El Calafate....Patagonia.....Glaciar Madness

  El Calafate, Patagonia, Argentina
Saturday, March 28, 2009

From the jungle to the glaciers:

Well as luxurious as the buses are over here, we decided to fly to Patagonia (7 hr plane journey..... you can only imagine how long the bus would have been....)
The flight was adventerous to say the least: just imagine all of a sudden an air hostess is screaming for a doctor on the plane.... old man in front of us decided to croke..... yep had a heart attack...... poor wife was beside him and we are just looking at this body on the floor and the doctor giving him CPR.... not a nice sight at 9 in the morning.... but we got to our destination ok.... we were glad to get off that plane....Also the landing was mighty scary.... Patagonia sure is rural... surrounded by desert.

We were gobsmacked by the diversity of Argentina... few hours ago we were sweating it out in the jungle and now freezing our asses off.

All was worth it when we got to our cabin... cutest little thing in the world... one up, one down... felt like we were in an episode of Little house on the Prairie...


Early start the next morning... Stephen was surrounded by dogs the whole morning... i am convinced they were crying when we got on the bus. Up to see the Petito Moreno glacier in the middle of The Glacier National Park... this park is huge... 600,000 hectares (for you farmers out there that understand hectares)...



We came around a corner and caught our first sight of the glaciar.... mind boggling to say the least.... Stephen had a smile bigger than the Joker.... this glaciar is nuts... ok ready for some facts.... this glaciar is 14 kilometres long... 5 km wide... and 60 metres tall..... so big that it stops the running of the river from one side to the other... also one of only 3 glaciars that is actually getting bigger each day...



Then we hear this thunderous noise... thought we were going to die... but it was just the noise of the detachment of ice blocks from glacier crashing into the water.... so now we have a floating iceberg.... couldnt help ourselves singing The Titanic song.... you know the one... Celine Dion eat your heart out...



Just a fantastic day... what a scene...