Day 43

Tuesday 14^th December 2010

Up for 07:30 today as we were getting collected at 08:00. We had breakfast in the hostel which was pretty good actually, cereal, toast and jam, fresh orange and coffee.

We boarded our transport for the day and headed west towards the Perito Moreno Glacier which is about 80km from the hostel. We arrived at the first look out point just after 09:00 and got our first view of the glacier. It’s set at the back of Lago Argentino and is absolutely stunning.

The most amazing thing about this glacier though is how accessible it is, its literally at the end of a road. If you wanted to go and see most others you would have a fairly big trek on you hands!

The view from a distance is spectacular as it sprawls up the mountain behind the lake, apparently it takes the ice at the back of the glacier 300 – 400 years to get to the front wall and eventually drop into the lake. It’s a stable glacier which means that it flows down the valley and calves off at the front edge at the same rate that it is forming as the snow falls in the mountains at the top. Like a river the middle of the glacier flows more quickly than the edges and it calves about 2m a day here. The edges only move about 13cm a day.

After this we were taken to the harbour for our boat trip (don’t you know). We boarded (embarked?) and set off across the lake.

The wind hadn’t settled any from the day before so we were delighted to be invited out onto the deck. The wind and spray cut through our clothes like a knife as we watched the glacier approach. The front walls are 60 meters high and it carries on for another 100 meters below the surface, although it doesn’t float, its actually sat on the rocks at the bottom. The boat took us up close to the moraine (front edge) which was hugely impressive with massive crevasses in the ice, some are 30-40m deep.

It’s very impressive indeed, listening to the ice crack off and fall into the lake, but it was bloody freezing! You could see some people on the glacier ready to go trekking, we quite fancied doing this but we were told that it would cost us about $150 (US) each so we thought better of it. We found out whilst on the trip that on the other trip you do everything that we were doing today plus the trekking, so we could have cancelled this trip, booked the one with trekking and made up the difference which would have been a lot more viable. Grrrr, Suz was not a happy girl.

We made our way over to the national park and were told about the routes and various lookout points.

We decided to do things in reverse so we went to the (empty) restaurant first and had cheese and ham pie. With the hope that we would then miss the crowds at each lookout point for the rest of the day and it worked!

We were stood at one of these lookout points when Suz turned to me and said

 “it’s big innit?”

“what?” I replied.

“Nature” she said

“yes darling, nature is big”.

We wandered around the various lookout points for a couple of hours and were lucky enough to see quite a few big bits of ice break off the glacier into the lake. The noise is deafening, like a fire work show and you have to be constantly watching as the ice falls before the sound reaches you, so if you hear the noise forget it, you’ve missed the ice falling.

Back aboard the coach we headed back into town and asked to be dropped of at the supermarket. We have to be up early again tomorrow (06:00) so we decided to eat in tonight and get to bed early. We bought the ingredients for Bacon, Pasta, Peas (my favourite dish from back home) some strawberries and ice cream, and yes a bottle of red wine. What? Were on holiday!

We went home for a siesta (well Suz did), Skyped my folks for the last time before we hit Sydney and then cooked up a storm at the hostel (slight exaggeration).

We took the remnants of the bottle of wine with us back to the room and watched a film on the laptop ( I Love You Phillip Morris starring Jim Carrey and Ewan Mcgregor), which wasn’t bad. Suz just about managed to keep her eyes open until the credits and then she was out like a light.

Somebody in the hostel had been annoyed enough by last night’s argument to retaliate tonight, with some hard house music! So I sat and read my book until they gave up. Yey!