El Califate - Los Glaciares Parque Nacional: Perito Morreno Glacier

From Puerto Madryn, we took a long bus trip of twenty-five hours south accross the huge and empty waste lands of interrior Patagonia. There is nothing besides scrub brush and grass and herds of sheep and guanacas between Puerto Madryn and the ugly city of Rio Gallegos. We then ended up in El Calafate, at the gates to Los Glaciares National Park. The thing to see here is the glaciers that descend off of the coninental ice cap, the Hielo Sur, into Lago Argentina. The first day, we took a trip to one of the last advancing continental glaciers in the world, Perito Morreno Glacier. Observe:It was huge!And very blue, white and active. We saw some amazingly huge pieces of ice fall from the glacier into the lake, making big waves. The sound was so loud, it sounded like intense thunder. This picture shows the wave and splash created by a large ice fall, or calving of the glacier. In Spanish the pieces that come off are called timbres. After this large piece fell from above, several huge pieces of saphire-blue, highly-compacted glacial ice broke off the bottom of the glacier below the water, and surfaced through the foam like great blue whales breaching.