El Calafate

Day 65 – Argentina, take 5

We got up early to reorganise our packs after trekking and head for a bus back into Argentina. We had to fill in a swine flu questionnaire as we left Chile, strange given we’ve had to do no such thing on our previous ten border crossings, including coming into to Chile. The Argentine side of the border featured a large “The Malvinas (Falkland Islands) are Argentinean” sign. Many of the Argentinean operations in Las Malvinas were based in this part of Argentina and you see many war memorials. I can’t ever recall seeing such references in England, though I suppose they exist somewhere.

“The Malvinas (Falkland Islands) are Argentinean.”

El Calafate, named after a type of berry, is a touristy town primarily set up to serve the nearby southern sector of Parque Nacional de los Glaciares, and in particular the extremely popular Perito Merino Glacier. Our hostel was billed as being “only 7 minutes walk from downtown.” Of course 7 minutes walk (more like 10) puts you on the outskirts of this fairly small town. In this case it also puts you on top of a very windy hill with nice views over town and the adjacent lake.

What followed was another exciting afternoon of grocery shopping, laundry and the like.

America del Sur Hostel with the clouds whizzing by overhead.

View over the lake from the hostel dining room.

Day 66 – Not another f’ing glacier

(Apologies to anyone who reads this who isn’t my father who might be the only person capable of detecting the very obscure Monty Python reference in today’s title.)

Options for today’s tour to Perito Merino Glacier ranged from expensive to ludicrously expensive. We opted for the former, a ‘regular’ bus to and from the park. When we booked the bus we were told that it would drop us off mid-morning, leave us to our own devices for ‘about 4 hours’ and then pick us up to return us to El Calafate.

When the driver spat out his fifty or so passengers outside the ferry office at the park (another variety of extremely expensive tour options were available here) he left us with instructions to be waiting outside the restaurant at 5pm, some seven hours distant.

It quickly became apparent that 7 hours was quite a bit more than we needed to walk the two or three kilometres of metal boardwalk. But we tried to make the most of it, walking from viewpoint to viewpoint as slowly as possible.

At this point I guess it would make sense to explain what makes this glacier so popular. Firstly, it’s big, about 6om high in the centre. Secondly, it terminates into a lake, making it quite picturesque. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, it’s very active, the odds of seeing a decent size block carve off are very good with only a little patience. And in fact with the ample time appointed to us we did see many pieces fall from the glacier into the lake below, the biggest being a little smaller than a mini I suppose. Each piece that fell made a really loud noise, like a cannon, even the relatively small pieces were surprisingly loud.

In 2004 a piece the size of a Toorak mansion came thundering down right where people were standing. You’re not allowed to get that close anymore. The other interesting thing this glacier does (though it wasn’t happening during our visit), is that is advances forward to touch the peninsula in the middle of the lake. This splits the lake in two, and one half continues to fill behind the glacier with no outlet. Eventually due to increasing water pressure and the movement of the glacier the water from the high side finds a way though, sometimes with such force and in such volume that it causes downstream flooding. In the past the locals have considered the use of explosives or a huge fire to try and stop this happening (at a similar type of glacier in Norway they have built a tunnel through the peninsula). Anyway, some photos…

After lunch the weather deteriorated further, the views diminished and we’d walked every centimetre of path, so we found somewhere semi-sheltered to huddle (along with everyone else on our bus) and read our books for a few hours until the bus finally arrived.

The hostel didn’t have a bed for us that night, but the kind staff rang around and found us one nearby. They even said we could hang around until bed time if we didn’t want to leave straight away!

Day 67 – Finally a decent microbrew

We moved back to the nice hostel, and seen as it was so comfortable we decided to take it easy. During the day we wandered around the shops, Erin looking for jewellery and pressies, me to replenish my ever dwindling supply of reading material (Erin was more successful).

The hostel sold a local microbrew which was actually nice, all the previous microbrews I’d tasted in Argentina were horrible (the one in Ushuaia was so badly infected it wasn’t even drinkable, I never saw anyone go back for seconds). So that evening I dragged Erin down to the place where they brewed the beer, Sholken. Disappointingly although the beer was nice the place wasn’t that flash, so we headed back to the hostel for an early night.