El Calafate,
Argentina
Thursday, March 16, 2006
El Calafate is a small, touristy and quite pleasant little town whose sole purpose in life is to provide services to the Marino Glacier. Being the conscientious tourists that we are, we booked ourselves onto the alternative glacier tour, that involved bird watching, coffee, glacier viewing walk, glacier platform viewing, glacier viewing by boat etc etc. The glacier calves off large blocks of ice every few minutes, a very impressive sight accompanied by a crack that sounds like a gun shot. We narrowly missed the biggest event of the calving calendar, a once every few years occurrence, where the glaciers entire snout falls into the lake. The glacier pushes onto the land at one point, and after a few years a tunnel forms under this section. This tunnel then collapses into the lake to tremendous applause, screaming and general mayhem - the splash is forced over 100 meters into the sky. This happened on Monday, and we got to the glacier on Wednesday - DAMN! This glacier is very active, moving about 2 meters per day at some points along it face, so it was very impressive to see and hear the crashing ice. I couldn't help fantasising over dropping a few grenades into some of the cracks to speed things along though!
We chill in El Calafate today, and then take a flight to Buenos Aires tomorrow. The buses from here to B.A take 47 hours, an insane amount of time to be stuck in a bus. Flights take about 4 hours - thank goodness for the Wright brothers!
Take care readers
