El Calafate, the closest town to the world renowned Perito Moreno Glacier, isn't the most exciting town. The main street is filled with outdoor shops and touristy restaurants, but there is little character. As we soon discovered, there is very little to do there other than see the Glacier, unless you have bucket loads of money!

We had 4 nights in El Calafate so we had a look into some options of what to do. On our first full day there, we enquired with some tour companies for tour options. A full day kayak tour to another glacier nearby called Glaciar Upsala looked incredible, kayaking up close to icebergs. Unfortunately it would cost about $400 US per person!!!

So, instead we just went for a walk. Close to town, on the shores of Lago Argentino, was the Laguna Nimez Reserva Ecologica. This was a bird sanctuary which we thought was free, but alas little is free in Patagonia! We decided we could just walk alongside the reserve and peek over the fence instead.

We stopped for our sandwiches on the shore of the lake a little further on, then doubled back and walked around the lake in the other direction for a while. It was a nice warm day to be out walking.

The next day we decided to visit the Perito Moreno Glaciar. This enormous glacier is one of few in the world that is actually advancing. The face of the glacier is 5km wide and 170m high, with the height above the water level averaging 74m. Its massive! Unfortunately the weather was not quite as nice as the previous day, and was even worse at the glacier.

We caught a bus into the Los Glaciares National Park. When we stepped off the bus it was utterly freezing. We knew it was going to be cold, but it was unbelievably cold and despite our many layers we were under dressed. Then it started raining about 2 minutes later.

Undeterred, we made our way down the path to the network of walkways. A very convenient headland allows visitors to get really close to the face of the glacier. There is a few kilometres of metal walkways and platforms for viewing stretching around this headland.

Before long we could see almost the entire face of the glacier stretching to our left and our right. What a magnificent and wondrous sight! If the weather had been a little better we could also have seen it stretching away from us into the mountains, but instead the tall spires of ice just disappeared into low level cloud and mist in the distance.

We continued along the pathway to the left which made its way down the hill through the forest. At the bottom, we had a much closer view of the left hand side of the glacier. The face was made from pillars of twisted ice which had incredible blue tones. We could see the lines where sediment had been collected then the ice had been bent and twisted as it made its way down the glacier.

In front of the glacier were chunks of ice floating in the water. As this glacier advances at 1-2 metres a day, large sheets split off into the water regularly, though spotting one proved difficult! Some chunks break off under the water surface and float to the top, popping up like enormous chunks of blue glass.

As we moved along the walkways we snapped photos and waited patiently for pieces to fall. We saw some smaller pieces break off and plummet into the water, making sounds like gunshots as they hit the water.

We would continue along the walkways and whenever we returned into a foresty section where we couldn't see the glacier, we would hear a much larger piece crash and hear the ooh's and aah's of the onlookers. We managed to get the timing wrong every time!

We stood at one viewpoint back in the middle of the glacier for ages. Ages. Just when we gave up and turned our backs, we heard a big crack and just caught the tail end of a huge sheet of ice dropping into the water. Of course we didn't have the camera ready! We did manage to catch the huge arcing wave that the ice created after it hit the surface. Such a cool thing to see!

Further along the walkways to the right we managed to time things terribly again and again, always missing the incredible show put on by this glacier for the lucky observers. But even without the ice falling it was still such a powerful sight. You really could stare at the colours and shapes in the ice all day! If you weren't so cold that your fingers and toes were completely numb, that is!!

Back in El Calafate the next day, we took it easy though did try and find a Canyon that was marked on our map. We either weren't in the right spot, or it just wasn't what it was made out to be as we could only find a big dusty hole with a river running through the bottom. We wished we had spent more time hiking in El Chaltén rather than sitting around in El Calafate, but time to relax is always nice.

LAPFWT