El Calafate - Santa Cruz - Argentina

Perito Moreno glacier in all its glory


Well, once again I may have left too much time between posts and now will have to try to condense or dredge the memories of less than a week ago out of my befuddled mind. I think the last time I wrote was before we went on the Beagle channel. I suppose that's a good place to start then. I've also just noticed that this computer is spell checking for me as I go along. I approve. My multiple typos were a great source of chagrin to me.
So, the Beagle channel. Well it was a very fun trip and having had a very...vigorous (i.e somewhat painful) massage and been covered in a substance that smelled like deep heat we went out into the cold waters of the southern Atlantic. I admit to feeling a little like Withnail. The picture on the previous post is of a me standing on Isla Bridges, one of the stops on the trip. Having been told I looked too cheery for someone who was slowly freezing and being eroded by the rain I decided to look slightly more apt for the camera. I think I look like Geoff in this picture for those of you who know him. I'm sure he would disagree. I really felt like I was in Galway on that little boat. Freezing, raining and with fog on people's glasses. Ah, home!
It was a little boat which could fit about 10 people in it. Cheap and cheerful, cosy one would call it if it had been warmer and it was great craic. We drank beer and hot chocolate, we got to call the driver El Capitan and we lurched around on the waves trying not to spill it all. We nearly fell out while trying to take pictures of cormorants and jumping seals and one of us felt seasick :). I met a nice Danish man who'd gone kayaking in the freezing water the day before, an interesting man he was too on his way around the American continent kayaking in impossibly cold and harsh places and some nice ones. Fair dues to him. Hi, Ole if you're reading this! He's a nice man with a very red jacket :)Around the most southerly lighthouse in the world in the most southerly boat in the world with, I'm sure, the most southerly drinks in our hands. They really make a big thing of that end of the world stuff there! The Apocolypsists (sp?) would love it. Then I got off the boat and went home and we all lived happily ever after :)
We went to stay with the self proclaimed "freaky" Ana after that in her "Posada del Fin del Mundo". It's a lovely place and I recommend it to anyone - bright, warm and with a kookie proprieter. She told us about how relatives of Shackleton would stay on their way to Antarctica and of the kayaker who after paddling around the Argentinian peninsula there died on another trip from Australia to New Zealand. There was also a lovely cat and a dog and lovely books. I felt very at home :)
Ushuaia began its life as a penal colony for really bad people. So bad were they that they put them in a place where even if you did escape there's no way in hell you could get anywhere without dying or starving first. So we went on the train that the convicts used to take to go cutting down trees to build the town. It's a lot nicer now and we even had sandwiches and scones and things and took pictures of horses :) It was snowy up there too and that was where Ernesto was born. I'm glad we got to do something with the snow seeing as it's too snowy for ice climbing now. I couldn't believe that one - it's too SNOWY for climbing on ice and not snowy enough to go sledding. For chrissake! But that's for another time. So Ernesto was born but all too soon his mothers left him and he had to fend for himself. Such is the life of a snowman at the end of the world!
Continuing with the prison theme we went to visit the museum in the old prison too. It was very interesting and very large. The art there particularly enthused me, there are some pictures of it on my photo website.
And so we were to leave Ushuaia. I really liked it there but the in between season thing messed it up a bit. As far as feeling like I'm in a wintery place here is a little better! I think it's because the climate's better. Ushuaia is very like Ireland with a lot of rain and damp. We are, of course as the post name implies in El Calafate. The calafate is a bush with blueberry like fruit and one can get calafate jam, ice cream, tea, sweets, probably calafate flavoured edible underwear for all I know. It's a bit like dulce de leche is everywhere else in Argentina. For the uninitiated dulce de leche is like a soft butterscotch toffee that you can spread on things. I can't say it's not tasty but when it's included in nearly every dish you could get a little tired of it. But I digress hugely. The reason why we came here is because of a big (or multiple actually) fuck off glaciers which I find simply breathtaking and I think I prefer over Iguazu falls.
Parque Nacionale los Glaciares is populated by many glaciers but Perito Moreno is the most incredible with Upsala as a close second in my opinion. Perito Moreno is a 60 metre tall and 5 kilometre wide sheet of ice moving at 7m a day. You can see it coming over the Andes and into the blue grey waters of Lago Argentino, the largest lake in Argentina. It's a truly magnificent sight to behold. the enormous spikes of ice with the bluest colour I've ever seen in nature apart from the sky in the crevasses between them. Huge pieces of ice regularly fall off and crash with immense noises into the lake beneath and ships are dwarfed beside it. Incredible. Some of my pictures, I admit, don't really look real but they are. The blue seems too blue or the ice seems a bit too big to me. I've really enjoyed being here. We went on another boat trip to see more glaciers and I must say that the boat trip with the 10 of us in the Beagle channel was much more fun. It was that bit too plush and cut off from the outside world which was kind of the point of the journey. The fact that we had to get up at 6.30 in the morning to go on it didn't help either :). The redeeming features though were a small walk through a very nice and strangely ravaged looking forest to a lake filled with icebergs with two glaciers flowing down towards it and the sight of the Upsala glacier. This glacier is receding (it's gone back 5 kilometres in my lifetime) and has left the lake immediately in front filled with gigantic pieces of ice - they must be about 30 or 40 metres high. Some of them have sort of cracked in the middle to reveal very old ice which is the deepest, most beautiful colour blue. It really is something. Such a pity we can't go ice climbing in El Chalten :)
And another thing about El Calafate. It seems to have some sort of gnome invasion going on. Everywhere there are gnomes. I can't say I know why but I'm beginning to think the former hippie town, El Bolson, and its inhabitants may have something to do with it. I like gnomes, don't get me wrong, but their proliferation in this part of Argentina, not an overtly mystical place, is confusing. Usually all talk is of the most earthly things; sheep farming, wildlife watching, rock climbing, trekking, mate drinking. Gnomes, fairies and magic just don't figure. I think I'll enjoy being in El Bolson too, it seems just weird enough. As long as it's not filled with pretend mystic wannabe assholes I'll like it. Real weirdos are more in my line :)
And so we prepare to leave El Calafate and continue on to Perito Moreno (Perito Moreno is a very popular chap and has a lot of stuff named after him. This can make navigation a little confused to the unknowing traveller. We hope to see a cave, Cueva de los Manos, decorated with the 9000 year old handprints of cavemen, paw prints of rhea and other Patagonian animals. The canyon that it's in sounds pretty cool too, very deep with condor lairs in it and huge caves. I'm looking forward to it. Oh and there's a casino shaped like Machu Picchu here too. Hasta lluego mi amigos! My Spanish is improving!