Day 15 – 6th December . Parque National Los Glaciares.

El Calefate – Tour around the Glaciers National Park 180 kms

Total Distance So Far: 3,655 kms

What a chilled out day today was. Enjoying a continued warm spell I had breakfast outside of one of the many cafés in town. El Calefate really is a great find, very smart, and busy, like an alpine ski town. It must be second home to the French as every second person seemed to be El Francais. A real recommend for anyone who plans a trip here.

I rode into the Parque National Los Glaciares 40kms away along the shore of Lago Argentina. The lake is huge being over 1 km deep and 100 kms long, and 20 kms wide. It’s a strange sight to see icebergs floating about in it. At the Andes end, there are several glaciers that wrap themselves around the mountains and down into the lake. They were really a very ‘cool’ thing to see – very impressive. It’s hard to get your head around the sheer scale of everything here. The largest glacier here, Upsala was over 1,000 sq kms in surface area and over 60 kms long. The pictures I took were of Perito Moreno a relatively small one being on just 200 sq km in surface area. The ice was 1 km thick when it reached the lake. I took a boat excursion to the face of two or three of the glaciers, which was my first organized tour. I’d have to say the boat was a bit crowded for me with 200+ passengers on all scrambling to get ‘the shot’. I sat next to a chap called Chad who’d come down ‘to do the glaciers’ with his family, ‘before they melt away’ he informed me. The guide book said they had been there for 30,000 years I pointed out, but he was sure they would be gone within 10 years! The glaciers were truly fantastic, it’s just amazing how the experience can be dented when you are herded about cattle style, with tanoy announcements booming in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Russian, French etc.

I said my goodbye’s to Chad and family and told him I hoped ‘the world’ would still be around in 10 years. It was great to get back on the bike again and zoom around the empty national park roads. Everyone else returned to their coaches to get ‘shipped’ back to El Calefate. All-in-all it was just an excellent relaxing day.

I also managed to get a distance shot of the Andean Condor – the world’s largest flying bird with a 3m wingspan. Checking it out later on the net, I also read it has the almost unique feature in the it practices ‘Urohidrosis’. This means it shits on its legs supposedly to cool them. I’d say there was a malfunction at the factory when this species was being made, putting either its legs or the waste pipe in the wrong place!

Returning to El Calefate I treated the bike to a bit of a clean. I treated myself to a tasty Argentinean Bife Chorizo al fresco, my favorite tenderloin cut, and watched the world shuffle by.