Thursday 2 December 2010

Calafate & Perito Moreno Glacier - Argentina









Calafate is a pretty average tourist town, with a far from average tourist attraction. Perito Moreno Glacier is awesome - 30km long, 5km wide and 60m high. It's a giant wall of ice, moving through the Andes and unlike most of the worlds melting glaciers, Moreno grows by 2m per day. The sheer weight of gravity pulling it down into Lago Argentina, whereby massive ice chunks as big as apartment blocks crash into the water. The sound of the glacier cracking is like multiple gunshots and when it breaks, like a mini-explosion. As weird as it may seem, you can spend the entire day watching it do its thing, getting cheered on by spectators waiting for a giant blue* iceberg to crash into the water and float away. Put like this it sounds very geeky... maybe you just have to see it for yourself!

As for Calafate, we visited a cute museum showcasing old black and white old photos of the town, lots of stuffed bird taxidermy and other out-of-the-ordinary artefacts. It was also possible to see real birds! There were lots of pretty flamingos and water birds to be seen down at Lago Argentina.

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