Los Glaciares National Park

The past couple of days I've been in El Calafate visiting Los Glaciares National Park.

A friend of mine had recommended taking two days here, spending the first day on a boat trip around the lake and taking the second day to visit Perito Moreno glacier. The reason being that if you did Perito Moreno first, the rest of the glaciers would be a disappointment.

So the first day we were picked up at the crazy time of 7:15 (after a night in the town in what the hostel staff described as the only party of the year) and taken to the boats.



They looked pretty sturdy, which was quite nice to see as we hit quite a few rather large lumps of ice on the way to see the glaciers.



We visited 3 glaciers on the trip, I won't post all the photos I took here, you can see them all on flickr, but it was quite spectacular.

Some of the glaciers are quite dangerous and we were only allowed to get within 800 meters of them as the entire front can collapse. This one is about 80 meters high and about 4 kilometers wide.


The distance makes it quite hard to appreciate the scale of the thing. We did get very close to some of the other glaciers and even managed to catch some of them calving (quite hard to capture on film, you're always just too late with the camera).



Stopped for lunch at a nice glacial lake and then returned home.



The following day we did something that I think will be one of my highlights of Patagonia. I was initially a bit reluctant to sign up for this tour, I'm starting to get a bit bored of the whole going on excursions thing, but it was more than worth it.

We were picked up a slightly more reasonable time of 8:30 and taken to the base of Perito Moreno glacier.



You can see some people walking on the glacier in this photo which gives you an idea of the size of the thing.



A quick walk through the forest took us to the start of the ice and it was time to strap on the crampons for our turn.



Walking on the ice was absolutely fantastic and the ice is truly beautiful.





After an hour or so walking on the ice we were treated to some whisky with glacial ice cubes!



We took lunch taking care to stay away from the edge of the lake:



and were then taken to the viewing platforms to watch the glacier calving. The noise here is amazing, sounds like thunder with an almost constant sound of cracking and creaking.





You can see more photos of the glacier here.

All in all, an amazing couple of days. Today I'm catching a plane to Iguazu to see what is billed as the second not to miss thing in Argentina, a massive waterfall.

Walking in a winter wonderland...

Today we decided to do a short walk to see Glacier Luis Martial. The day was looking a bit gloomy so we didn't hold out much hope for views.

Started off the walk on what seemed to me to be a cross between a ski slope and a path.



This soon turned into a proper mountain and the weather started to clear up quite nicely. Bit windy though...



Finally reached the base of the glacier. Of course, you can't see it, it's covered in snow, but it's behind that rock formation...



The view back into town is pretty amazing.



However the weather quickly started to close in and it started to snow quite heavily.



So it was a quick run/slide back down the snow to the refugio for some hot soup and mulled wine.



Felt slightly lazy getting the chairlift the rest if the way down...



Off to El Calefate tomorrow for more glacier excitement.

Laguna Esmeralda

A few of us went on a short walk today to visit Laguna Esmeralda, we knew that the lake would be covered in ice and snow so there would not be that much to see of it, what we didn't know was that the path to the lake was pretty much knee deep in mud all the way...

Here's a picture of one of the bogs we had to cross:



But it was all worth it in the end, a nice pleasant place to have lunch and skip stones.



Back down at the bottom of the walk we had time for some interesting coffee and to play with the huskies that are bred there:

Ushuaia - Parque National Tierra Del Fuego

Went for a walk in the local national park, beautiful day. Stopped off at the guard post near the Chilean border and they made us a cup of coffee! Excellent bunch of people.

Ushuaia

I am now just about as far south as you can go without getting very cold - the town of Ushuaia.

The trip over her from Chile was quite interesting, we drove along the coast of the Straits of Magellan.


We even got to go for a quick boat trip!



Ushuaia is a surprisingly nice town. We'd got used to these isolated towns in Patagonia being a bit run down and not that nice, but this is very nice place.



There is even a ski-resort down here!