El calafate:the "one glaciar" tour.

For today we had arranged to do the "All Glaciers Tour", a boat trip that takes you through the Argentino lake to several different glaciers.

We left the port early in the morning, and just few kilometers away the deck we started seeing icebergs, huge pieces of ice that had fallen from the many glaciers that end in the lake. They had diferent shapes and colours and their submerged part was nine times the above water part!!

The "original" trip was going to the Upsala glacier, the biggest in Argentina, then it entered in Onelli Bay, where we would descend from the boat to make a short walk through the forest and reach a point where we could see other 2 or 3 glaciers, Finally again in the boat we would navigate to see the last glacier called the Spegazzini.
The capitan announced that the itinerary of the trip could be modified since it depended on the disposition of the icebergs. If they blocked the entrance of the chanels that leaded to any of the glaciers, we wouldn´t see them. Still ... we had to try.

So, as we approached to the entrance of the Upsala glacier we knew our fate: there were huge icebergs between us and the Glacier...so we coudn´t go further to see it.Unfortunatelly, that was the same way we should take to reach the Onelli Bay, so we wouldn´t do that part either....
Finally we started moving towards the Spegazzini glacier. Its frontal wall is the highest of all glaciers more than 100 m above the water level) and it was so blue (it turned out that highly compacted ice is blue!!) that it was amazing.

After a while admiring the glacier we move back to the entrance of the Upsala glacier to try it again. For a second we though we could do it, but the capitan told us that there was too much ice and we risked to get trapped among the icebergs.. so the excursion had finished.

Of course we were all a litle bit dissapointed....we had payed a lot of money and we would see just a third part of all. No refund, of course. Then Mihai discovered that they had just managed to get to the Upsala twice in the last month. I guess that if we all had known that before booking the trip, we would have though it twice.
In any case, I think that it was worthy just to admire the blue icebergs.

We landed and decided to go to the Redonda bay, a part of the Argentino lake that freeze in winter so people go there to do some ice-skating. I managed to rent a pair of skates but there were no skates for Mihai. Better for me, I really needed someone to hold my hand while I pretended to be a professional skater!!!!

Tonight at 3.00pm we will be leaving by bus towards Ushuaia, the end point of our trip :( . It will be a 12 hours trip in which we will cross the border on Chile a couple of times and will cross the Magallanes Channel on a ferry boat. It may be much longer that the plane trip, but at least we know we will arrive in Ushuaia, not as with the Aerolineas!!