After half a day just stroling around Ushuaia, we flew north (I don't think you can even fly south from Ushiaia, haha) to El Calafate (also in Argentina) on the 1st of April. We landed around 16 in the afternoon and got to our hostel, Hostel America del Sur (definitely recommendable!!). The landscaping is very beautiful: when we drove from the airport, on one side you could see dry, moon-like landscaping and on the other side we saw very lush and green areas surrounding a lake and snowcovered mountains in the background. From our hostel we could see the lake and the mountains.
The people at the hostel helped us finding a tour to the glacier Perito Moreno, so the next day (Thursday the 2nd) we left the hostel at 8:30 and arrived at the national park Parque Nacional Los Glaciares around 10:30.
Here are some facts about Perito Moreno:
* The glacier Perito Moreno is part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field (Campo de Hielo Sur),
which has an area of around 16.000 km2.
* The glacier Perito Moreno itself has an area of around 250 km2, and is one of the few glaciers that doesn't lose volume - it has kept the same volume since 1917!
* It is one of the most dynamic glaciers of this area - It moves around 2,5 meters A DAY!!
* Each summer it loses about 14 meters in height, but since 70 % of the glacier is increasing and only 30 % decreasing, it quickly regains it's "losses".
* Perito Moreno is located around 180 above sealevel and at the same latitude as London, so you wouldn't think that it would be the best conditions for a glacier. The reason why it is there is the Andean Mountains and the winds from the Pacific Ocean: The strong and damp winds blowing from the west from the Pacific hit the Andean Mountains, are pushed upwards and turn into snow. The snow falls and the weight of all that snow (that is, it's own weight) is so heavy that the snow turns into ice.
* The icewall that we saw was about 70 meters high! The glacier is about 700 meters high at the deepest/highest spot!
Here, you can see some cool pictures and an even more cool video where a BIG piece falls off the glacier (fast forward to min. 2:20 if you don't want to see the whole movie): www.tierraunica.com/tierra_unica/2008/07/incredible-live-images-of-little-black-dogs-fall.html
Unfortunately we didn't see any pieces fall off. We heard a lot of pieces fall off, though, but inside the glacier - so we only heard cracking sounds and saw some small waves coming out from underneath the glacier into the lake.
We sailed close to the glacier and walked through a beautiful woodland before we went to get our "spike-shoes" on so we could walk on the glacier! We went off in a big group - around 20 people (not everyone were as young as we are, let's say it that way...), so we always had to wait for people.. But we got a quick introduction to how to walk on ice with the spike-shoes (going down a hill you for example look like Michael Jackson in the song Thriller doing the zombie-dance-move, haha), and went off. We walked on the glacier for around 2 hours, and it was beautiful. Nothing like I imagined it to be, though. I had imagined "white" ice with a plane surface. What we walked on, however, was "dirty" ice (the winds blow dirt from the woods onto the glacier) with many holes and "hills"; a very rough surface. But it was a very unique experience! Around half way we got a Whiskey On The Rocks - literally speaking! The "rocks" was of course the ice from the glacier, so even though I'm not fond of Whiskey, I had to try it - I mean, when would I ever get the chance again..?!:-)
After walking on the glacier, we had lunch with a view to the glacier - spectacular! And then we sailed back across the lake to get to a viewpoint where we could get a better view of the glacier from up a hill. It was spectacular! It sounds like a cliché, but when you are that close to one of nature's wonders, you really feel small!
On Friday the 3rd we left El Calafate to go a bit south to Puerto Natales in Chile. Again, the view was.. well, not spectacular - the landscaping was very flat, and we drove through "no man's land" for some hours before we got to Puerto Natales around 1pm. We had been recommended to go to a hostel called "Erratic Rock" because they have information meeting every day at 3pm about the national park Parque Nacional Torres del Paine where we wanted to go. Our plan was to go to the meeting and then catch a bus to the park later on in the afternoon. But since it was low season we had to wait 'till the next day to take the one bus that left a day to the park. But that didn't matter - we stayed at the Erratic Rock hostel - a very cosy hostel with very nice people! And they had the biggest VHS-collection (YES, VHS, not DVD - so old school, haha:-D ).
We had thought that we could go to the park and stay at a residence and then do 1-day-tours from there, so we could sleep in a bed and wouldn't have to carry our backpacks around. But at the info-meeting we realized that we had to do an actual trek to be able to see different parts of the park!:-S That is, we had to pack our backpacks with food, cooking equipment and only the necessary clothes etc., and we had to carry it around - no lamas or the like to carry our stuff like we had in Peru...! Also, we would have to sleep in tents and not in real beds - it would have been 3 times the price if we wanted to stay in the residencies and not just rent tents:-S Luckily the hostel had all the equipment we needed to rent, so we bought all the food we needed, packed our gear and got ready to get up at 6:30 the next day to go to the park Torres del Paine.
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