A two and a half hour bus ride north is El Chaltén and the northern part of the Glaciers Park. If El Calafate was a two horse town, El Chaltén is a one horse town mainly catering for backpackers and hikers in what is Argentina's most famous hiking and camping region. It has a much nicer, quieter atmosphere than Calafate, cheaper and less 'touristy' without coachloads of visitors, but it has its own less famous glaciers and we take a trip across the lake to walk on the biggest, Viedma.

After clambering over yellow-orange rocks, grooved and smoothed with wavy patterns by the retreating glacier in the last ice age we get to the remaining glacier, are fitted with crampons and shown how to walk in them across the icy surface of the glacier crusted with rocks, gravel and dust which the glacier has gathered from rocks it has crushed on its journey from the mountains hundreds of miles away over thousands of years.

We timidly approach the edge of a deep crevasse, the compacted ice at the base is deep blue which gets whiter the more it's exposed to the air. We walk through another narrow canyon formed by the cracking of the ice as the glacier moves forward. It is a cooler day and I am glad of my thermal layers and grateful there is still little wind as the breeze coming off the glacier is indeed glacial.