Sep 23 2013 A world of ice

Patagonia is one of those places I end up with the giggles unable to assimilate the hilarity of the landscape. The accompanying Andes gravel road in the western part and the eastern route penguins fit on the beaches of the Atlantic. There are lakes lit, White Mountains, Ski cities, Mapuche claiming lands, active volcanoes, rheas, bikers, gauchos, Patagonian lamb, Araucaria forests and glaciers there, hundreds of miles of ice, a universe of frozen water, surfeit of blue, icebergs off the hook to overwhelm the traveler. And the traveler goes there always smaller, quieter, because the glaciers are by definition immense and silent. Imposes its colossal size and if they get split, its only thunder sticks in the memory as a centuries crunch impossible to forget.

There are hundreds, thousands of glaciers. They lie in the mountains Argentine or inaccessible valleys of Chile. Most of them inaccessible, but there is a place that concentrates on a walk nautical wonders: is Lake Argentino.

Hundreds of miles of ice, a universe of frozen water, surfeit of blue, icebergs off the hook to overwhelm the traveler.

From Calafate hordes of tourists depart wool hats, camera and winning smile. The boats dodging ice floes, pieces that fell from the wall of glaciers. We travel in the bow, to capture the blue-green water, to point to the snowy mountains. Back, the rest of tourists making grimaces zooms and rehearsing before the landscape.

Lake Argentino, with or without tourist boats, is one of the wildest and most beautiful places on the planet. It is unique for its statues of floating ice and the proximity of the glaciers that grind on the tip of the gloves. Lakeside, Onelli Bay looks like a story, because only in fiction can invent a place with its flowers and trees decorating a lake full of frozen structures and valleys where most glaciers slide down.

Back at the lake we approach the Spegazzini and Upsala glacier, the largest of the Glacier National Park, so majestic and so huge that you lose and the notion of space and only see ice, a world of ice.

Some daredevils have come in too to see how the glacier collapses and died riddled with ice chips

But of all the glaciers, but there is one that strikes you is considered: Perito Moreno. It is the most famous of the world's ice fields, the most visited, the most admired. Perhaps because it is friendly, gives facilities. We present unceremoniously, Hit, to only forty feet away with its front rising proudly and with a start shedding blocks deaf. Some daredevils have come in too to see how the glacier collapses and died riddled with ice chips, which fired shrapnel exiting the water impact.

Like so many other hikers with crampons, Also we walked its surface to feel that we were on another planet, rough like a giant ball of paper, water wells and can accommodate the full range of blues possible. The Perito Moreno deserves a walk, but more than that would be too much vertical walls and crannies that never ends.

Hard to think that it is water, only frozen water, ever stranded on ice. And so watching the glacier lost among the mountains, without seeing the frosted finish one gets the giggles, feeling a little smaller.