Penultimate Pinnacle Perito Moreno

I woke at 8am, but with everyone fast asleep in their bunks and the sun not up, you would’ve thought it was 6am. I had breakfast and ordered a packed lunch from the nice breakfast man. He slipped an extra alfajores in mine I later discovered.

At 9.20 a man called Milton picked me up. This tour was a lot more full but there was only a few English speakers, lots of French and Argentinians. We drove for an hour and a half and Milton talked the entire way on a loudspeaker. It was punishing. I put my headphones in and watched the scenery go by, rather than hear how many sheep you need to make a Patagonian estancia profitable repeated in both languages (it’s 80,000). We had a first viewpoint stop of the glacier, where Milton whistled into the speaker, startling me! ‘Don’t you love my office’ he yelled.

It was beautiful but it was freezing and we were still far away, so we didn’t stay long. We went to the port, where I paid 500 pesos and got on a small ferry that dropped off hiker on the glacier. Everyone, lots of Chinese and Argentinian families, raced outside desperate for photos. This crazy Thai girl asked me to talk heaps of pictures of her. The boat glided past the chunks of ice in the opaque water, the wall of ice growing bigger. It a way, you couldn’t see the top of the ice wall so you had no real scale for how massive it was from that viewpoint. But it was still amazing to see.

The next part mostly consisted of free time. He gave us a speech at the top of the ‘balconies’, the network of viewing platforms of the glacier. Then I walked down one, talking to the Thai girl and a dentist from Belgium. As we walked, this noise that honestly sounded like a Boeing 737 taking off cracked across the valley. A huge piece of ice the size of an apartment block had carved off the glacier! I saw part of it fall but we were still in the trees. We approached the first platform and I had my Milanesa sandwich, banana and biscuit here. Then I walked down the first circuit, stopping to take photos for others. I couldn’t walk far with all the steps. But I found a semi-peaceful spot to film a time-lapse of the glacier for an hour. Nothing big carved off, but lots of tiny pieces fell making a sound like a gunshot in an echoing room. It was unbelievably loud. There was constant water moving under the glacier and icebergs turning. And the highest point was 70 metres high, there was no way to tell the scale until you saw a miniscule ferry below.

At 5pm we got back in the van and drove in peace back to the hostel. I cooked myself some dinner and had saved the bottle of wine for my last night in El Calafate. I sat by the fire and shared it with Sam, the hippie French guy who had lived in NZ for 4 years, Alexandre a Polish-French doctor and another French girl. Alex had a look at my foot – he said I needed to get it checked out because there was bruising starting - and strapped it for me with this crazy tape that sticks to itself. We sat at the table by the window and chatted for ages, someone else had some wine to share so we kept drinking. I had said that when I started drinking at 8pm I would go back to my room after the one bottle and pack my bag. Alex was literally staying up until 2am to get his flight and the other two were leaving at the same time in the morning as me. However, it ended up that I stayed up to half past midnight. I really enjoyed the French people’s company, even if I couldn’t understand them much, it was a nice note to end on. I got up at 6.15 and crept around our room trying to make as little noise as possible.

Luis was also up and getting the same flight as me so at least I didn’t need to pack in the dark. I had breakfast with a very sleepy-looking Sam who was wearing the same clothes as the night before. My transfer arrived while I was in the toilet, I could hear them calling my name. I grabbed my stuff, gave Sam and Luis a hug and left. The van hurtled through the dark, playing death metal. At the airport there was the Belgium dentist, the Americans from the boat tour, Luis somehow in front of me in the line despite leaving after me, and a few other people I recognised from various tours. I checked in like normal, got a seat no problems in the empty emergency exit row. The leaving view from the window wasn’t so good, it was cloudy in the morning.