With regret, we left Puerto Natales back to Argentina and a town called El Calafate where we would see one of the supposed natural wonders of the world, Perito Moreno - a huge glacier that´s constantly advancing and one of the few remaining the world. The town nearby, El Calafate, is very touristy and expensive, although upon arriving, we found a nice and cheap place to stay from a lady waiting for the buses. The only thing odd about it was the receptionist. When we asked her a question she looked petrified and also looked like she was about to murder us, all at the same time. Everytime we spoke to her she had this strange face, very weird!Deciding to go straight to the glacier, we hired a car from a very nice and helpful man. Car hire isn´t cheap here but it is much cheaper than taking one of the expensive, rip-you-off-to-hell tours that you find in Argentina. There´s not many signs in town, so I ask someone how to get to Perito Moreno and a guy tells me to take the road, left, out of town. After driving for twenty minutes we come across a police checkpoint and I ask if this is the correct road. It turns out, we´ve gone in completely the wrong direction and the man probably told us the wrong way on purpose! Cunt! Oh well, we find the right road had head out. The drive is pretty spectacular, going past lakes, deserts, mountains and glaciers. We enter the national park and the office is closed so we don´t have to pay and continue onwards past lakes and mountains covered in snow.
Our first view of the glacier is from faraway and it looks like a shining blue tongue. The colour has to be seen to be believed. There was only a few people there which was good as apparently the crowds can be unbelievable. The sight of Perito Moreno is quite simply, extraordinary. The glacier is up to 60m in height, 3 miles wide and 20 km in length. It comes down from three mountain areas which are permanently covered in ice and snow. The colour is a beautiful blue, punctuated by areas of white and areas of deep blue. Every so often, you hear a noise like thunder that is the glacier advancing which is does by up to 2 metres a day and every once in a while we saw bits of ice fall off the front of it. We walked around the network of catwalks which treated us to various viewpoints of it. We stayed for quite a beautiful, moody sunset before the long drive home. One the way, we narrowly missed Patagonian hares jumping out in front of the car and saw a couple of dead ones too. At one point, one jumped right in front of the car. I tried to swerve, slow down and drive around the poor thing but it actually run towards us and finally under the car. There was a big bump when we drove over it. There was nothing I could have done. I drove the rest of the way home feeling very sad, I´d never killed an animal before.
The next morning after barely any sleep, we work up late and had missed getting to the glacier for sunrise. We got there before anyone else and it was beautifully quiet, a part from the odd rumble from the glacier. We managed to have it to ourselves for a while, until, a huge group of turned up, disturbing our peace. In Perito Moreno we decided to do a walk to another viewpoint. Colin didn´t like this as he was waiting to see a big chunk fall off. Just as we got to the different viewpoint, we heard a huge bang and splashes followed by lots of screaming. A huge chunk had fallen off and we hadn´t seen it. Colin was not amused with me for making him walk in a different direction. Later on, we stayed at the main viewpoint as it looked like there was a huge area of ice that would fall off. We waited and waited. I had to go and check on the car and as I was coming back, a massive bit fell off which was fantastic. There`s huge waves in the lake afterwards. Satisfied that we had seen everything, we headed back to the town.
As it was so expensive to eat out, we decided to cook for ourselves. In our hostal, we had, basically, a whole cabin to ourselves. The kitchen was ours, the toilets were ours. It was great. Colin cooked a fantastic steak and we managed to connect the ipod up to the TV, so we had music played for the first time on the whole holiday. We drank lots of wine, listened to music and it felt like home. It was a lovely and memorable evening. The next day, we headed to the centre of trekking in Argentina, a town called El Chalten and home to the Fitzroy range of mountains.
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