Hasta la vista, Patagonia

Flight 2871, somewhere between El Calafate and Buenos Aires, Argentina 8/01/2009

And so my first Patagonian adventure ends. My first because I am sure, as sure as I am that I will go back to Mexico and Ireland some day, that there will a second, a third… who knows? Adventure because, pardon if I exaggerate, these last few days truly felt like and adventure.

I did kilometres on a bike against a wind that forced to pedal even when going downhill, saw and heard unknown birds during walk around Laguna Nimes, got sun, rain, fog, snow and a lot of wind in the three hour trek to Glaciar Grande and Lago de la Torre, indulged my eyes with views I thought impossible and bestowed my legs endless kilometres on the way up to Fritz Roy and Laguna de los Tres, walked on the ice in a glacier as big as Buenos Aires…

For some it might not be very impressive, but for me it was an adventure. Even today, which I spent reading in the sun in the only windless day I got in Patagonia, had something adventurous about it.

Thank you Patagonia. Until we meet again.

Rocks on the rocks

Perito Moreno glacier, Patagonia, Argentina – 07/01/2009

In the twenty seven plus years of my existence I had only read about glaciers and had seen nothing but photos and videos of glaciers. Yesterday and the day before yesterday I got to see glaciers live, today I get to walk for over four hours on top of one.

A remarkable evolution in my relationship with glaciers.

In the middle of the austral summer I put on my windproof coat, my gloves and ice walking spikes on my feet to set out, together with twenty other strangers and five guides, into the icy vastness. The first thing that strikes you once you’re on a glacier is that it’s a lot of ice. I mean a lot of ice. Really. The second thing that strikes you once you’re in a glacier is that there’s even more ice, a lot more, than you imagined. Never ending ice moving two meters a day, despite the apparent stillness, born in the icy mountains and dying in the waters of the Lago Argentino. A slow suicide, with huge ice blocks jumping from its imposing walls into the waters, in a roar of foam and thunder that sets off a string of photographs and interjections from the tourists who wander about. And there are a lot of them.

Walking on ice for four hours, four hours of ice and more ice, is a “strange” experience, to say the least, for a Portuguese guy who grew up two minutes away from the beach and now lives in Barcelona.

Strange, beautiful and impressive.

Strange because you have to adapt to walking with two extra kilos of metal in your feet which cling to the ground, because at first so much white numbs the senses, because, in the beginning, when I am putting on my spikes while the wind nearly tumbles me over I can’t help to ask myself “What the hell am I doing here?”.

Beautiful because once the wind dies down and you go into the glacier’s valleys, hills, creeks and waterfalls, the wind, the weight of the clothes and even the wound the spikes caused in my heel are rendered irrelevant to give way to a new concept of beauty my poor Iberian brain was not prepared to face.

Impressive because as the hours go by and the weather goes back and forth between nice and not-so-nice, I realise that without the 5 guides none of us would endure much time in this labyrinth of cracks, this mountain range of razor sharp hills, this field of bottomless “sumideros”. As I looked into the sumidero the guide half-jokingly called La Boca del Diablo (The Devil’s Mouth) I let myself be conquered by a true sense of respect for this white titan.

Already on the boat back, while I enjoyed the whiskey and the alfajor the guides offered us, I reviewed the dozens of photos I took without truly realising how beautiful they were. It was only in the night when Marc and Martin went berserk with some of the photos that I really grasped that I had the privilege to spend four hours walking in a truly special place.