Lucia and Felix picked us up from the hotel this morning for a tour of the Argentinian pampas near the small town of San Antonio de Areco. The word pampa is Quechua for flatness or flat space – it makes great grazing area for cattle, sheep and horses. Estancias (ranches) all over the countryside have…

El Zanjon Granados is a mansion dating from 1830, originally built by a wealthy family in the San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. During a renovation of the mansion and some surrounding buildings, an ancient zanjón (ravine) was found running under the whole block. The tunnels that were used to channel water from the stream…

After a leisurely breakfast we packed and drove back from El Chalten to El Calafate. The mountains were so clear this morning, we had to stop several more times to appreciate them! Then it was off to the airport to return the car and head back to Buenos Aires. It was raining and dark when…

We woke up to light rain and snow. Not unexpected but not what we wanted either. After a morning of relaxing the weather cleared up a bit and we decided to do the Cerro Torre hike. At 3128 meters, it is a gorgeous and snow-covered spiky mountain ‘beside’ Fitz Roy. There were still a few…

Today we drove about 3 hours from El Calafate to El Chalten – another scenic drive with a bunch of photo stops! The drive took us around the east shore of Lago Argentino. El Chalten sits at the base of Fitz Roy mountain – we started to get amazing views of the mountain about an…

At Walichu we saw prehistoric (pre-Tehuelche people) cave drawings found on the walls of an escarpment on the shore of Lake Argentino. The paintings are 4500 years old (upper Paleolithic period) and include human figures, camelids (likely guanaco) and handprints. Francisco Moreno ‘discovered’ the paintings when he was surveying the lake. Iron oxide and ferrite…

Yesterday was just a boring travel day. Direct flights to remote areas are hard to find, so we had to fly 1.5 hours north to Buenos Aires only to turn around and fly south again to El Calafate. The city of El Calafate sits on the shore of Lago Argentino, formed 15,000 years ago and…

This morning we left the wineries behind and drove west for three hours, almost all the way into Chile.  Our destination was Aconcagua National Park. Mount Aconcagua is the tallest mountain outside of Asia (22,825 feet), the tallest in the Southern and Western hemispheres. The mountain holds 5 hanging glaciers. We have seen Andean Condors…