Crashing Icebergs and Huge Glaciers

From El Calafate, there are lots of excursions as you´ve probably guessed. Our final ´must do´ tour was to the Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciers National Park. The glacier is part of the southern Patagonia ice field which is where we´ve seen all the various glaciers, however this glacier is different. It´s the largest, most active and most impressive glacier in the ice field and the good thing is you can get right up close, allowing you to see how truely awesome a glacier is.

I´m hoping you´ve read Stu´s glacier facts from his ice-climbing trip, so you´ll know a little about them. Well, this glacier is stories high and as I said, this one is active, which means huge chunks fall off and drop into the lake frequently. You can hear the glacier groaning and cracking as it´s slowly moving, and then when a section splits off, the sound is like thunder. Unfortunately, by the time you´ve heard it, the section of ice is already in the water creating a small tidal wave across the lake!

It´s possible to take a boat trip near the glacier, but you don´t actually get that close, mainly because it´s so dangerous! To give you some scale, here´s a picture of the glacier with a boat. You can just about see the boat - it´s the little black dot on the right!

We spent around two hours here, simply gazing in awe at the mass of ice, waiting for the next chunk of ice to drop off. Quite incredible.

Ice Climbing and Clambering on a Glacier

We set off at 7.00am in the morning to make it to the base camp of the glacier by 9.00am. We made a quick stop at the base camp to collect our equipment and have some tea and biscuits before the final part of our trek to the glacier. The second section held the treat of crossing the river using a fixed rope, so we had to drag ourselves across.

After a further climb over a woodland pass we decended onto the glacier. Our guide gave us a demostration of how to use the crampons and a few pointers about how to walk safely. The basics of which are - don´t step on anyones feet, don´t kick anyone and walk like a duck which felt a bit quackers! Luckily Nicky had to decided to stay at the hostel otherwise I would have had a few spikes up my jacksee. The crampons are excellent they allow you to walk on icey surfaces that are at extreme angles!

A few glacial facts:
• Glaciers are formed by large amounts of snow falling, melting and compressing into ice.
• There is no air in the ice when the glacier is formed in this way, so the glacier looks blue instead of white.
• When a body of ice is formed and is greater than 20 tonnes it can be classed as a glacier.
• The weight of the ice and snow high up the glacier causes the glacier to move slowly down the mountin valley. As the glacial moves, rocks and debris under the glacier are crushed into small pieces which form a lubricanting layer allowing the glacier to continue moving. As the glacier shifts down the valley the ice breaks and cracks creating large in the glacier.
• At the end of the glacier there is usually a lake and river formed from the glacial melt. The lake takes on a bluish turquoise colour from the small particles of debris.
• Where the glacier meets the lake, this section is called the tongue of the glacier. High up in the mountains small glaciers form called hanging glaciers, which I have renamed the `ears of the glacier´!
• 5,000 years ago the glacial tongue which I walked on was 200km longer than it is today. Since the last ice age, the earth has slowly warmed and the tongue has retracted.

We also has a chance to try ice climbing on a small wall in the glacier, this was excellent, if not a little slippy. Wacking ice axes into the wall was harder than it looked and the once grippy crampons suddenly were not much help with a very hard compacted vertical wall of ice.

In all I spent about 3 hours walking and climbing on the glacier, it was really excellent. The 4 hour trek to the glacier and 4 hour return was definately worth it, even if I had to walk like a duck the next day because my legs were so stiff!

On the way back we were lucky enough to see a skunk carrying its little baby in it´s mouth. It was very cute until she got a bit perturbed by us and chased us away, there we were 4 grown males running away from a tiny fluffy animal, felt like something from the Monty Pythons Holy Grail! Better that, then stinking for a week!

Hanging out in Huaraz

It feels like we´ve been here ages, but in fact it´s only been a couple days. We´ve been pottering about this little town which is quite quirky. We´ve found ourselves staying in a hostel that is normally frequented by Israelis, however there are none staying at the moment because it´s low season. Strange, because I thought all the notices and posters on the walls were in Quechuan (the local Peruvian language), when in fact they were in Hewbrew! The lady who owns the hostel said that she started it 24 years ago and one of the first people that stayed was an Israeli, and since then, most of her guests have been Israelis. Nothing like word-of-mouth recommendation! We even looked in her guest book and on every other page there´s a European couple, other than that, they´re all Israeli. We´re with a Swiss couple and French girl, all of whom are really fun to be around.

Huaraz is on a fault line and has been hit with many natural disasters in the last 100 years. The two main types of disaster are earthquakes, and the second are aluviones which are when high glacial lakes burst their banks causing a wall of water to wipe out whole towns in the area. Huaraz has been rebuilt at least three times and so is not the most beautiful city, but Mother Nature certainly keeps you on your toes.

The surrounding countryside is high glacial mountains and is impressive because of the number of peaks over 6,000m. It´s really quite beautiful and yesterday, we went on a tour to visit one of the glaciers, where we were allowed to clamber all over it. It was melting at an incredible rate and at the base of the ice was a small cavern which allowed you to see under the glacier. There was lots of water and a beautiful bluish hue from the centre - very pretty. We climbed almost to the top of the glacier, which was a breathless 5,200m and very tough. Getting down was much more fun, especially as we were sitting on our plastic bags. Unfortunately, I span out of control and bashed my head on some ice, just before being saved by Stu. Nothing worse then falling over on the ski slope though, and no lasting damamamage.

As part of our tour (more like package tour), we also visited a few local touristic sites, which were a touch amusing. The first stop was a pond of effervescent water - all naturally carbonated! The little pond was surrounded by a couple of traditionally dressed women with llamas wearing sunglasses and wigs. There were also the obligatory small child with a lamb wanting you to take their photo. The lamb was called Picachu and very cute, but not worthy of a photo. The 15 Peruvian teenagers on a school trip from Lima seemed tolike this though and enjoyed both the llamas in fancy dress and the carbonated water. The next stop was the ´lake of many colours´, which was in fact a small pond, no bigger than my front room and generally a dirty brown colour, rather then the well publicised seven colours. We then saw plants that only flower every one hundred years, and unfortunately they weren´t flowering! Anyway, it was still a fun trip and we enjoyed our time on the glacier.