The Ice Age is coming!!!

Iceman
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So another comfortable 14 hour bus journey where we headed south to Rio Gallegos and changed to go inland to El Calafate.

El Calafate is a touristy town, whose main existence is due to the Glaciers. These were discovered by an Argentine explorer called Perito Mereno, hence the name of the famous glacier - Perito Mereno. The lake the glacier is on, is called Lake Argentina. Clever chaps these Argentines.

We checked into our lovely, but incredibly hot hostel. We sprung for a double room and it was lovely. Absolutely gorgeous views over the lake.

Glacier seen from terraces
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The next day we headed off on a tour to see the glacier. On the way we stopped to watch the sunrise over the mountains. The sun doesn´t rise here till about 10am at this time of year, which is a little odd to us. Anyway on we went entering Parc National des Glaciers. Soon after we got our first view of the glacier, from the south end. It´s amazing. Bigger and very different from Fox glacier, we´d seen in NZ. For a start it´s on a lake so it and the snowcovered mountains are reflected beautifully. The peaks of the mountains were pink as the sun continued to rise. Beautiful. I took far too many photos.

Perito Moreno Glacier, north face
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On we went and we decided to opt for a boat trip on the lake which is the closest you can get to the glacier without actually walking on it. (Been there, done that). So armed with a hot chocolate against the cold we went up on deck where it was very chilly - the wind coming right off the top of the glacier, was, er, glacial. The North face of the glacier is about 80 metres tall, with another 180 metres or so under the water. It´s impressive.

Every so often you can hear it creak and see a chunk of ice fall off into the lake with a resounding splash and the lake is littered with large ice cubes. Apparently the glacier advances 2 metres and loses 2 metres of ice per day.

Glacier seen from terraces
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After our boat trip we went up to the viewing platforms to get a better view of the scale of it. We could see the large catarmaran we´d just been on looking like a little dinky toy in contrast to the glacier. Wow, it´s a big one. The views were amazing, we continued to hear and see big chunks fall off. Check out the photos (coming soon....)

Next stop the end of the world.