Berg Adventures Joints In Motion Patagonia Trek Dispatch

October 17, 2010 – We Begin Our Adventure At the “End of the World”

This is Leila Silveira reporting from Los Glaciales National Park near El Calafate. We woke this morning in Buenos Aires and, after a lot of struggle at their domestic airport, managed to board our plane. Three hours later, we landed in El Calafate.

We then started our 80 kilometre drive to Perito Moreno Glacier where our lodge, Los Notros, is located.

On our drive here we saw something quite fascinating; driving through El Calafate, we were actually driving on an airport runaway, with a tower and everything but no planes. It begged the question: how do they control when a plane needs to land and how they manage to stop the traffic?

We managed to arrive at Los Notros for lunch where we chose our meals from an amazing menu and enjoyed great service. Our lodge is absolutely fantastic. All the rooms face the glacier, and even the bathroom has a bathtub with a view to the glacier. From our windows we see the five kilometre width of the glacier where it spills into Lago Argentina!

With only 32 rooms, lodge guests are the only people allowed to be inside the park after it closes. We see buses coming and going with tourists, but only we get to enjoy the privilege of staying the entire day and actually seeing the sunset and sunrise, weather permitting. Let’s not forget, this IS Patagonia, after all.

After lunch and a quick rest, Sue, Sharon and Reginald went on a nature trek and had a chance to see the glacier up-close. George, a professional photographer, decided to drive around and look for special photo opportunities which he found in spades.

We met again for another amazing dinner and scheduled ourselves a trek along the glacier tomorrow morning.