So yesterday was mainly spent packing up my rucksack and travelling. I flew from Buenos Aires to El Calafate and as soon as I arrived I went to a travel agent and booked a trek on the glacier for today.

The hostel is lovely and the lady who runs it is super friendly and welcoming.

The landscape in El Calafate is already really different from anywhere else I’ve been.

So this morning I was up early and we set off for the glacier. We were a big group of 30+ people but they split us into smaller groups to go walking on the glacier.

When we arrived at the park we had to get a boat across to the glacier and we had our first sighting of the south wall of the Moreno Glacier.

You can see the top.of a tree in the first photo above. That’s because the lake is now around 14m higher than normal as the glacier has moved right across and joined up with the land and formed a dam. So the water on one side of the dam is much higher than the other side – eventually the water will find a way through and form an ice bridge which will eventually collapse. You can see the dam here:

When we got off the boat we could leave some of our bits on a shelter and then we all had to put on crampons to go walking on the ice – they gave us a short lesson on how to walk in them. All the time you can hear the ice moving and cracking. This glacier moves around 2-3m a day but it’s currently in equilibrium as it also builds that much a day.

The walk on the glacier was unbelievable – it’s really hard to describe. It’s so amazing and so different to anything else. The glacier looks like snow dunes in places and like spiky meringue in other places. There are lots of crevases and ice holes which look really blue where the light is reflecting off the compact ice.

Before getting off the ice we stopped for a whisky and glacier ice – delicious.

I could be easily spent another hour or so walking on the ice but unfortunately we had to leave.

On the way back we visited an ice cave – the walls were really smooth like glass.

But that wasn’t the end as we were then driven to the other side of the glacier where we could get a better panoramic view and also see the glacier calf.

We actually saw it calf three times when we were on the south side, and once on the other side, but it happens so quickly that you don’t get time to take a photo. The sound is incredible though and the waves it makes are huge.

I managed to catch a bit of it in this photo.

This was a fantastic experience, and the whole trip was really well organised. The glacier looks like something from another world.

So a great day was finished off with a great steak. I went with a German girl, Tabea, into town and we found a really nice restaurant.

I have loads more pictures of the ice but none of them can capture what it feels like and what it sounds like when you are actually there.