El Calafate

The Perito Moreno glacier

Us hiking on the glacier

After a 1-night stay in Salta (which we did mostly to make sure we made our flight the next morning), we flew to El Calafate via Buenos Aires.  El Calafate (named after the calafate berry, which once eaten guarantees your return to Patagonia) is sort of like tourist central in Argentine Patagonia.  It felt like the Argentine version of Banff – overpriced gift shops, fancy hotels and restaurants, and people wearing unnecessary technical clothing to walk around town.

We stayed two nights at Hostal Amancay.  This was my first experience with a hostel, and it was apparently pretty typical.

We were in Calafate for one reason – the Perito Moreno glacier.  Located about 45 minutes from town in the Parque Nacional de los Glaciares, the glacier is an offshoot of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.  We booked a ‘mini-trekking’ tour of the glacier, which included a boat ride in the lake surrounding the glacier, a 1.5 hour walk on the glacier itself (with crampons!), and a visit to a set of terraced viewpoints for panoramic glacier views.  The glacier itself is remarkable for two reasons: the proximity of its face to land (as opposed to a lake) makes it great for viewing, and its location in a temperate climate mean it moves very fast, creating a great show for spectators when giant ice pieces break off the face of it ever 15 minutes or so (calving).

The ‘mini-trekking’ was great – Hielos y Aventura (the operator) ran probably the best-organized tour we’ve been on in South America (though priced to match – muy caro!).  They were on time to pick us up, their guides were knowledgeable and spoke many languages, and it was really fun.  The obvious highlight was our hike on the glacier itself.  It was the first time either of us had work crampons (which felt super weird at first), and we felt like the time spent on the ice was perfect – enough to see the major stuff (crevasses, sinkholes, different colors in the ice, etc.), but not so long that we got really cold or bored (as the alternative 5-hour trek might have done).  And at the end of the excursion, our guide chunked some ice off the glacier and served us each a glass of decent whiskey with glacier ice to chill it!

Afterwards, we headed to the balcony overlooks at the face of the glacier for an hour and watched some ice chunks cleave off.  We saw probably 4 or 5 huge pieces break off into the water over the course of about half an hour, all with a colossal BOOM that sounded like explosions.

Back in El Calafate, we were pretty tired from a long day in the park, so we showered up, ate some pizza, and passed out before the sun went down (at the latitude here, about 50 degrees South, the sun goes down around 10:30pm!).