Patagonia- how to describe it? After a 29 hour bus-ride across it, I feel that I should at least be able to try. It is a land shaped by glaciers, forgotten by the rain, and swept bare by the wind; leaving only a few small shrubs clinging to its soil. It is contained only by the oceans- Atlantic and Pacific, and is punctuated by the magestic Andes mountains. For me it recalls the Australian outback- vast and barren and home to interesting animals (like guanacos and ñandus) running alongside cowboys made hard from sun and life in the saddle. For Douglas, due to the herds of sheep grazing on the hills, rounded up by dogs as the sun slowly sets, Patagonia is reminiscent of Scotland. Once we dipped down the valley to El Calafate and saw the Andes once again, I had the distinct feeling I was in the Tetons. At the end of the day, however, Patagonia is not exactly like anywhere I´ve ever been. According to Bruce Chatwin, the author of the book I´m currently reading, ¨Patagonia is not a precise region on the map. It is a vast, vague territory that encompasses 900,000 square kilometers of Argentina and Chile. The area is most effectively defined by its soil. You know you are in Patagonia when you see rodados patagonicos, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and jarilla, the low bush that is its dominant flora.

El Calafate is also a strange place. It´s a town built in 1985, partly to facilitate tourists´ visits to Glaciar Perito Moreno, and partly to claim the land before Chile could. It is very touristy, but pleasantly located on the edge of Lago Argentino (the largest lake in Argentina) with a nice view of the cordillera beyond. We even had a lake-view from our hostel window, and we could watch the sunset over the mountains every night, since we were usually home by sunset at 10:30pm :).

Our first day in El Calafate we decided that if a town is built around a visiting a glacier, we should probably visit it. We were right. The company we went with offered a three part tour. Part one: viewing the glacier from catwalks across the water from the glacier. This was spectacular. It allowed you both to get up close to the ice face, and also to see how far the glacier stretched back into the mountains (15km!). The glacier is stable (meaning that it gains the same amount of ice that is loses each year) and quite active. While we were there we saw two particularly spectacular calves- huge ice chunks crashing violently into the lake below. Part two was seeing the glacier from a boat on the lake. This was also beautiful, and gave us a feel for how high the ice went above the water (40m above, 110 below!). The third part, however, was spectacular- we landed on the shore next to the glacier, put on crampons, and went for a 1.5 hour hike on the glacier itself! In addition to offering stunning views of ice and sky, this allowed us to see all of the water ON the glacier. We saw rivers, waterfalls, and lakes below. For those of you who are concerned, don´t worry, walking with crampons on ice is probably easier than walking on land with shoes (at least for me!). I did not slip, fall, or hurt myself in any way :).