April 15th, 2007
Patagonia — it´s not just an outdoor clothing company; it´s the name of the mountainous region in southern Argentina filled with lakes, glaciers, wildlife, and other amazing scenery. We flew down here (getting close to the bottom of the planet) to visit a few well-known sites.
The city of El Calafate is most famous for the huge Perito Moreno glacier, an incredible glacier the size of Buenos Aires that moves very fast, approximately 2 meters per day. Its front end lies in a lake, and we hiked to get the best views possible. Here we are getting close to the glacier.
We then took a boat ride to get even closer to this humongous block of ice.
Moving on. Several days later we rode on multiple buses for 7 hours, crossed the border into Chile, and reached the Torres del Paine National Park, a park featuring three large (2000m high) towers of stone and many lakes. The park has every sort of terrain possible — forest, mountain, rivers, boulders — and you have to hike across all to reach the best view points. The classic hike has 4 legs (called the “W”), each leg taking one day; we did the first part of the W. Unfortunately the weather was not great that day — they say there are 4 seasons in each day here — and we couldn´t see the towers. An exhausting, but great, day.
In case you can´t tell, it is cold here…very cold. Unfortunately I didn´t plan to come to Patagonia, and so I didn´t prepare appropriately — expecting a trip full of beaches and sunny weather, I packed only shorts and T-shirts. So most of the clothes I´m wearing I bought down here!
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