"Oh! That's So Spiritual!"

Day 7, Friday, December 27, 1996

The crown jewel of Parque Nacional Los Glaciares is the Moreno Glacier. Most visitors to these parts come to see just this. There were guided glacier trekking tours, but given my deteriorating physical condition, they were out of the question. Our tour was light. The mini-bus deposited us at the park and gave us almost four hours to walk around on our own. For those of us who wanted to, we could also take a boat tour to see the glacier. Ed and I had lunch early to get it out of the way. We had ordered only sandwiches the night before. When Ed went to pick up the food this morning, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the lady at the diner had included soda and fruit without additional charge. They were simple sandwiches with ham and tomatoes, but they tasted quite delicious, especially since we didn't have the time to have breakfast.

The Moreno Glacier flows eastward down a valley and cuts right across a northwardly flowing river (strictly speaking, a branch of Lago Argentino) that empties into Lago Argentino. The ice dams the river and causes the water level on the upstream side to rise. Every four years or so, the ice ruptures under the pressure. The last time this happened was in 1988. The water was still flowing freely today, so there wouldn't be any rupture any time soon. One could clearly see a band right above the water line where the rocks were of a lighter color and the vegetation was much sparser. The glacier itself is surprising jagged. It's not one smooth piece of ice at all. We'd hear cracking sound intermittently as the ice re-arranged itself.

There didn't seem to be much happening. Unlike Iguazú Falls where huge volumes of water plunge and splash and make deafening noises, most things around here are pretty static and quiet. After all, glaciers move at - what? - yes, glacial speed. We were pretty close to the glacier, but it's not like we could reach out and touch it. The overwhelming dynamics of Iguazú wasn't really here. I did appreciate the tranquility, though. Ed asked me which I thought was more impressive, Moreno Glacier or Iguazú Falls. He thought the Falls were more impressive. I agreed, but thought it's more impressive by only a small margin.

I had imagined that the river was totally dammed, that it took four years for the water to build up, that then the whole shebang collapses, and that whoever fortunate enough to be there to witness the explosion could die happy. It's not like that at all. The glacier comes down the valley and fills most of the width between the eastern and western bank of the river. However, the gap at the eastern bank allows water to flow freely. Chunks of ice crash into this channel, and gradually restrict the flow. The ice mass makes contact with the river bank at only one point. Only when the water flow is severely restricted does the water level upstream build up. The eventual rupture occurs at this contact point. The physical scale of the rupture is small compared to the scale of the ice mass flowing down the valley. However, one's sense of scale can be quite distorted out here.

What looks like a small piece of ice breaking off generates a loud noise, echoing and reverberating through the valley, lingering for seconds. At any moment, a piece can break off anywhere around the perimeter of the glacier. This happens every ten or fifteen minutes. To be at the right place at the right time to see it is not so easy. Now I could appreciate why lots of people just sat around and stared at the glacier, and why we were given four hours to hang around the place. Sometimes we would hear a loud bang, only to realize that we were on the wrong end of the glacier looking in the wrong direction.

In one of the gum commercials aired recently, a woman is seen to be chewing a piece of generic brand gum on a whale-watching boat to find the elusive such-and-such whale. Another woman claims to have waited all her life to for this moment. Just when the gum goes bland and the first woman fumbles through her pocket to find another piece, the whale suddenly leaps out of the water. In the background, the other woman exclaims, "Oh! That's so spiritual!"

Ed and I both remembered the commercial because it was funny in a silly way. (The advertisers would be very dismayed to hear that we both couldn't recall what brand of gum the commercial was for, even though we remembered the exclamation so well.) Every time we caught the sight of a chunk of ice breaking off, we'd go, "Oh! That's so spiritual!" Most of the pieces didn't look huge, but in one instance, we saw one big chunk crashing into the river on the downstream side, creating a shock wave of water. The area where the ice fell now had a layer of small pieces of broken ice. I'd try to take snap shots of falling chunks, but usually succeeded only in catching the aftermath. The rest of the time, we just waited. This suited me just fine. I was still sick and was developing a cough.

Close to the end of the day, another mini-bus took us to a dock several miles upstream to take the boat ride to see the glaciers up close. Understandably, no boats go to the downstream wall of the glacier. It never got very close to the glacier for safety reasons, since pieces of the glacier do break off from the upstream wall too.

Our tour bus dropped us off at the various hotels. We were told that we could buy tapes featuring the rupture of Moreno Glacier and other souvenirs at Casa Blanca, a restaurant. We had dinner at Rick's Cafe across the street from our hotel because it advertised that it showed the tape on its TV. Get it? Casa Blance and Rick's Cafe both show the tape. The tape itself isn't very good. It has a lot of zero-patting at the beginning about other things. It was also a little weird to hear the Star Trek theme song at the opening.

We went to a pharmacy to buy some medicine for my cough. I looked up the words cough and sore throat in the dictionary. Cough is tos. The word for throat I actually already knew from Garganta del Diablo (Devil's Throat) at Iguazú Falls. The lady behind the counter gave me a roll of cough lozenges, called Negatos. Kind of a fitting name. I thought if the N were substituted by a M, it'd be Megatos, which was what I was suffering. The roll looked pretty normal, like any other cough drops I had seen. The price for this roll of 10 cough drops, however, shocked me. It cost $5.50! I had disagreed with LP in its description of El Calafate as a place that attempts to milk the tourists dry during the high season. My conviction was a bit shaken now. Oh, well, I had to get the lozenges or I'd be coughing my lungs out. Five fifty was a small price to pay. Right after I got back to New York, my cough flared up again. I got a bag of 30 cough drops at Walgreens. It just happened to be on sale for 50 cents.

We went to buy some stuff at the small supermarket across the street. At the check-out, something curious happened. I was to receive five cents in change. Instead, I got two candies. Now, I knew the U.S. dollars are interchangeable with the Argentinean pesos, but I didn't know that candies can substitute for small changes too. It's expected that the pennies are rounded off. I didn't expect that these people don't want to bother with nickels either. Moments like this I am baffled why the Americans still insist on using the penny. Come on, let's be a little more sensible. Let's get rid of the pennies, have a dollar coin that gets used, include the sales tax in the price, forget about the useless 9's, and, dare I say, use metric.