(Town of) Perito Moreno to El Calafate
We left the town of Perito Moreno early on Friday morning for the 8 hour drive down the famous Rt. 40 to El Calafate. The entire drive would be a fairly monotonous slog across the Patagonian Steppe and we wanted to do it one go so we could spend a rest day in El Calafate, taking a catamaran ride on Lake Argentino to get up close and personal to several of the glaciers in Glacier National Park (confusingly, including the Perito Moreno Glacier which is no where near the town).
Tori took the first shift. The scenery was a sparse, arid scrub land with some texture from bluffs and ridges, but I spent most of the day being reminded of the vast emptiness of Wyoming, South Dakota, or Nevada. There wasn’t much traffic and the road was at least nominally paved. There were several stretches where the definition of paved was definitely strained, and the 110 k/h speed limit was at odds with the deep, sharp-edged craters of potholes Tori was mostly able to dodge. We had a few hits that had us cringing and crossing our fingers the rental’s wheels survived. We were also able to hit one of the famous Rt. 40 gas stations/hostels that we’ve seen featured in a bunch of adventure riding / overlanding YouTube journeys we’ve seen.
I took over driving after an extended gas & lunch stop — turns out when the only station for hundreds of kilometers is down to refill their tanks the lines back up a bit. While the road started as the same monotonous ribbon of pavement that Tori had, it quickly turned into a ~100km section of rough, loose gravel road that took me back to the stretches of the Dempster Highway in the Northwest Territories. It took a fair amount of focus and getting used to the car dancing as it searched for traction on the loose gravel, but we eventually made it back to pavement as the scenery finally started to change. Mountain ranges and glacial lakes started appearing as we approached El Calafate, which was a nice teaser for Saturday.
Lake Argentino and Perito Moreno Glacier
We work up early again for the transfer to the port. The bus ride and 200ish passengers on the catamaran were jarring; it was our first tine being around that many people after the relatively sparseness of Northern Patagonia, and hearing brash American accents (and an unfortunate amount of politics) were reminders that we were entering a more mainstream tourist area.
Fortunately the conversations mellowed as the boat got underway and we starting the tour of the largest lake in Argentina. The scenery kept getting more staggering as we headed west and approached the snow capped peaks and glaciers. The first photo stop was at a pair of huge icebergs that had calved off of the glaciers. One was a deep, true blue that was striking on the milky torquoise of the glacial lake water, the other was almost pure white but had intricate spirals and shapes formed into its ice.
We continued down the various bays, stopping at hanging glaciers high in the mountains and valley glaciers that met the lake. We disembarked to visit the site of a former ranch house, one of many vacated when the national park was first formed and the source of feral horses and cows in the park. The final stop was Perito Moreno Glacier — while not the largest in the park, it’s one of the most stable and accessible and the boat was able to come within a kilometer of it for great photos. Just like the rest of Argentina, the scale was almost impossible to represent in photos without a frame of reference, but for context the terminus of the glacier is almost 2 miles wide and the ice rises 240 ft out of the water.
After almost 6 hours on the boat, we ended up disembarking at the walkways overlooking the glacier and had a bit over an hour to take more photos from land before being bussed back to town. The higher perspective let us see more of the full length of the glacier up the mountain, and we even got to see some big chunks calve off into the lake.
On Sunday, we’ll leave El Calafate and cross back into Chile for the final time and the third phase of the trip in Torres Del Paine and Punta Arenas.
