We arrived into the national park after a long drive, we had to set up tents on a gravel roadway which was covered in big stones, thankfully our air beds were good enough to not feel them once we were laid down. The landscape at the park was very nice, we went to a look out point to see the hanging glacier, it was very impressive as it was high up in a cliff face with water running down from it into the lake below. There wasn't much else to do here apart from hike up to another view point, Gráinne stayed behind because of her ankle.
It took about an hour and a half to get up to the top mainly through forestry but it was all uphill so was a bit tiring. We reached the top and it was on level with the glacier but still quite far from it, it was a good view but not much better than down below. After about 2 or 3 minutes we heard a massive cracking thundering sound and a huge chunk of ice starting breaking away from the glacier and crashed down the cliff face sending a massive cloud of powdered ice everywhere, the sound was deafening but was really impressive to witness.
It didn't take too long to walk down, but we needed a shower quite badly. The park had lots of different designated camping spots but only one of them had showers, I set off to get one but they were about a kilometre away from where we were camped, it took ages to find them and was not what you wanted after a hike. After finally reaching them you discovered that there was only one shower for men and one for women so there was a big queue of people waiting as there was a lot of people camping. To top it off the hot water ran out half way through so had to finish in a freezing cold shower.
It was spaghetti bolognese for dinner which went down amazingly and I think everyone had two portions of it. Everyone went to bed pretty early as it was a big drive day the next day.
We were driving nearly all day and had a border crossing into argentina, it was a long border crossing and took ages, they seemed to take the longest studying british passports for some reason, just after the border there was a sign say 'Las Malvinas son Argentinas' meaning the Falklands are Argentinian, we found this funny. We were due to have our first bush camp that day, when we arrived in the town where we were going to camp, there was no opportunity to bush camp so ended up just staying at a campsite. We had chicken pasta with mushroom sauce which was surprisingly good considering it was all tinned veg and packet sauce because no fresh food is allowed across the border. Apart from the chicken, that was fresh but hidden and smuggled across.
We had porridge the next day for breakfast and then continued on our drive.