MET EISH, JA, MET EISH

Fuelling up for the day, El Calafate, Argentina

Incredible colours on the way to the Perito Moreno glacier

Dawid with a good vantage point to watch proceedings, Resrtaurant at Perito Moreno glacier

Impossible to capture the scale on a photograph, The glacier face is about 100m high

Dawid on the way back

The bright turquoise of the water is characteristing of lakes and some rivers in this region

Coffee in El Clafate

Our next day took us to the Perito Moreno glacier on the good quality surfaced road to the glacier park, an easy 60km with only a stiff breeze to the park after which we were in the mountains with pleasant 17 deg C temperature and sunny (only partly clouded weather). Perfect to witness on of the most spectacular nature sights we have seen. I estimated the height of the face to be around 30m when we got to the first lookout point from where the glacier could be seen. The reserve has a huge parking area (we found out later why) and we walked approximately 500m on a very neat steel walkway to a number of lookout points closer to the glacier. Getting as close as we could get I revised my estimate to over 100m, a spectacular scene with occasional blocks of ice breaking from the face and dropping to the water of the lake with a massive rumble. Really a spectacular scene to which no photograph can do justice. But we will post a few.

Incidentally, most hotels where we have stayed thus far have WiFi (except Chaiten, which still have to get electricity again) but we somehow have difficulty in loading pictures on the Blog. We are now reducing the size to Webpage format and hope they will be OK.

The way back to El Calafate provided the most spectacular colours with some wild karoo type flowers along the road, the dark mountains, white clouds against a blue sky and an almost fluorescent green colour of the lake (the actual colour of the water is green, not due to algae!).

Back in El Calafate we collected our panniers and BMW bags from the hotel and took on the road to Puerto Natales. To stay on surfaced roads we travelled east to a very small place called Esperanza and then south west again, all in all approximately 300km in similar windy conditions than the previous day but on tar. We kept our speeds to between 60 and 80km/h and managed to stay on the road.

We crossed the border posts back to Chile smoothly and found a basic but warm (physically) and pleasant hotel Eberhardt a welcome oasis at approximately 10pm.