Petito Moreno Glacier

Trip Start Jan 17, 2008
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Trip End Jun 30, 2009


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Flag of Argentina  , Patagonia,
Thursday, October 30, 2008

Our flight to El Calafate left at about lunchtime from Bariloches surprisngly modern airport. I was quite hungover as I had gone to a bar with Amy and Stephanie and some others the night before. Daniella had sensibly gone to bed, which is what I was wishing I had done. We were flying with LADE, which is the Argentinian Airforce airline, who turned out to be a good airline and provided a nice meal (even though I did not eat any as I had eaten 30 minutes before in the airport cafe). There was some turbulence as we approached El Calafate Airport, due to the high winds which are very common in Patagonia. The landscape as we drove from the airport into the town was very bleak, there were no trees and few plants to speak of, except than low-lying shrubs. The surrounding hills were brown and desolate amd there were few landmarks to look at except a large lake, which surrounds the town and has a beautfiul shade of blue as its colour.

We were coming to the town, as most people do, to visit the Petito Moreno glacier, which is one of the most famous glaciers on the planet All wrapped up against the cold and the wind
All wrapped up against the cold and the wind
 . The town itself is not particularly attractive, there are a lot of shops that have obviously sprung up in the previous few years to cater for the invasion of tourists. The prices of the restaurants were so high, we decided to buy food from the supermarket in town, as opposed to eating out, though we did find a good bakery that had a great selection of empanadas - meat, spinach, cheese and ham to name a few... we also had to queue about 25 minutes for the ATM, as there is a bit of rush on Fridays to withdraw money before the weekend comes, and when the towns cashpoints often run out of money.
Whilst we were in El Calafate, the weather was not great, the town was always windy and on the second day, the day that we took a trip out to the glacier, there was a lot of rain, but then we did not really come for the weather!

The Petito Moreno glacier is located about 3 hours away by bus from the town, we left early in the morning and the first thing we did was go out in a boat onto the lake from where you have a fantastic, unrivalled view of the north face of the glacier, which is considered to be the best side to see it from. The glacier itself is surprsingly larger than you would except, it is over 60 metres in height and over 3 Km is width. Whilst we were on the boat, we were lucky enough to see some of the glacier ice break off from the main glacier and drop with a loud splash into water, where there were lots of icebergs floating in the water Argentinian flag
Argentinian flag
 . It was a pretty amazing sight to witness, thi glacier was definitely more impressive than the 2 glaciers that we had seen in New Zealand. 

Afterwards the bus dropped off as the visitor centre, unfortunately our bus would be returning to El Calafate at 3.30pm, still over 4 hours away. We would usually have gone for a walk, however we were in the middle of a torrential rain storm, it was pissing it down, and hundreds of tourists were crammed into the visitor centre cafeteria, which was not designed to take this amount of people inside. The prices were high, like in the town, so we had brought our own food to eat, which we were not allowed to consume inside the cafe, only outside. After eating our lunch of sandwiches, we had no choice but to go inside and order a hot drink, as it was so cold outside! We ended up passing a bored couple of hours waiting for the bus, though the rain did ease off a bit to allow us to walk down to the viewpoints to get a view of the south side of the glacier. The petito moreno glacier is a truely amazing sight, and in our opinion, a must see for visitors to Argentina. We returned to El Calafate after having dozed off in the bus, and were given a lift down to the supermarket by one of the tourists at the hotel, thank god, as it was still raining heavily. We had dinner and hit the sack as it was another early-ish start the following day, when we taking the bus back to Chile to the town of Puerto Nateles, gateway to Torres del Paine.

All in all, the glacier was worth coming for, but the town itself was not so good.
 
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