Where in the WORLD is Pat?!

This hiking destination was high on our must-do-before-we-get-too-decrepit list. The two treks we took are on every list of the top 20 best hikes of the world. The trails were extremely well-marked and easily accessible by bus, so there is no way in hell you’d need to go with an outfitter, if you speak even a smattering of Spanish.

This was only my second trip to South America, after Peru in 1984. As expected, Argentina and Chile are extremely Europeanized with huge middle classes, but traveling independently, the trip was very affordable. As in Spain, the South Americans’ mellifluous Spanish accent sounded almost like Italian to us, versus the very crisp Mexican Spanish we hear here.

BUENOS AIRES

Many visitors spend a long amount of time soaking in the sights and bustle of “the Paris of South America,” but we only spent a half-day exploring. The city reminded me very much of Madrid. We stayed in a hostel in the San Telmo district, the city’s oldest and filled with gracefully aging Beaux Arts and Art Nouveau buildings. The 1880s San Telmo market was a delight with colorful produce, vintage clothing, and antiques and early 20^th-century from the mansions of “wool barons.”

The famous Plaza de Mayo had screaming parrots in its trees. It is the site of many of Argentina’s most famous political rallies, including the weekly “Madres de Mayo” vigil of grandmothers whose young family members – “los desaparacedos" ("the disappeared") -- were the still-unaccounted-for victims of the military’s 1976-83 “Dirty War” reign of terror. The pink Casa Rosada mansion houses the president’s office, and Evita Peron gave her famed speeches from its balcony.    

IGUAZU FALLS NP

One cannot go to BA without also flying to nearby IguazuFalls, one of the world’s mightiest cataracts. I was expecting it to be on the scale of Zambia’s Victorian Falls, which I saw in 2004, and it was. The park has two sides, in Brazil and Argentina, and we set off on the many viewing paths of the latter. Catwalks take you out over the edge of the massive walls of roaring water all around you. Vultures soared overhead, dusky-headed swifts zipped in and out of nests behind the cataracts, and we spied a white heron patiently fishing in one of the myriad side falls.

This was the only tropical destination of our trip, and the birding was exotic. I immediately spied in my binoculars two tuco toucans and a Chilean field flicker, a woodpecker with a golden head. We saw blue-beaked, red-rumped black caciques zipping in and out of hanging, 4-foot-long nests. The plush-crested jay had a white breast and royal blue head and poufy crown. A turkey-sized guan had a red wattle, and I spotted a trogon with a barred tail.

Fat black-and-white iguanas sauntered about. There were warning signs at the concession stands about not feeding the coatis, and sure enough, around lunchtime, many of the raccoon-like, leaf litter-rooting mammals walked boldly among the shutter-clicking tourists. I hadn’t seen coatis since Tikal in 2002.

Two southern lapwing plovers cried loudly as we crossed a dirt parking lot. A trio of park workers saw us watching the birds, and one guy gestured for us to approach a small grassy strip in the middle of the lot. I asked, “Hay un nido?” (“Is there a nest?”), as the guy stood up with a tiny fuzzy grey fledgling with black spots! We were horrified that he would touch it, so quickly smiled and nodded so he’d put the chick down immediately. We later heard and saw the parent birds wheeling around the nest – right beside of which a bus was now parked. How they had managed to raise their baby up to that point was beyond us.

Our guidebook said our best chance of seeing wildlife was on the Macuco Trail, a 3-mile, little-visited path to a small waterfall. Blue morpho butterflies the size of my palm and other colorful species flitted about the dense jungle, and Chip got great shots of another toucan.

But the species we were really hoping to see was the brown capuchin monkey. Sure enough, as we retraced our steps at about 4 p.m., we spotted a troop of them right above us in the canopy. The capuchins I’d seen in Honduras were black with pink faces and a pronounced white “tonsure,” which give them their name, after the monks’ order. But these capuchins had brown fur and faces, with less-distinct head coloration. A juvenile enchanted us by sliding down a trunk upside down, with the help of its tail. This was a novelty, as, for all of the monkeys I’ve seen in Asia in the last four years, only New World species have prehensile tails, the underside of which in some species have rough “finger pads.”

The guidebook told us to save the best falls for last: the Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), accessed by a narrow-gauge train ride and mile walk on catwalks over the broad river. Several massive falls converge in a thunderous slam with a 200-foot-tall column of spray. Rainbows danced along the top, and swallows went about their feeding under what seemed impossible circumstances (I hypothesized they are probably deaf). This wondrous natural phenomenon capped a marvelous day. On our flight out of the nearby town of Puerto Iguazu, the pilot flew directly over the falls, to the delight and applause of the furiously shutter-snapping passengers.

Our plane didn’t leave until 4 p.m. the next day, so we had a down day in Puerto Iguazu. We walked to The Hito, a monument at the juncture of the Iguazu and Parana rivers, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet. There was a bust of the famous Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador who survived a shipwreck in Florida, the loss of half his men from starvation and Indian predation in the jungle, capture and life with Indians for many years (about whom he wrote the first New World native-peoples anthropological treatise), and wanderings in our Southwest as far north as Colorado. Eventually, he returned to Spain and secured funding to explore the Rio del Plata, the site of today’s BA. He was the first European to “discover” IguazuFalls, in 1541.

Our Aerolineas Argentinas flight back to BA proved a fiasco. When we got to the airport two hours early, we found out the flight was delayed three hours. After 2.5 hours, they announced the flight was cancelled, and we would go to a hotel for the night, then they’d roust up another plane in the a.m. We had prepaid a room in BA for that night, so were out $40. To make a long story short, we ended up getting two nights’ hotel, four meals, and two round-trip taxi rides to two airports out of the deal. We ended up having to take a 4 a.m. flight out of BA for our original destination, Rio Gallegos. We then started hearing from sympathetic Argentineans that government-owned AA was a constantly unreliable screw-up.

PUNTA ARENAS

Rio Gallegos was our first Patagonian destination and where we first experienced the No. 1 thing you expect there: strong, incessant winds. Gallegos has a big military installation and was the base of operations for the 1982 Falklands War, called the Malvinas War by Argentineans. We tend to treat Argentina’s disastrous move to take over the British-claimed islands as a joke, but it was a source of deep humiliation for the Argentineans and is still very fresh in their minds. An unpopular president decided to stake the claim to the Falklands to bolster his standing. Maggie Thatcher, also down in the polls, saw it in the same terms. The teenage Argentinean forces were ill-equipped and untrained, and forced to surrender after only 74 days. The 650 men who died are considered heroes, with many visible reminders of their sacrifice.

We took the bus to Punta Arenas, just over the Chilean border. The Patagonian pampas reminded me of our northern prairies, and we saw our first llama-like guanacos, Patagonian hares, upland geese, and a fox-crossing warning sign.

Punta Arenas is very near “el fin del mundo,” “the end of the world,” right on the Straits of Magellan. Arenas was heavily colonized by Brits, Scots, Italians, Germans, and Yugoslavs in the latter half of the 19^th century, drawn by its whaling and fishing potential and endless grasslands for cattle and sheep ranching. Pesky Indians kept poaching the colonizers’ stock, so in 1879, the president decreed that the indigenous people be systematically exterminated in a campaign euphemistically called “The Conquest of the Desert.” Problem solved.

Arenas is a rough-edged, wind-lashed town with many old tin-roofed cottages and a pretty plaza surrounded by wool barons’ mansions. Frequent rain spatters in bright sun reminded me of Northern Nevada. We took a long walk on the esplanade along the Straits, scudding with whitecaps in wind you could lean on. It was just so neat to be on one of the most infamously treacherous waterways on earth at 53 degrees, the farthest south I’ve ever been -- just a few hundred miles from Antarctica. (We had 18 hours of daylight in late spring.) Magellanic cormorants on mud nests crowded a pier, buff-necked ibis cried, and we got a long look at a Chilean swallow crouching in the sand. We visited the town “cementario,” which was one of those wonderful Latin American over-the-top celebrations of death with lavishly decorated crypts, elaborate marble tombstones, and mausoleums the size of many an apartment I rented in Berkeley.

SENO OTWAY PINGUINERA

We went to Arenas for one reason: its easily accessible penguin colony on Seno Otway (Otway Sound). The Magellanic penguins spend all day foraging at sea then return to the beach to rest and tend to eggs in dirt burrows. I’ve seen penguins in South Africa and New Zealand on sand and rocks, but it was strange to see them walking around on grass.

As a species, penguins are very tolerant of humans, and it was a spellbinding delight when they passed within 5 feet of us behind the fence. There were about 100 birds, including kind of klutzy yearlings with less-pronounced black-and-white and more-fuzzy plumage than the adults. I always feel guilty when I laugh at penguins’ looks and antics, but they are so damn cute, you can’t help yourself. The birds resting on the beach looked like big footballs, and their arched-neck interactions and preening were cunning.

As a birding bonus, a chimichango caracara eagle strolled down the beach among the pinguinos, looking for babies and eggs. I saw this predator-among-prey phenomenon in Africa, with ungulates ignoring lions in their midst and sea lions ignoring jackals. On the bus ride to the pinguinera, we saw guanacos and our first rheas, a grey ostrich-like walking bird. Alas, we were only to see rheas from buses, so never got a really good long look at them.

TORRES del PAINE NP

Another bus ride took us to Puerto Natales, an old ranching town on the ominously named Seno de Esperanza Ultima (Sound of Last Hope). Natales’ cash cow now is thousands of trekkers bound for the jewel of Chile’s mountain national parks, Torres del Paine (pie-NAY). On our hike of the 24-mile “W”(-shaped) Circuit, we had planned to stay in the dorms of refugio lodges. But upon discovering they were totally booked and redoing the math to realize it would cost us $100/night, we decided at the last minute to backpack for five nights.

We rented a tent, stove, and sleeping pads, and hit the supermercado for food. Thus began 11 consecutive nights of the same two dinners: tuna and rice alternating with lentils and beans, cooked over our camp stove or in hostel kitchens. Hey, while boring, the dinners were cheap, easy -- and utterly delicious after consecutive long dayhikes.

TORRES del PAINE Day #1

We had been told that it rained every day in November 2009, but we couldn’t have had better weather for every day of our hike in Paine. While very near the Andes, the Torres massif is a separate range, and just as dramatically shaped by glaciers. Just before the park entrance, the bus went through multiple herds of very nonchalant guanacos. The alpha males maintain harems of up to 30 wives and their babies. Then we saw a grey fox chasing a hare right next to our bus window!

Excitement grew as we neared our first view of the famed “torres” – towers – sheer-sided knives of rock that looked like they were thrust up yesterday. I’ve never seen their like, in all of my alpine adventures. We started up the trail to our first campground, with glimpses of Lago Nordenskjold through the orange-red blossoms of Chilean fire-bush. The lakes are a pale turquoise blue, just like in the tropics. But while the latter is due to the white-sand sea floor, glacial lakes’ astounding color is due to sun reflecting off of “glacial flour,” fine rock sediment. 

The free campground, in dense beeches thrumming with wind noise, was jammed with young backpackers, predominantly Brits, Germans, and French. Chip was off filling the water bottles from the glacial stream (none of the available water was processed, which made us very nervous) when he came upon what was clearly a campground pest: a charming little red fox, which posed for several pix.

That afternoon, we hiked up steep talus to the Torres mirador (lookout). I gasped when I saw the three impossibly sheer rock needles over an ethereal, aquamarine lake. The No. 1 thing folks all do on this trek is go to the mirador at sunrise to photograph the light on the torres. My vision in my glasses in poor light is very bad, and I feared negotiating the talus, so I opted out the next morning. But Chip got the shot, with dramatic clouds swirling around the orange-hued torres.

TORRES del PAINE Day #2

On a Thanksgiving Day to remember, I hiked the farthest with a pack that I have in 10 years: 15 miles. We had shirt-sleeves weather and, miraculously, no wind. Near the lake, we heard an odd, loud, repeated call I first thought was a raptor. But it was a guanaco, pursuing a smaller one; I surmised it was a bachelor trying to convince another’s wife to mate with him. Chip got what were to be the only shots of guanacos that we didn’t see from a bus.

The lakeside trail was a real rollercoaster, but the heartbreakingly pretty landscape was compensation. The pale blue lake framed by fire-bush filled with birds and butterflies, green hills, cumulous clouds, rocky beaches, colorful wildflowers, green islands, and snowy mountains alternately reminded me of many places: Switzerland, Maui, Alaska, Canada, the Sierra. But mostly it looked like a Chilean Tourism Board poster for what you would assume was an enhanced, postcard-perfect image.

We staggered into camp to find it jammed tent-by-tent by trekkers, but Chip managed to find a relatively removed site for our two-night stay. The camp was at the mouth of the river flowing down the Valle de Frances under the 7,500-foot Cuernos (“Horns”) ridge and their glaciers. We heard ominous avalanches, like thunder or a jet takeoff, several times during the night.

TORRES del PAINE Day #3

This was to be our layover day, but we still hiked 13 miles, mercifully without the packs. Under partial clouds with snow spindrifts blown off the peaks, we started up the talus and beeches beside the swollen, ice-cold river churning off the hanging valleys of glaciers. Cerro Paine Grande, the highest in the range at 10,500 feet, loomed over a glacier riven by deep crevasses of blue ice. Glacial ice is blue due to trapped oxygen and light wavelengths. The more compact the ice, the longer the light has to travel, and the bluer the ice.

The spiky Cuernos were two-toned, with dark sedimentary rock on top pushed up by the younger, grey granite. Their sheer faces reminded me of Half Dome or the Wind River Range’s Cirque of the Towers. The mists swirling around the snowfields parted for a view of the peaks against blue sky – the continuing clear weather was a miracle.   

TORRES del PAINE Day #4

This was our last pack-carrying day, an easy 5 miles to Campamento Paine Grande, on the shores of Lago Pehoe. This was a paid campground and lodge, accessible by a catamaran ferry. The hot showers, nice communal kitchen, and picnic table were worth every penny of our $18. The campground pests here were American robin-like austral thrushes and cute chestnut-collared sparrows with loud, melodious songs.

We took a short hike along cliffs above Pehoe, the lake you see in all images of the region. Its turquoise blue was almost incandescent under scudding clouds. The lake, fire-bushes, Cuernos and Paine Grande, islands, and grassy camping area looked like a child’s drawing of paradise. Honestly, it was one of the most gorgeous landscapes I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t help but think that if this celestial place were in the U.S., it would be just like Tahoe: accessible by roads, have huge RV-filled parking lots, the lake would be covered in private boats, and there would be multiple fast-food joints.

A pair of upland geese – the male white and black, the female brown – posed for Chip, and I saw male long-tailed meadowlarks, with brilliant red breasts, spy-hopping in the grass.

TORRES del PAINE Day #5

Our longest hiking day of the trip -- 19 miles -- began with a light drizzle. We headed up through beeches alongside huge Lago Grey, an opaque grey color because of its high glacial flour content. Bright-blue icebergs, from RV-size to small chunks, trapped in inlets, gave the lake an otherworldly appearance. As we neared Grey Glacier, it cleared for an hour, and Chip got great shots from the mirador practically right over the terminus. The glacier has 600-foot-high ice cliffs that may be 2,000 years old. Deep-blue crevasses indicated where it would calve next, and fins of solid, turquoise-blue ice stretched for miles back up the valley.

The immense glacier is part of the Campo de Patagonia Hielo Sur (Southern Patagonian Ice Field), which extends north for hundreds of miles. We always think of the Northern Hemisphere as the “land of ice and snow,” but the glaciers I’ve seen in Patagonia and New Zealand make our Canadian, Montana (including Glacier NP), and California ones look downright pitiful.

Next day, having hiked a total of 70 miles within the park, we took the catamaran across Lago Pehoe back to the bus to Natales. Rheas, Chilean flamingos, and the resident guanaco herd bade us farewell.          

 EL CALAFATE

We retrieved our stuff from the Natales hotel and dashed for a 6 p.m. bus back into Argentina and El Calafate. We’d been warned that unreserved rooms were hard to find, and it was midnight before we got a $20 room with two twin beds and a shared kitchen and bath in someone’s sister-in-law’s back yard.  

This old sheep-ranching town has remade itself into a trekkers’ mecca, with ritzy mini-malls crammed with hiking gear from all of the major U.S. outfitters. Many houses are in the quaint “Alpine” style, stucco with wood and stone accents, patterned after immigrants’ Central Europe homes. A 2-foot-high lupines in blues, pinks, and purples made for pretty gardens.

There were dogs wandering everywhere; those with collars have owners, while those without are strays. They were sleeping in the sidewalk and street medians, looking for handouts at the bus station, trotting purposefully down the sidewalk on serious doggy business, following one person then abruptly taking up with another. As always, I was struck with how calm Third World dogs are. Unlike our neurotic canines, they never bark maniacally if a person walks by their yard territories nor fight amongst themselves.

Calafate is on the country’s largest interior waterway, Tahoe-size Lago Argentina. The guidebook said the birding was good along its shore, so we headed off in 50 mph winds with the goal of finally getting a close look at the Chilean flamingoes we’d hitherto only glimpsed from buses. We hopped the back fence of the Laguna (Lagoon) Nimez reserve for a good look at about 50 of them foraging in a shallow pond. I assumed what was to become “the Patagonian birding stance”: legs spread, feet firmly planted, forearms flat on my chest to try and steady my bins in the relentless wind.

I’ve seen flamingoes in Peru and Namibia, but never that close. Their big mass of plumage was a solid pale pink – like cotton candy on stilts – and they had red, knobby knees on their black legs and huge black bills with which they strain the water for crustaceans. (FYI, wild flamingoes derive their characteristic color from ingested shrimp; the dark pink ones we see in zoos are fed dye.) We gasped when they flew, revealing a slash of red in their wings, with black primary feathers – talk about a spectacular bird! While we associate flamingoes with the tropics, my best sightings have been deep within the subtropical zones.

Other bird highlights were an ibis harassed by nesting lapwings and a small hawk wheeling in masterful control of the wind. We spooked an upland goose from her nest of six large eggs, lined with her breast feathers.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #1

The town of El Chalten was founded in 1985 to service Los Glaciares NP. It is the official “trekking capital of the nation,” and the trails start right from its edge. The first stop on the bus is the NP office, where they give you maps and an excellent briefing. The Fitz Roy Massif (named after the captain of Darwin’s Beagle) is in the Andes proper. The weather is notoriously bad in the range, which is so ice-bound it makes its own weather. Climbers sometimes have to wait for weeks for it to clear, so we crossed our fingers we’d have sun. 

The park museum chronicles climbers’ first ascents of the most difficult peaks, including the Ruta California. One of the climbers on that route was Yvon Chouinard, who went on to found the clothing company named after his beloved Patagonia. Galen Rowell took stunning images of his climbing trips here.

We found a wonderful duplex with many luxuries we’d been lacking: a queen-sized bed, chairs and a table, our own bath, a kitchen we only had to share with one other room. We splurged on the price: just $55.

We took two short routes above the park HQ to lookouts; alas, the range was in clouds. But we had great views of the icebergs on Lago Viedma and a Chilean flicker (woodpeckers are called “carpinteros,” or “carpenters”). 

Chalten had the air of an Alaskan outback town, a hodgepodge of buildings thrown together with no regard for codes. They were painted all manner of bright colors; why are U.S. houses such bland colors? The Rio de las Vueltas (Returns) braids through town in a glacial-till floodplain under steep cliffs.

Dogs roamed everywhere; part of the NP lecture involved making sure they didn’t follow us on the trails. Glaciares NP is home to the nearly extirpated Patagonian deer, or huemel, which the dogs will chase.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #2

We headed out for a 14-mile day through beautiful alpine meadows of flowers and beeches to Laguna Torre, at the base of 9,300-foot Cerro Torre. The peak is an impossibly vertical spire of granite twice the height of El Capitan. It was considered unclimbable until finally being conquered in 1974.

Lago Torre was an opaque grey with small icebergs, created by immense Glaciar Grande. The snout of 100-foot ice cliffs looked like a wall of quartz. We waited three hours for the clouds around Cerro Torre to clear, to no avail.

Chip saw a bird flash out of an eye-level, 4-inch cavity nest hole. We had disturbed a carpintero parent feeding its brood of furiously cheeping hungry babies. We also had a glimpse of green austral parakeets – another species erroneously associated strictly with the tropics.    

While eating dinner, we discovered that the peaks were finally clearing. The massif was stunning in the late-afternoon light, with 10,000-foot Fitz Roy dominant. “El Chalten” is the Indian name for the peak they revered, and means “Smoking Mountain.” Sure enough, ragged clouds caught on its summit did look like it was on fire. One of its attendant peaks is St. Exupery, named for the “Little Prince” author and aviator, who directed Argentina’s airmail service in the 1930s. The small Andean town at the base of the mountains was beautiful. We had resigned ourselves to never having clear views of the range so were ecstatic to be able to get good photos of it.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #3

We were on the trail at 7 a.m. for the day’s 16-miler. Under clear skies in buttercup-strewn meadows, we flushed goldfinch look-alike black-chinned siskins, so numerous they looked like a swarm of butterflies. We had our first long look at a hare, very much like our jackrabbits. The trail ascended 2,000 feet up above the river through beeches then onto a boggy altiplano like Alaskan tundra. Chip was strafed by three squabbling parakeets going about 60 mph.

A light rain began to fall as we began the final, very step climb up talus to Lago de los Tres, named for three climbers killed in one incident. The last stretch was in light snow and face-planting wind; thank God for trekking poles! The lake, right below Fitz Roy’s glacier, was frozen solid. Again, we waited in vain for the clouds to clear for a peak view.

On the way back down, I had my first confirmed ID of an Andean condor, with its distinctive white neck ring and wingtip “fingers.” Where else would you see a parakeet and a condor on the same day?! Near a campground, we were startled to see a crested caracara walking around in the grass like a big chicken – another campground pest? The magnificent eagle had a black “toupee,” white face and chest, striped belly, bright yellow legs, and orange-and-blue beak. Halfway down, the clouds above Fitz Roy finally cleared for a good, relatively close-up view.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #4

I got up to pee at 5:15 a.m. and noticed our clearest view yet of the massif. Chip ran off with his camera while I stood out in the street in my nightgown skirt, long-johns, and jacket staring at the mountains with my bins. A police car cruised by, and the woman officer laughed at my get-up and grinning, exaggerated pointing at the peaks.

The day became our clearest yet for the 15-mile, 2,100-foot ascent of Pliegue de Tumbado, the only trail, according to the guidebook, from which you can see both Cerro Torre and Fitz Roy. Sure enough, the massif came into view immediately, including our first real views of Torre, much less in mass than Fitz Roy and 1,000 feet lower. The abrupt finger of granite gave me a shiver as I wondered how this “unclimbable” peak was finally conquered.

We walked through meadows of buttercups and dandelions then beech groves, ringed by snowy peaks and distant Lago Viedma, with cloudless views of the cordillera all day. Attaining a treeless altiplano, the wind hit us at 70 mph for the final 1.5 miles; at times I thought I would get smacked down. The view at the end was the stuff of fantasy: Laguna Torre and Glaciar Grande at the base of a ring of vertical peaks—truly, one of the most sublime landscapes I’ve ever seen. Several of the peaks and routes are named after the Italian and French climbers who conquered – and in some instances lost their lives on – there, as vertical as the Matterhorn and Eiger on which they learned to climb. We spent an hour basking in the cold sun and feasting our eyes on the vista.

On the way back down, Chip spotted another huge caracara inexplicably walking on the ground. It was a white-throated caracara – our third of the four caracara species in Patagonia. Back in Chalten, we paid homage to the Capilla de los Escaladores (Chapel of the Climbers) memorial to the 30-plus people who have lost their lives in the massif since 1953.

GLACIAR PERITO MORENO

Back in Calafate, we prepared for the No. 1 attraction of the town, the Perito Moreno Glacier. We decided to look for the flamingoes again, and got even closer this time. We saw a darling gosling swimming along between its upland goose parents. I spotted some very large white birds across a mudflat. As I gingerly walked out, I realized they were coscoroba swans.

While not as high as Glaciar Grey, Moreno was certainly the most massive we’d seen: the terminus wall is 3 miles wide and 180 feet high, with blue crevasses and ice fins extending back into the Hielo Sur as far as you can see.

This is one of just three glaciers worldwide considered “stable,” and it’s actually advancing up to 6 feet a day. You hear constant noises like the crack of a rifle as the ice splits and shifts. Here is where we saw many calving cliffs – a sobering, scary, and unparalleled sight. The glacier was one of the most spectacular natural phenomena I’ve ever seen.

Two miles of catwalks take you closer and closer to the wall of ice, until, above the Canal de Tempanos (Icebergs), you are just 1,000 feet away. There is a big sign warning you to stay behind the fence: 30 people were killed over 15 years by tidal waves spawned by the calving. The intense blue of the crevasses increased in the afternoon light, seeming to glow from within. Between the ice and blue-grey Lago Argentina framed by snowy mountains, fire-bush, and beeches, it was another postcard-perfect landscape.

Our final bird encounters of the trip were many condors wheeling up on thermals and the startling image of an ibis flying across the ice face. Of the latter, I told Chip, “Now, that’s a birding experience you’ll never have again.”

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MILES HIKED/WALKED: A record-shattering 160!

CRITTERS: I ID’d 36 bird species using a Patagonia checklist and a Torres del Paine fauna book given to me years ago by Nick’s parents. I ID’d 11 bird species in Iguazu. The mammal total for the trip was eight, including mustangs and a flash of a furry butt on the Macuco Trail that was probably an agouti.

A WORD ON GUNACOS: There are four species of New World camelids, two of which –llamas and alpacas – are the result of centuries of selective breeding of the wild guanaco. The fourth species, the knee-high vicuna, is the highest-dwelling animal on earth. Llamas were bred for their meat and cargo-carrying ability, and alpacas for their wool. Guanacos are not much smaller than the llamas, at about 250 pounds. They and jaguars are the biggest terrestrial animals in Central and South America. When Panama was a land bridge, Pleistocene megafauna (including the giant sloth, one of whose bones are in a famous cave near Natales) crossed to South America, but died out. Panama became separated again, and the North American megafauna thrived, resulting in our modern bears, caribou, elk, moose, and bison. Interestingly, the North American camelids died out, while they survived in South America.

MUST-DOS WE DIDN’T DO IN ARGENTINA: 1) eat beef; 2) drink mate, this bitter infusion of herbs drunk through a straw in a gourd cup is a national obsession; 3) eat chocolate, ditto; 4) dance or see the tango in BA; 5) buy souvenirs. This is my third-consecutive trip to a Europeanized culture that has essentially eliminated its folk art. Argentina has an active indigenous culture in the northwest Andean region, but the only traditional art for sale was in expensive gift stores. No, thanks – I want to buy art objects directly from market stalls or off of dirty blankets from the folks who made them.