The next leg of our trip involved our 3rd visit to Argentina to visit El Calafate, and the Perito Moreno Glacier, which a friend back in London had recommended to us (thanks Hugh, we changed our itinerary to do this and we’re glad that we did!). The trip across the border via the Dorotea Pass in our hire car proved to be interesting, but less stressful than we had expected – 2 different offices where you have to present your passport to the Police and the car’s documents to the Customs officers.
This is the paper to take the hire car across the border, by the time we got back it had been stamped 6 times!!
It turns out that there are more than 50 border crossings between Chile and Argentina because of the length of the border between the 2 countries. The drive is along Route 40, renowned for being a boring road to drive and it certainly lives up to its reputation. Up until a few years ago, the entire 250km was gravel, but now its possible to drive the entire way on tarmac unless you choose to take a 60km shortcut. On the recommendation of a Dutch cyclist, but against the advice of Adele, Cameron and Ollie, I decided to take the shortcut only to admit defeat after 10km as the car bottomed out for the 3rd time!! I think I lost a few brownie points that day.
Lupins are wildflowers here, lining all the roads.
We found a great place to stay in El Calafate called Solares del Sur Cabins, owned by a humorous Argentinian named Sergio who, it turns out, used to be the CFO for Cadbury’s South American operation in Buenos Aires before seeing the light 17 years ago and moving to El Calafate.
Our home in El Calafate
We had heard so many amazing stories about the Perito Moreno Glacier that we had high expectations and we were not disappointed. The glacier is only around an hour’s drive away but the road is littered with “stunt bunnies”, large hares that habitually run across the road in front of fast moving cars. Being the animal lover that he is, Ollie was quite distressed at seeing the cuddly creatures nearly get wiped out every few miles!
The glacier is HUGE and photographs truly cannot do it justice. It’s like a large living beast, creaking and groaning and occasionally ‘calving’ where large slices fall off into the ice waters below, the sound of this happening is unbelievable like a long thunder clap right in front of your face. Amazing. You literally spend hours just standing staring at this huge wall of ice and you are quite literally spellbound, and I think subconsciously aware that you might never see anything quite like it again. You also have to hand it to the Argentinian national park service CONAF, they keep the parks beautiful and have built a brilliant series of metal walkways to see the glacier from every angle possible. And before we left we did a boat trip to view it from the water too!
They don’t call the National Park here Los Glaciers for no reason; the next day we went out on a huge new catamaran trip to see the 3 other large glaciers in this region, all different, all spectacular and all only accessible via boat. They are the Upsala, Seco and the Spegazzini, our family favourite as you can see it winding it’s way down huge terraces on the mountainside. Plus the boys could have hot chocolate on the boat!
Spegazzini Glacier
That evening we finally caught up with my brother, Tim, who decided to join us here for Christmas. He had already been in South America for a couple of days travelling, so was pretty wiped out – it’s a very long flight from Perth, Australia to get here!! A good Patagonian lamb dish and some Malbec revived him briefly. He’s basically doing this bit of Argentina/Chile in reverse and we catch up again in the Lake District, where we fly to next. Our drive back to Chile was more interesting as the wind had finally died down. We did a side trip to see Miladon Cave, where in 1935 a German explorer found the preserved remains of a 10,000 year old giant sloth. (apparently they are now located in the British Museum?). The cave is in a beautiful spot between a lake and forest. Then we found out what everyone in Punta Arenas does on Sundays, the local racetrack was packed with people watching car racing. The rest was uneventful except for when we are packing to fly north Ollie remembered he had left his ipad mini in the hire car we had already returned! Whoopsie, as Ollie would say. Luckily Uncle Tim is going to be in Punta Arenas next week so might be able to get it back? Ollie & I account for all our losses so far (see our Most Wanted page for details).
Finally, the wifi here is awful so it’s taken us 2 weeks to post this – we are now in the northern lakes district area for some relaxation and volcano climbing for Christmas – will post about this by the New Year hopefully. HAPPY CHRISTMAS to you all – thanks for reading this and for your comments – we love them, it helps us feel connected so don’t be shy we’d love to hear from you!
Even the bus shelters here are interesting!
We sneaked in to watch a little car racing – very noisy!
The Milodon Giant Sloth
7 Responses to Perito Moreno Glacier, El Calafate, Argentina – again!