South America Day 56

Today we had a group tour to Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina's most famous and third largest glacier at the west end of lake Argentino in Los Glaciares National Park.  Perito Moreno Glacier is a quarter of the size of Glacier Viedma where we ice trekked a couple of days ago but more popular because of its ease of access.  We were picked up by our guide with a tourist coach at 8am and drove approx 50km along an old scenic road, past lots of estancias.  We stopped at one estancia for a break, they had lots of cute baby goats, very greedy though, we were given bottles of milk to feed them.  We had a short hour long walk along the side of the lake with distant views of the glacier before entering the park and visitors centre for the glacier.  We spent three hours at the glacier, there were lots of well designed metal walkways and viewing platforms enabling close range views of the glaciers middle, south and north faces.  We were probably only about 150-200m from the face of the glacier.  It was amazingly beautiful, almost mesmerising, even on a dull day, you could stand just looking at the glacier for ages.  We wandered around all the walkways to get different view points and perspectives. We saw a red crested woodpecker whilst wandering around just 2m from the path pecking away at a rotten tree, it managed to find a big grub and feed its baby close by. There were regular crashing sounds where large ice chunks broke off crashing down into the water, both on the face of the glacier but also areas underneath or behind the glacier face.  It was a drizzly wet day but eventually the sun came out causing dramatic changes on light. 
Loads of photos again!

In the evening we went out for a lovely group meal to Don Pichon restaurant on the outskirts of El Calafate town.  We had a fantastic Patagonian lamb dish, lamb being the restaurants speciality.  Obviously a popular place, people were queuing to get in again on a Monday night.