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Boat ride
Huge icebergs
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Floating ice
Onelli Lake
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This boat excursion (8-9 hours) leaves El Calafate early in the morning. The first stretch is overland to Punta Bandera. There you board the catamaran, crossing the north inlet of lake Argentino to the Upsala glacier, which is the biggest of all the glaciers in the national park.
While sailing, you can see strange shaped icebergs floating in the lake. They have a beautiful variety of colours, which go from brilliant white to deep turquoise and sapphire blues. After approximately 2.5 hours, the boat stops about 600m from the edge of the glacier. The glacier is 50km long and 9km wide and at the edge of the lake, large chunks of ice crash into the water, surfacing to become icebergs. This is the moment when you can enjoy and be impressed by the immensity of the surroundings in the area and hear the far off creaking of the falling blocks of ice. What you see is only a part of the giant glacier, whose bottom lies down to 300m under the waterline on the ground. Guides on board explain (in different languages) all about the different kind of glaciers you see on the trip.
The boat continues to a quiet bay. After a short walk through an enchanted wood you will reach the Onelli lagoon (the entrance to the Onelli bay is blocked by icebergs since a few years ago), where you have the possibility of doing a picnic or having lunch in the restaurant (not included). This lagoon is the watershed of three different glaciers, which can be seen in the background: the glaciers Onelli, Bolado and Agassiz. The bay is covered with stranded icebergs in all shapes and sizes, which is a spectacular show of ice, light, water, and mountains. Back on the catamaran you sail back the same way you came. The different daylight shows the same landscape in different colours and shades.
After sailing along the hanging glacier Heim, the boat enters another arm of the lake Argentino, to visit another hidden beauty of this region, the glacier Spegazzini, the favourite for many locals. It is much smaller than the Upsala glacier, but its scurrile walls, the highest of all the glaciers you see on this trip, rise up over 70m out of the water. It is the last highlight before the catamaran sails back to Punta Bandera, from where you drive back to El Calafate. |
