Boaz Kantor

We took a bus from Pureto Natales to El Calafate, a 5-6 hours ride north, including yet another border crossing (Chile to Argentine). We arrived at the beautiful town of El Calafate. As opposed to Puerto Natales, this is a lovely and lively town. It´s very touristic, so there are many shops here: good restaurants, trekking gear, supermarkets, etc. I would love to stay here longer, however the town is quite expensive and there are no real reasons to stay here, except for visiting the huge Perito Moreno glacier.
We took a bus to see the Perito Moreno. That ice block is huge! We watched it from distance, and every couple of minutes some small ice-crumbs fell off it to the sea. They looked quite small, but the sound the fall made proved otherwise: the ice chunks were as small as a man to as big as a house, making a booming sound when cracking, rolling on the glacier and hitting the water. The site was magnificent.
After that, we took a boat to a more quiet side of the glacier, put on some shoe-gear (crampons, or shoe-spikes), covered ourselves and our backpacks against the rain, and headed on to.. walking on the ice.
Walking the Perito Moreno was a very different and a really exciting experience. We saw small brooks streaming on the glacier floor, finding their ways to small cracks in the ice. Each such crack is either small, or as deep as reaching the bottom of the glacier and the sea level. That was an awesome experience.
We are now looking for different ways to ride through the Carretera Austral and head north to Bariloche.