Patagonia: Picture Perfect....

So from BA a 3 hour flight took us to Ushuaia. This is the largest city (40,000) this far south, on the planet, cool!  A pretty port city with a naval base, fishing (crab, scallops, langostinas and southern sea bass (yum, yum) and tourism.

 This is the place people come so they can get to Patagonia to hike and to take cruises to Antarctica.  Patagonia is an area that includes land from both Chile and Argentina at the southern tip of South America. We spent a few days here before meeting up with our tour guide and group.  Our group for hiking included a Brit, an Aussie, a Swiss and a fella from the US.  Our guide (Carolina) was from Chile and had been guiding for about 10 years.  We took a flight from Ushuaia to El Calafate and then a bus ride that got us to El Chalten.

 From here we hiked up to Mount Fitzroy.  Wow, a beautiful glacier lake (a cirque) was at the base.
 This hike was not for the unfit as it was an 18km round trip including an 800m elevation gain.

 The short hike to Serro Solo (17km round trip) the next day took us to another glacier lake.  It did not have the elevation gain of the day before and it was not quite as picturesque, but still pretty.  We then took a bus back to El Calafete.  We took a short ride to the most visited glacier in the world, Perito Moreno.  This is because you can get there by vehicle, then there is a boat that gets you close to the front, the views are stunning and it calves icebergs a lot.  There are pictures showing a huge peice of it coming off and splashing in the water.  I hope it does is justice, it was amazing. 

It also is in equilibrium which for the non geologists in the crowd means that it is not receding but gains as much as it loses. 

This is a bit unusual as most of the glaciers here are receding.  The Patagonian ice sheet has a huge amount of glaciers that encompass the area and we saw a lot of them. 
After this amazing site we spent a couple nights here with some absolutely amazing sunsets, wow.

 Off to Porta Natales to get organized for the camping part of the expedition.  We have started to see some of the local wildlife.  Mainly birds and llamas.  The llamas are called guanaco.  They are wild and are quite common.  The only big predator is the puma or as we call them cougars.  We got into the national park where we are camping and went for another 18km hike up the Torres del Paine. 

This was very familiar as this area looks a lot like the Rockies.  Non the less, it was stunning.  We did have one wet day where we did a few small hikes to look at some cave paintings and to see some of the devastation from a recent forest fire.  This was set by a stupid tourist who did not want to carry out his garbage.  So he set a fire to burn it and burnt down 14,000 Ha of Patagonian forests.  These are slow to return and is devastating to see.  We camped for a few nights but we had our tents set up for us and our meals cooked as well.  I need to camp in Canada like this!  A quick trip to Porta Natales and then a long bus ride back to Ushiawa ended our Patagonian adventure.  There is a sign here in Ushiawa it says "Ushiawa, the end of the world and the start of everything".  I could not agree more.  I hope the pictures do Patagonia justice.  Off to Antarctica next for a 9 day boat trip.