Blue Fire

After 35 blog postings I am running out of superlatives and adjectives to describe the natural wonders of this journey. This posting describes one of the scenic highlights so far – so I’m going to let the pictures do the talking for me, after some brief contextual waffle.

El Calafate main street

The rapidly growing town of El Calafate sits on the south shore of the stunning Lago Argentino. The town exists almost solely to serve the tourism highlights of the Andes in this isolated corner of the country, the main attraction being the Perito MorenoGlacier, which is what this posting is about. El Calafate’s population has burgeoned over the past few years to over 8,000 as evidenced in the buildings being thrown up all over the landscape – some kind of planning enforcement could be helpful here before they destroy the goose that laid the golden egg, as I see so often back home in Cornwall. Tens of thousands of tourists manage to reach this corner of nowhere every year, apparently from all over the world, but I am struck by the lack of British people. The new town centre is pleasant enough – lots of outdoor equipment shops, tourist trinkets and good restaurants; the dominant eyesore is the casino – why are they always so hideous wherever they are built?

Hideous casino

We spend a day in the indescribably beautiful Los Glaciares National Park, visiting the Perito Moreno glacier – one of the few in this part of the world that is not shrinking. The glacier bleeds from the heart of Chile’s 16,800 sq km Southern Patagonian Ice Field to the west. After a 70km westward drive, for once on a decent road, we enter the park’s tourist hot-spot. People of every nationality, including the (very) occasional Brit, walk an engineering marvel that at first sight appears rather hideous – a steel walkway that traverses and contours around the rocky headland touched by the glacier we have come to see. It even has a lift to provide wheelchair access.

Lago Argentino viewed eastwards over glacier-scoured bedrock

Section of the impressive walkway

The Patagonia Three: Lisi, Jane and me

Funky view of shades of blue

The deeper one peers into a glowing fire, the more intense become its oranges and reds until vision and heat merge into a single experience. In the same way that a photographic negative reverses a visual experience, the deeper one peers into the cracks and fissures of a glacier – astounding blues become more saturated and spell-binding, and colder. The sensory intensity is augmented by a natural auditory backdrop of creeks, cracks and bangs as, like a giant, sluggardly animal, the glacier crawls over a hidden topography stretching, straining and, eventually, breaking. Occasionally, house-sized chunks drop from the glacier’s snout into the lake, creating waves through a crushed ice soup, and slowly melt to feed the turquoise waters of the Lago Argentino.

Goodbye Perito Moreno glacier