We had a 'sea change' in the weather today. Yesterday, we had lovely sunny, cool, breezy weather. This morning, it became apparent that someone had royally irritated the weather gods because the sky was filled with black angry-looking clouds and frequent short bursts of pelting rain came down. We knew we were to go on a potentially very wet boat ride to Grey Glacier in the afternoon, so we dressed for the occasion in the morning and managed to stay dry all day.
We drove to the area of Hosteria Lago Grey, and walked across a scary hanging bridge over the rushing waters from the glacier melt. Enrique turned off the main trail, and, always anticipating a good adventure, Ivan and I followed! We would not be disappointed! We were heading uphill through low-growing shrubs and a canopy of Notofagus trees. We arrived at the top of a small hill and Enrique played the call of a Magellanic Woodpecker. A male flew from a nearby tree in a direction away from us, but we were very excited that we saw it. Ivan took this photo:
Remember, it was rainy and windy, but I think this is a fabulous photo! The bird is standing at the entrance to its nest cavity, and, much to our complete delight, a few seconds later the female came out! We had moved, cross-country style to a higher vantage point, a little further away from the tree we thought, correctly, was the nest tree and had lovely views as these two birds tended to the nest. We didn't hear any young begging for food, but the male and female made numerous trips to and away from the nest while we watched quietly, but mesmerized by this wonderful discovery.
Finally, Enrique made the difficult decision to take us away from our front row seat on a fallen log and return us to the hotel for lunch. We talked incessantly about this very interesting morning we had had with 'our' woodpeckers.
At around 2PM, we were supposed to head out on the boat to the Grey Glacier, but it was so windy that the boat that was already at the glacier had decided to wait for a bit in the hope that the wind and swells would lessen. We ended up departing around 2:30 in spitting rain, but lesser wind, on the boat. There were about 15 others on this adventure and we all anticipated seeing this huge and beautiful glacier. Below are a couple of photos I took. You may need your magnifying glass again for the photo from the beach of an ice floe with people at the edge of the beach. It's all about perspective!
This is the main face (there are three) of Grey Glacier.
See the teeny people sort of on the left of the photo?
Ivan and I have no idea how tall this face is, but I guessed at 500'. It's HUGE!
Since we had a late start, we didn't go ashore, something I was just as happy about! We headed back happy and impressed until the crew came around with glasses of Pisco Sours or whisky for each passenger. Each glass had a large piece of glacial ice in it, like this:
I have no idea what's in a Pisco Sour, but it's served everywhere in Chile and is quite tasty. Try googling it!
After arriving back at the boat launch, we met up with Enrique and Alvaro and headed back to Rio Serrano for our last night there. Next day, we moved to Hosteria Las Torres and even more exciting and unexpected adventures.
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