Just as El Chaltén is a super cute small village, El Calafate is a pretty cute mid-sized town. Our bus arrived on Wednesday in the late evening and, after checking into the hotel, we wandered around the main strip for a bit before turning in. Highlight: the Borges & Alvarez Libro Bar (see picture on left below). The next morning, Brad flew back to Buenos Aires while I took the Big Ice tour of the Petito Moreno glacier (see above).
I have to be honest: there were a lot of things I didn't like about the tour. For one thing, it was a huge group of people -- at least 80, if not 100. For another, it had all the problems associated with big tours: it rather felt like we were being shuffled along an assembly line as we visited the balconies to view the glacier and hiked up to the camp where we would be fitted with crampons and harnesses (the harnesses were purely for emergencies, we weren't doing any climbing). That fitting process rather reminded me of going through airport security, which takes all the romance out of the experience.
All that being said, walking on the glacier itself is pure magic. I'd always thought of glaciers as relatively unchanging huge blocks of ice.
They are huge blocks of ice, but they're anything but static -- especially in Argentina, where the glaciers move significantly faster than those in Europe or in Antarctica. (This is partially because there is actually a layer of water separating the glacier from the bedrock below.) For example, we visited a beautiful ice cave (see right) that the guides were pretty confident would cave in within the next couple of months. Moreover, the structures and formations in the glacier itself are incredible (and unbelievably beautifully blue). I'd have willingly put up with three times the amount of Disneyland BS to walk over these crevasses and marvel at the foreign beauty of the landscape.
I probably should have taken more pictures, but it was hard enough to keep up with the group as it was without pulling out my camera to take a picture every couple of seconds. Also, even though every vista was a uniquely breathtaking experience while walking on the ice, it probably becomes pretty repetitive and boring when clicking though on a screen. I do really wish I had caught the big piece of ice that came off while we were admiring the glacier from one of the balconies; instead, all I managed to snap was the aftermath (see below).
(Aside: in an awesome random coincidence, one of the people on the tour was a kid from Issaquah who'd just graduated from college. We recognized each other as fellow Seattleites because we were both wearing the same Mariners hat -- as he pointed out, you don't see them every day in Argentina. Interestingly, most Americans I've met while traveling this time around have been from the West Coast or from Colorado.)
In sum, Petito Moreno is an absolutely gorgeous glacier and even though I found most of the tour's surrounding hooplah extremely annoying, it was still a fantastic experience. What's more, my legs and knees held up the whole time despite the extensive workout they received in El Chaltén. I'm also pleased to announce that I experienced no major injuries or other disasters, although I did have a slight crampon malfunction. Basically, the crampon didn't fit well over my right hiking boot so, at times, my boot would be stuck in it at an odd angle. Usually I could jam my shoe back in it and get it on track, but at one point the entire front section of my foot came out, which alerted the guides to the problem. After a couple unsuccessful attempts at retying the crampon, one of the guides set me up with a new crampon, which promptly broke only a few steps away. Combining pieces from my first crampon and the second crampon, I finally had a properly fitted piece of equipment to take me the last 10 minutes back to land.
After three days of solid activity, I figured I had earned a rest. Accordingly, on Friday, I woke up late, ate some breakfast, packed my stuff, checked out of my hotel, ran a couple errands, and then took a shuttle to the airport to catch my flight to Ushuaia.
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