Patagonia — Part One: Argentina

Perito Moreno — Five Kilometres of Moving Ice

When it was time to leave El Calafate and head out into the landscape properly, our first major destination was unmistakable: Perito Moreno Glacier, roughly a two-hour drive southwest through the steppe.

Named after the 19th-century Argentine explorer and naturalist Francisco Moreno, Perito Moreno was one of only a handful of glaciers in the world that was not retreating — in fact it was considered stable, even occasionally advancing, but sadly in the last year or so this has changed and it has joined the others in decline. Sitting within Los Glaciares National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981), it’s one of three massive glaciers feeding into Lago Argentino, and the most accessible of them.

What no photograph — including mine — fully prepares you for is the sheer scale of the thing. The glacier’s terminus face is 5 kilometres wide and rises up to 74 metres above the surface of the lake. It groans, it creaks, and with startling regularity, enormous seracs of turquoise and white ice calve from its face and thunder into the water below. The sound is genuinely extraordinary — a deep, reverberating crack followed by the rush and splash of ice that has been moving, millimetre by millimetre, for centuries. You wait, you watch, you try to have your camera ready, and you feel very small indeed.

The overcast conditions worked beautifully for photography — no harsh shadows, and those extraordinary blues in the ice came through with real depth. Getting images of the calving was part patience, part luck, part caffeine.

El Chaltén and the Shadow of Fitz Roy

From Perito Moreno, we made the long haul north — roughly eight hours of driving through the vast, flat, bone-dry expanse of the Patagonian steppe — to reach El Chaltén, a tiny mountain village of only around 1,500 permanent residents that sits in the shadow of one of the most dramatic peaks on the planet.

Cerro Fitz Roy — or simply Fitz Roy — rises to 3,405 metres and is one of the most technically challenging mountaineering objectives in the world. It was named by Francisco Moreno (the same man as the glacier) after Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle and the man who brought Charles Darwin to these shores. The Tehuelche indigenous people knew it as Chaltén, meaning “smoking mountain,” a reference to the cap of cloud that almost perpetually shrouds its summit. First successfully climbed in 1952 by a French team, it remains a formidable target and an iconic silhouette — that jagged, improbable spike of granite against a Patagonian sky is immediately recognisable to anyone who’s spent time here or even just opened a travel magazine.

El Chaltén itself is the self-proclaimed trekking capital of Argentina, and it earns the title. The entire town exists in service of the mountains. It’s charismatic, a little rough around the edges, and entirely unpretentious — and we liked it immediately.

However, within hours of arriving, I was laid completely flat by one of those sudden, brutal bugs that seem to specialise in striking at inconvenient moments. Thirty-six hours of feeling thoroughly sorry for myself, horizontal and out of action. The others, bless them, carried on without me — though I’m told they missed my relentlessly cheerful presence enormously 😂

Chorrillo del Salto — Autumn Gold and White Water

A short drive from El Chaltén brought us to Chorrillo del Salto, a waterfall that under different conditions might be simply pleasant. Under an overcast Patagonian sky in early autumn, it was something else entirely.

The diffused light did exactly what overcast conditions do best — it stripped away the harshness and let colour breathe. The beech trees surrounding the falls had turned into a riot of amber, gold, and burnt orange, and those colours glinted and shifted in the fleeting moments when the sun broke briefly through the cloud, almost as though the light itself was being selective about what it chose to illuminate. The white water churning behind the foliage seemed to intensify everything — the contrast between the rushing brightness of the falls and the warm tones of the trees brought out their shapes and textures in a way that full sun simply wouldn’t have managed.

The final image from the location almost composed itself: a single bare trunk, stripped of its leaves and silhouetted cleanly against the white of the falls behind it. Simple, graphic, and exactly the kind of shot that sometimes feels like the landscape is offering it to you directly.

The Gorge Sunrise — Second Time Lucky

The sunrise location was a gorge just outside El Chaltén, looking out over the sweeping curves of the Río de las Vueltas as it winds through the valley below. We’d attempted this once already — got up before dawn, drove out in the dark, set up, and waited — and it hadn’t delivered. These things happen in landscape photography, and you come back.

The second attempt was a different story entirely. The clouds caught the light beautifully, that sequence of deep reds and pinks shifting through peach and gold as the sun climbed, and for a few minutes it was the kind of scene that makes every early alarm call worthwhile. We weren’t alone — there were perhaps sixty other photographers spread along the gorge edge, all of us facing the same direction, all of us quiet, all of us knowing that this was it. It didn’t last long. These light shows rarely do. But it was absolutely enough.

The wind, though. I need to mention the wind. Gusts of over 60 kilometres per hour according to the locals, and it was absolutely relentless — the kind of wind that gets into your ears and doesn’t leave, that makes tripod work genuinely technical, and that makes you question some of your life choices. As it turned out, the locals were also quietly amused to tell us that this was nothing. Just a warm-up. We would come to understand exactly what they meant.

The day rounded off with a visit to a nearby lake, where the simplicity of a weathered fence stretching away towards snow-capped mountains in the far distance provided exactly the kind of quiet, contemplative composition that balances out a morning of dramatic skies. Sometimes it’s the understated shots that sit with you longest.

The Long Road to the Border

With El Chaltén done, we loaded up and pointed the bus back south — the seven-hour drive back past El Calafate, which by now was starting to feel like an old friend, and then onward.

A highlight of the journey, and genuinely one of those roadside finds that you couldn’t script, was a stop at the Ruta 40 café. Route 40 — La Cuarenta — is Argentina’s legendary highway, stretching the entire length of the country from top to tail, and this particular outpost along it has become quietly famous for two things: a traditional ring-tossing game (deceptively simple, completely addictive, very difficult to walk away from without one more attempt) and their sopaipillas — deep-fried bread that arrives hot and slightly crisp at the edges and is entirely the right thing to eat after several hours in a vehicle crossing the steppe. We lingered longer than planned.

From there, the Argentine-Chilean border crossing — which, given some of the stories you hear about South American border control, was pleasantly relaxed and unhurried. Paperwork exchanged, passports stamped, and we crossed the threshold into Chile.

The second chapter of the Patagonia odyssey had begun.