Traveling To Patagonia, Part 2: Perito Moreno Glacier

Whenever I think of my travel bucket list, natural wonders rarely come up. I am mostly drawn to urban, not rural landscapes. But Jose loves to travel anywhere. Ask him about a country or a city and he knows exactly where it’s located on a map, what the culture is like and even quite a few points of interest. When we travel with his family, he always helps decide on the destination and a few activities. We almost didn’t make it to the Perito Moreno glacier. Their plan was to cruise through the Magallanes strait, but Jose insisted the trip way down there would not be worth it without seeing it. So, they decided to debark in Ushuaia and fly up to El Calafate. I flew down there from Panama to meet them. Words can’t describe what it was like to stand in front of this colossal mass of ice. I’ve never seen whites and blues quite like those. The way the light reflected off its surface. The deafening silence between the ice’s echoing creaks just before bits broke away and plummeted into the lake. The only adjective I keep repeating when trying—and failing, TBH—to rightfully describe our Patagonia experience is surreal. I don’t know. In my opinion, no vocabulary is vast enough for this shit. Wow, just wow.