El Calafate and Perito Moreno Glacier

Crossing back from Chile into Argentina, we took the bus to El Calafate, a popular tourist destination and gateway to Los Glaciares National Park.



By far the most famous place to see is the Perito Moreno Glacier, a 250 km² (97 sq mi) ice formation and the world's third largest reserve of fresh water (and of course we remember these facts from our Spanish-speaking tour guide and totally didn't look it up on Wikipedia).








So that's where we headed the day after our arrival, despite the chilly weather. First we went on board of a boat to get close to the "ice front"....

This was already pretty cool (yes, also literally). In particular, every couple of minutes or so, a large block of ice would separate from the big mass and drop into the water. Imagine a large building collapsing right in front of you and you get the idea.

They even offer tours to go hiking on the ice. Yes, the small dots on the left are actually people. -->

Having just hiked in the mountains, we passed on that one though.









The really awesome part was to see the glacier from the many observation decks they've build.













You can walk around there for hours and see the ice from many different angles.

A view from the top platform. Lots of tourists there, of course. As usual, every other tourist group was from Germany...

And yes, we made the obvious joke and asked whether they would serve a Vodka on ice in the nearby restaurant. Just to find out that, in fact, they did offer alcoholic drinks with glacier ice there - for a hefty surcharge...

Well other than that, there wasn't really much to do in El Calafate other than seeing more glaciers such as one called "Upsala". But we decided that we've seen enough ice for now.

Instead, we took it easy just went for a few walks along Largo Argentino, spotted a few flamingos...






... and spent a lot of quality time hanging out at a local coffee place. Or in German: Rumhängen! :-)


And preparing(*) ourselves for the upcoming 30 hour bus ride to our next destination: Bariloche, almost 2000km north of El Calafate. We'll tell you in our next blog post how that went.




(*) preparing = Max downloading TV shows such as "The Bachelor", "Two and a half men", "Revenge" from iTunes.