Southern Patagonia

This part of the trip feels like a ‘grand finale’ of sorts and the landscape provides a fitting crescendo. Southern Patagonia is one of the world’s flagship destinations known for the grandeur of its landscapes. There’s the Andes of course, along with the Southern Patagonian ice field, being the world’s second largest contiguous extrapolar ice field (number one is in Alaska). All this creates spectacular snow covered mountains, glaciers and iceberg-dotted lakes. It’s truly stunning.

Woah!

Perito Moreno glacier

We first fly into El Calafate, which is a small town set on an impossibly turquoise lake and almost wholly based on glacier tourism. We do a day tour to visit the Perito Moreno glacier, which takes us by boat to the moraine at the southern edge from where we walk up and onto the glacier with crampons. I’m interested (and comforted) to hear they test and create new walking routes every morning.

First sighting of the glacier on the bus ride in

Closer

Closer still

Our intrepid little ice adventurer

Very close now. On top of it, in fact.

See!

Nothing like a toast with an alcoholic beverage to top off a tour

As we’re walking back to the lunch spot, we’re delayed looking for the rubber stopper from the end of Aelie’s new hiking pole. This turns out to be a stroke of luck as some ice falls off the glacier as we’re walking back and we’re in pole position to see it (no pun intended). It’s a remarkable sight but what’s more incredible is the sound, which is a bit like fireworks when it’s cracking and then a canon when it crashes into the water.

After a lunch spent staring intently at the glacier front in hopes of seeing another ice fall, we hop back on the boat to cruise passed the southwestern edge of the glacier and then back on the bus to visit some walkways and platforms that allow you to view the northwestern edge.

It’s a top notch tour, with good explanations of the local flora and fauna, the glacier and its history as well as what we’re doing at each stage. I also love the finale of the ice walk, where they give us all a shot of whisky and a chocolate for a grand toast.

El Chalten

We then drive north about 3.5 hours to El Chalten, a town almost wholly based on trekking tourism. We’re incredibly lucky with the weather on our drive - the skies are blue and clear, offering us uninterrupted views of the magnificent mountain range and its peaks, Fitz Roy and Torre.

Our first day here, we do a short walk to some lookouts…

…and finish with a horse ride, followed by an asado dinner…

Day 2 is rainy, so we relax and do a short walk to a waterfall in the afternoon…

Our last day looks ok weather-wise, so we get up early and walk to Lake Torre, an 18km hike through forest and up a river bed to get a closer look at Cerro Torre from across its icy-cold lake. Previous hikers have built some little half shelters so you can retreat from the bracing wind that blows across the lake from the glacier while you eat your lunch. The views are stunning and the rock peaks look mysterious and enchanting with their shadows and clouds.

One thing I’m delighted/baffled by (which doesn’t seem that crazy now I write it down 😉) is how different the peaks can look depending on where you are - sometimes they seem so massive and close and they loom over the landscape and other times they seem in proportion to their distance away.

Torres del Paine National Park

And now, the big granddaddy - Torres del Paine! We cross the border into Chile for this leg and have a good laugh at the absolutely clean line separating the rough, dirt road on the Argentinian side and the smooth, well-marked bitumen road on the Chilean side. We’re also literally blown away by the wind as we struggle out of the car to visit the border crossing / customs offices on either side.

As we’ve been travelling for so long, we’ve been modest with our accommodation in most places. The same goes for our cabin in TDP, but I reckon the view is worth a million bucks!

I discovered this view when I casually pottered down to the river from our cabin and squatted down to stretch my back!

We’re again blessed with mostly clear skies on our first day, so choose a few short walks to take advantage of the stunning views…

The winds are insane, averaging 15-30 knots with gusts up to 80km. Our walk up to one viewpoint includes a section between two peaks that’s effectively a wind tunnel. The winds are so strong I have to steady and pull myself along using the rocks on the ground at one point!

The next day, we do a walk along a stretch of beach that borders Grey Lake, facing out to Grey Glacier at the far end. There's a large, impossibly blue iceberg sitting just off the beach. It looks incredible against the layered greys and greens of the lake, mountains and clouds. 

Part of the puzzle with TDP is matching our individual preferences, chosen activities, weather and stock of petrol (the nearest fuel is 85kms away). There’s a big, flagship day walk here that I’d been really keen to do since I learned about it, but our walk in El Chalten revealed a few things: (1) the hiking boots I’ve hired are ok for the first 10kms and then very much go downhill from there (‘scuse the hiking pun 😂) and (2) my knees are a bit bodgy. We also read reviews that speak about a high level of difficulty and so rule out taking Aelie. This means only one of us can do it and, given my boots and knees, Sim does it and Aelie and I do a horse ride instead…

In a delightful turn of events Aelie and I hear a tap at the door while relaxing at the cabin after the ride. It's a little girl, the daughter of our hosts. We bumble through Google Translate to discover she's asking if Aelie can come for a play, which she does for hours 😊 We’d been hoping there might be such an opportunity but the language barrier has been strong. We’re all stoked that Aelie has this experience, none more than Aelie herself!

And then it’s time to drive back to El Calafate for our flight to Santiago and the last few days of our trip. We’ve been super lucky with minimal flight disruptions so far - a few flights have been rescheduled by an hour or two and we’ve had to rebook a few things here and there, but nothing too disruptive. But it seems our time is up! There’s been a massive storm in Buenos Aires and, as most flights in Argentina are routed through the capital, pretty much everyone trying to fly in and out of El Calafate is affected. They’ve rescheduled us to fly in a couple of days, so I stand in a line to try rebooking flights in person while Sim gets on the phone to our insurance company and looks at other flights online. When we realise there aren’t any other flights available, we book new accommodation, try and fail to book a new hire car (they’ve all be snapped up!) and make the best of it with a nice meal out. We feel for the people on short trips and the Australian family booked to go to Antarctica in a few days and we hope they manage to make it work.

Next stop: Santiago / Tunquen