From Puerto Madryn I made my way further south in Patagonia to El Calafate. El Calafte is the town closest to Perito Moreno Glacier. It is a tourist town that you stay at if you are going to the Glacier.
The hostal I stayed at here was lovely. It was a hotel last year and had only just become a hostal, so it was very new and had great showers and heating. A very pleasant relief after having no hot showers in Puerto Madryn.
The hostal was able to book me on a glacier tour for the following day so I spent the first day having a look at the town of El Calafate and the lake and nature reserve next to the town.
There were even Flamenco´s here, which I was very surprised by. These Flamenco´s (Flamingo) were a bit too far away to get good photo´s of but I tried to take some anyway.
The next morning I had to be up at 5am to be picked up by the bus. It was still very dark outside when I jumped on the bus. There were 7 people on my tour which was good as it is better to have smaller groups, two of the guys were from Montreal, Canada. Their names were Pierre and Elio.
We headed to the national park where the glacier is located.
We were the first tour group to arrive and had the walkway and viewing platform to ourselves. It was still quite dark but we could see the glacier.
The glacier was huge. It is almost 5km across and stands almost 80 metres high. Because it was overcast and raining lightly it looked like the glacier was very blue.
After walking around the boardwalk to view the glacier we went back on the bus to go to the boat harbour. At the harbour we boarded a boat and headed up the side of the glacier. We couldn´t get too close incase a bit of the glacier fell off and plunged into the water.
We took the boat to the other side of the lake where we gotreadyto go for a trek. The trek took us up the side of the glacier through some national park before we then turned and went onto the top of the glacier.
We walked about one third of the way across the glacier, which took us about an hour and a half.
It had been raining most of the morning so I had to borrow a bright yellow rain coat so I didn´t get completely wet. Unfortunately the bottom half of my jeans were still exposed so they were getting wet and the water was making its way up my legs. It was very cold.
We had to wear funny thing on our shoes called crampons. These help you to grip onto the ice which is very slippery.
We got to see some really amazing formations on the glacier, one of which was the ice wave. It was a big piece of the glacier in the shape of an ocean wave. I was able to stand under it and I look like I am holding it up.
The other cool thing was the ravine. It was about 5 floors deep and at the bottom there was a river of fast flowing water gushing through it. Our tour guides held their arms out straight so we could walk up to the edge of the ice shelf and look over into the ravine. It was very blue at the bottom and the noise of the river was very loud.
It was a very difficult walk, which took a total of 5 hours. 3 hours were spent walking on the glacier. I will never forget it as it was so strange and very interesting.
When we caught the boat back across to the bus they gave us a glass of whiskey to warm us from the inside and the whiskey had big chunks of glacier ice in it....!!!!
I was very glad to get back to the hostal that night and be inside and warm again. I was so tired I ordered a pizza to be delivered and then went straight to bed after dinner.
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