Glacier Perito Moreno

The first big sight in Patagonia happened to be my first glacier. Breathtaking. It is not the world, let alone Argentina's largest, but it is my first ever, so to me, it is. In the winter, the glacier pushes up against the peninsula that houses the viewing boardwalkds, blocking water from flowing into Lago Argentina. In the summer, the ice melts by the warmed water, creating a bridge connecting the peninsula to the glacier. A cruise ship could fit under this bridge. On average, every two years, the bridge cracks away from the ice and tidal waves into the water. I could use some cute euphemism here, like shamu washing over its viewers, but I can only imagine the heart stopping roar and beauty of something of that magnitude crashing on that moment of that day you happen to be sitting there, taking an unassuming bite of your sandwhich from the viewing platform. Lloyd and I only caught small calvings, six foot tall chunks of ice that crack loudly away from its 22 story mother and slosh noisily into the lake. The glacier is quite active- it moves on average two meters per day. You can hear the cracks and shiftings of ice from deep inside the glacier, and when you hear that boom, you look up from your travel book, and everyone stops talking. The colors in the wall of ice were astonishing. Yes, ice is white, but it is also blue. A rainbow of blue, from a pale sapphire to a solid cobalt to a black navy creeping into the deep calvings to the black veins that show like rings on a tree.  Quite satisfying.