Parque Nacional Los Glaciares

Parque Nacional Los Glaciares is a national park in the south of Argentine Patagonia, which as its name suggests, has lots of glaciers and also some pretty dramatic mountain scenery.

From Bariloche we flew to El Calefate, a town in the park, with the Argentine military airline LADE. It isn't an experience that I would recommend to a nervous flyer. The plane looked pretty shabby with visible dents and they didn't even bother with the usual safety demonstration!

El Calefate isn't the most charming town in the world but it makes up for it with the nearby Glacier Perito Moreno. While Glacier Perito Moreno might not be the biggest glacier in the park it is certainly very impressive. Our bus took us to viewing platforms opposite the glacier and we also went on a boat trip near to the front of the glacier.

Glacier Perito Moreno looks like a huge, frozen, blue river coming down the hill and finishing in cliffs of ice. The most amazing thing was watching the huge chunks of ice that would periodically fall of the glacier and crash into the lake with a loud bang.

After visiting the Glacier Perito Moreno we traveled up to El Chalten in the north of the park. This tiny town is surrounded by the most dramatic and beautiful mountain scenery. The peaks of Monte Fitzroy and Cerro Torre that tower above the town have cost the lives of many mountaineers attempting to scale them. Fortunately we didn't have anything so ambitious in mind just some walking and camping around the bases of the mountains.

On the first day we walked up to Laguna de Los Tres, which is pretty much the closest that you can get to Monte Fitzroy without climbing equipment, and were rewarded with a superb view of the mountain. The next day we continued to the Glacier Piedras Blancas. By this point it had started raining heavily and the wind was blowing. As getting up to the glacier meant climbing over huge, slippery boulders with our big ruck sacks on we eventually decided to turn back. We retraced our steps to the campsite where we had spent the night and then climbed up to a viewing point on the other side of the glacier where irritatingly we could see that we had actually only been a few meters from the glacier when we had made the decision to go back! Fortunately the sun came out to cheer us up and we carried on down the valley until reaching a campsite and the next day walked all the way back to town.

The highlight of our time in El Chalten however, was undoubtedly our trip to Glacier Viedma, the biggest in Argentina. We approached the glacier in a boat across Lago Viedma which was full of beautiful, blue icebergs. After that we went trekking on the glacier itself. It was the first time that either of us had ever worn crampons and I found the way they made my feet stick in the ice so that I could walk down steep slopes of ice really, really cool. A nice touch of the tour operator was to give everyone a shot of Baileys near the end, made with real glacier ice!

Next we are going to Puerto Natales in Chile where we plan to do some more walking in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.