We said goodbye to BA and boarded a flight on Monday 26th October 3hrs south to El Calafate. This is our first taste of Patagonia!
You can go much further south but on our limited timeframe we decided a few days in mid-Patagonia would have to do, hopefully we'll come back one day and do Torres del Pines and Ushaiai.
Our drive from the airport to El Calafate gave us the first glimpse of the landscape down here - it is vast and mostly flat until it reaches the mountain range (the Argentine side of the Andes) which are snow capped and line the Argentine Lake. El Calafate is like a ski resort, there are shops selling ski gear, wooden buildings and lots of little restaurants and bars along the main strip. And it's cold! Luckily we bought some layers in BA but I'm having to borrow Ben's UnderArmour jacket to keep warm which swamps me! We went for a walk the first evening and stopped at a remote bar for a hot chocolate (this country is so good at hot chocolate!) before heading to a hilltop restaurant where Ben sampled the local speciality - slow cooked lamb which had been barbecued whole over open coals. It was delicious!
The next day we did a full day trip to see the Perito Moreno Glacier. The bus dropped us at the viewing balconies first for 2 hours to view the glacier from a distance of 800 meters. It was slightly overcast as we walked the 3 balcony routes. Perito Moreno is unusual because it's one of the only stable glaciers in the world as it has a 70% accumulating zone and 30% melting zone. The face is 50m high but double that under the water. It advances 2 meters a day but only 10cm at the edge and the ice at the front is 400 yrs old (relatively young compared to the slow moving glaciers of the Arctic). When the ice falls from the front of the glacier it sounds like an explosion or gunfire, it's pretty impressive and creates huge icebergs that float off into the lake. Pumas have been spotted on the glacier as recently as 2011 and this area is also well known for the condors that circle above.
After viewing it from afar we then caught a boat over to the glacier and were split into English and Spanish groups, fitted for crampons and headed up onto the glacier! Our guide explained to us that the shape of the glacier mirrors the bedrock underneath as it is shaped as it moves along. We walked up through ravines and saw huge sinkholes where the water runs through the ice. We walked the glacier for about an hour and a half and then the guides finished it off by taking us to a spot where they served whisky on ice with a chocolate - our kind of tour!
We spent that evening hanging out at our hostel and planning the next week as we're getting an early morning bus to El Chalten tomorrow.