it butts up against culminates in a huge explosion. This happened most recently in March 2004 and given the sounds of the little bits we heard today, I can´t even imagine what that would sound like. Pretty awesome.

We wandered back to the car totally charged. I have never seen anything like this. Even as we were driving away, we could still hear the thundering from the glacier.