Beunos Aires - Ushuaia - El Calafate

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I've been very lazy sending emails, so I've been trying to setup this travelblog to make things easier. I'm actually in Puerto Natales which is in Chile. We're having a couple days rest before starting a 5 day trek in Torres del Paine Nacional Parque, so I'm using the time to finally get it sorted.

After we got back to BA from Puerto Iguazu, we had a couple days before we flew to Ushuaia. We spent one of those at an estancia just outside BA, which is basically a farm. It was really tourist but we got to have an asado, which is an Argentinian BBQ. You can see from the photo on my homepage that a lot of meat was eaten.

Ushuaia claims to be the southern most town in the world, when in fact it isn't, as there´s another town across the channel which belongs to Chile. Had a good few days there. Spent 2 days doing walks around the national park. Really nice but would have been better had we not got caught in a snow storm. We also hired a car and went on a road trip for the day. The roads hadn't fully recoverd from all the snow, so there was still a bit of ice on the road, so I was driving more cautiously than normal - you can imagine the queues behind me.

From Ushuaia we flew to El Calafate. From here we went to see the Moreno Glaciar in the Los Glaciars Nacional Parque. Absolutely immense. This thing blew away the glaciar I saw in NZ. It's 5km wide, 60m high and stretches back 14km. The best bit was just watching the glaciar, listening and waiting for chunks to fall off. Every couple of minutes you would hear what sounded like a crack of thunder or a gun shot and then see a piece fall into the lake. We were luck enough to see huge pieces fall off.

We then took a bus to El Chaten, which is a tiny town near the Fitz Roy Range. We went on a 2 day trek. This place was so beautiful and impressive and we were lucky enough to get good weather. The first day we spent hiking to Laguna de los Tres, from where you get an amazing close up of Mount Fitz Roy. We'd arranged to do ice trekking the next day. Because the weather was good , we did the walk to the lake, which meant that we couldn´t make it to the camp where we were supposed to meet the guide the next morning. This meant that we had to get up at 6am, pack away our camp and trek 3 hours (2 of those in the dark) to meet the guide. The cheap torch I bought off eBay broke, but luckily Bri had a spare one. The park is full of pumas, so we were slightly on edge until it got light. The ice trek was good fun. Got to see Glaciar Torre up close and even got to do an ice climb. Had to have two attempts as somehow my shoe came off as I half way up.

From El Chalten we had to get a bus to El Calafate before we could get a bus to Puerto Natales. That's pretty much brought you up to date. I'll be in touch again soon.

Suerte

Jack

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Photos

Ice Climbing on Glaciar Torre
With those size 12s, how did that happen?