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Published: November 10th 2012
After leaving Rio we arrived in good old Buenos Aries, this place was beginning to feel like home. We had to spend a night here as we could not make a connecting flight straight to El Calafate from Rio.
The next morning we had a flight at 6:30am to El Calafate which is down in the south of Argentina. The night before, Zac had gone out waving taxis down to find out the cost of a trip to the airport as we were leaving too early for any shuttle buses. We got up super early and by about 4:30am we were out on the street. We met another guy heading to the airport who wanted to split a taxi but he had been given a quote by the driver of 200 pesos! Zac had been told 50 pesos the night before by five different cabs, so we declined this offer and told the guy it was way too expensive. We then flagged down another taxi and he told us it was 50 pesos so we got in. Our driver was awesome, such a nice guy, but he didn't speak much english. He did speak nice and slow for us in
El Calafate
Grocery shopping El Calafate style. (No plastic bags here)Spanish, and I was able to understand quite a lot so we had a bit of a chat. We arrived with plenty of time to check our bags in.
We had great window seats for our flight and a clear morning sky so we left with great views over the city and clear weather nearly the whole flight to El Calafate. As we were coming in to land we could see these huge blue icebergs in the lake next to the airport. We arrived with the air hostess telling us it was a balmy 4 degrees... we had left Rio the day before to 36 degrees! This was going to be a shock! We got off the plane, collected our bags, and then had to put our bags through an X-ray scanner in order to leave the airport!! We caught a bus into the town of El Calafate, which is a pretty small township. The landscape was so barren there, the hills are dotted with tufts of grasses and littered with rocks. We arrived at the hostel we were staying at and dumped our gear and headed into the town to look around. The main attraction in this area
is the Perito Moreno Glacier, which is a 30km long glacier that comes from the Patagonian Ice Fields. It is 5km wide in some parts, 60m above the water at its end point, and up to 170m in total height including what is under the water. We booked a tour to go walk on the glacier for the following day. To finish off our first day in El Calafate, we went for a walk down to the edge of Lago Argentino. There is a wide road running beside the wetlands that surround the lake but it looks so unloved, like they invested lots of money and time into it about 5 years ago but never finished it. In the shallows of the lake there were large flocks of flamingos, despite the fact that it didn't seem like a habitat that would be attractive to flamingos (I always think of them as a tropical type bird for some reason). We walked out on the wetland to try to get photos of them but they were smarter than us and just kept moving. The closest we got to birds were these crazy plover like bird that just flew straight at your head
Glacier Perito Moreno, El Calafate
On the boat to start the minitreking on the glacier. (even more scary than the plovers at home). We retreated to the safety of the board walk and started heading back to the hostel via the supermarket. There are no plastic bags for shopping in this town so you pick out a box and use that, pretty good idea we think.
The next day we got picked up at 7:30am for our tour of Perito Moreno Glacier. The glacier is about 80km from town so it was a nice relaxing drive into the national park. The landscape is so beautiful in this area - it is really barren but really beautiful. When we arrived at the park we started to see more significant vegitation, including amazingly shaped beech trees, and the whole area was really pretty and green. We got a boat across the lake, which was littered with iceburgs, to the huts where we started the tour. Our guide was an enthusiastic local Argentine who spoke excellent English (and he was learning German also). We were told great detail about the glacier and the surrounding Patagonian Ice Fields, and then it was off to be fitted for crampons.
After receiving some basic safety instructions for walking on
the ice, we were off. This glacier is quite compact and stable despite it advancing 2m per day! The glacier was so pretty to walk on; the colour of the ice when looking down into the cracks and the water holes was the most incredible blue. The weather for this day was a little on the cold and overcast side! The wind coming off the ice fields was so cold. In our group were three crazy women who stripped down to just a thin Argentinian soccer top and then a Colombian soccer top to take photos. Way too cold for that! The trek took about an hour and half and finished with a very special feature of the Perito Moreno Glacier... a small table set up on the ice with a bottle of Jameson whiskey and chunks of glacier for ice, oh and a chocolate biscuit! A nice end to the trek!
We had a short walk through another beech forest with great views back over the face of the glacier. We sat and ate lunch overlooking the glacier and listening to the cracks and creeks of the ice. From time to time there are pieces of ice that
actually break off the face of the glacier and land with a splash into the lake below. It made a sound like thunder when a piece broke off, and every time we heard this we would jump up and look for the piece that had fallen. More often than not it was quite a small piece and the sound was dramatically disproportionate to the size of the piece that had fallen! After catching the boat back to the other side, we had about an hour to wonder around on the board walks that have great views over the face of the glacier. We stood and watched and watched but unfortunately didn't get to see any big chunks of ice fall. We did, however, get roped into putting the Argentinian soccer tops on after running into the girls from our tour group. They were a little crazy but lovely.
The next day we caught a bus about an hour out to a smaller town called El Chalten that is in the Los Glaciers National Park. It sits at the start of some beautiful day hikes in the Fitz Roy Mountain Range, to Cerro Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre. The day
we arrived we were blessed with clear blue skys, which is a rare site in this area. We arrived at 1230 and all busses go first to the ranger hut where you get current information on the trails. The park ranger told everyone to get out and enjoy the trails because most visitors to the park only get to see the mountains covered in clouds. So we decided to take her advice and headed out to do one of the harder walks in the park, to a lake at the base of Cerro Fitz Roy called Laguna de Los Tres. This walk is a 24km return that is meant to take up to 8 hours. The walk took us up 700m in altitude, with the last 2km of the walk being an incredibly steep climb of 400m. The walk was beautiful; it has wonderful lookouts over glacial valleys and lakes, paths that wind through small beech tree forests, and finishes on the top of a ridge over looking Laguna de Los Tres and it's glacier. Before we started, we were told to be careful as the track had some parts that were frozen. This was clearly evident on the last
2km as we walked over patches of snow and ice, and scrambled up huge boulders. We arrived at the top to be greeted with views of Laguna de Los Tres frozen solid and covered with nearly a metre of snow on top of it. From this lookout we had magnificent views to Cerro Fitzroy and behind that Cerro Torre. We stayed a while enjoying the views, but then we had to begin our decent and long walk home. We smashed this out in great time, finishing the walk in 7 hours including about 2 hours of stops. It was great to have long daylight hours as we made it back with about 30 minutes of light left. Both of us had such sore legs towards the end of the walk and were totally exhausted but glad we got straight into this amazing part of Patagonia. I'll tell you this though, we slept very well that night!
We woke the next day and were very surprised to find that legs were not as sore as we feared they would be. We were blessed with another clear day so we decided to keep on making the most of this weather and
do another longer day hike, this time to Laguna Torre. Another 7hr hike and about 22km return, this time to get great views to Cerro Torre. This walk was a lot flatter which was a nice relief after the day before. This walk takes you along the bottom of a glacial valley, through some very old beech forests to a lake at the base of Glacier Torre. This time we were pleased to see that the lake was not frozen solid but instead, the water closest to the track was covered with icebergs. The view out over these icebergs to the glacier and then the huge peak of Cerro Torre with a clear sky was amazing. We sat here quite a while soaking it all in, taking loads of photos and playing with sheets of ice that had made their way to the lakes edge.
The next day was my birthday and so we thought we'd relax a little and do some short walks. After a nice sleep in we headed out to the ranger hut to ask about the walks we had done over the last 2days as the information we had was not clear to the length
of the walks, this is when we found out we'd done 25km and 22km on the last 2 days. No wonder we were so tired after the walks. With this in mind, we headed out to do the shortest walks in the park. We started with Mirador de los Condors, a short but uphill walk to a lookout over the town of El Chalten and on top of a rock hill that condors make their nests in. From here we took a sidetrack out to another lookout 2km away looking over the plains that we had driven over to get to this town. After that it was time for some relaxing and some complaining from me that I didn't want to walk anymore, but Zac convinced me to do one last walk out to Chorrillo del Salto a waterfall 4km walk out of town. I am glad he did convince me to walk out there as it was a very pretty waterfall; no swimming under this one though as it was way too strong and way too freezing! Once we returned from the waterfall, Zac left me at our hostel to catch up on our travel diary and blog so
Glacier Perito Moreno, El Calafate
Some quick instructions on what not to do on the ice. he could go shopping in order to cook my birthday dinner. He even did his best to get a birthday cake, although the only thing that he could find was some yummy bakery biscuits with caramel filling.
This area in Argentina is such a beautiful piece of the world and it was a bit sad to leave in the end. It was, however, made a little easier knowing that our next stop was going to be Torres del Paine National Park. We caught a bus the next morning back to El Calafate and, after some mad running around town to find an ATM that worked in order to buy tickets, we got a bus to Puerto Natales, Chile!
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charles
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Jamesions
Sounds like a nice surprise at the end of a walk!!!!!! and you wouldnt any ice to go with it, than a bit of glasier. Thoroughly enjoy the reading, stay safe and enjoy. Love Dad.