#29 Walking on thin ice - Perito Moreno Glacier, El Calafate

While friends we had met along the Careterra Austral were able to cross the border from Villa O'Higgins to El Chalten, the path not being suitable for vehicles meant we had a long ride all the way back round. That meant a few long days on the road to make up some of time we had lost. We crossed from the mountains, lakes and forests of the Careterra Austral to the the vast expansiveness of the pampas in Argentina surrounding us on either side and the occasional sighting of wildlife.

Mostly we have seen guanacos (if a llama and a camel made sweet love, their baby would be the guanaco), odd groups of pink flamingos chilling out in lagoons, horses of course, condors in the sky, oh and once I spotted a fox. And tonnes and tonnes of sheep. There are not many towns in this section of Ruta 40 though you wouldn't think that if you looked at a map which we only realised later notes the nearby Estancias or sheep farms.

This video really begins about half way through so be patient, it's worth it!

This would be the first real test of the bike's petrol range. To save ourselves a detour we purchased what we calculated to be enough to get us to El Calafate from some spares held by a woman running a lodging and campsite out of her Estancia. A combination of some crazy headwinds on the Ruta 40 and a pretty bad section of gravel meant we were really pushing it coming into town; the red light started flashing 70km out (indicating only 50km left) and we questioned whether to turn off into the airport 30kms out and beg for some. Instead we went with the alternative option rationalising that it shouldn't be that hard to get a ride if required. It was not needed but we were crazy close. At the first petrol station in town our 20L tank was filled with 20.1L of petrol!

El Calafate is swarming with tourists visiting to get a sight of the Perito Merino Glacier, which was a bit of a shock to the system given where we had been. But there is a reason everyone goes and it's for the glacier which really is something special. It extends 30 kilometres and unusually rather than receding like most glaciers it is actually getting bigger. As a bit of a treat we chose to 'MiniTrek', as its promoted, on the glacier itself which involved a bus ride to the park, a boat ride to the glacier, a couple of hours on the ice, capped off with a short trip to an observation platform.

The walk was pretty fricking awesome and not at all like walking on snow as we were expecting. We were given special ice-walking shoes, were able to peer down into funneled holes created by the ice, and to top it off were given a glass of whiskey to finish chilled with ice from the glacier. I nearly didn't get off the bus for the last stop on the tour it was raining so hard, except well they made us. As I was waiting for Reece in the souvenir shop the sun came out and we were able to spend the next hour listening and watching as large chunks of ice cracked and crashed their way to the lake below, a phenomenon caused by the continual movement of the ice.