Besides being a stopover for visiting nearby El Chalten and Torres del Paine, Calafate is where you go to see glaciers up close and personal.
The most famous is the Perito Moreno Glacier – one of the few in the world which are actually advancing instead of melting away.
The national park has several viewing platforms just a couple hundred meters from the face of this massive glacier. The glacier is advancing at a rate of about 6 feet per day, but that’s also how much of the face breaks off (or calves) into the lake each day, so it seems to stay in the same place.
All day long, you can sit and listen to the glacier rumble and crack – the sound is really incredible.
Occasionally, a huge skyscraper-sized chunk of the glacier’s face will calve off into the lake, creating huge waves and a sound like an earthquake.
From the pictures, it’s hard to realize just how enormous this glacier is. Notice the boat in the picture below – it’s actually a 150′ double-decker catamaran.
We could sit and watch that glacier calve all day long, but after awhile, our eyes started to feel the strain of staring at all that whiteness (plus it was pretty cold there). A few hours was about all we could manage.
We really wanted to do some hiking on the glacier – but the minimum age of 11 is strictly enforced, so we had to save that for another day.
There are other glaciers in the park which can be visited by boat, so we did that instead. Unlike in Ushuaia, there isn’t a small-boat option – there’s only one tour company authorized to do these tours, and they use only huge 200-plus passenger catamarans.
The day tours visit 2 other glaciers which aren’t nearly as impressive as Perito Moreno, but what’s really cool are all the icebergs.
The fleet of boats winds its way through all these massive chunks of ice, sometimes passing very close to them. Incredible shapes and colors.
Hannah’s favorite was this one, which looked like a fish or dolphin:
It was a pretty cool trip!
You can see more pictures of the glaciers and icebergs on our flickr page.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
absolutely breathtaking!!!!! great pics.
Now that seems like a great adventure, even with it being cold!!
Those pix are outstanding!!!