Travel journal: Exploradores Glacier (Chile)
This is day 4 of my 30-day writing challenge, feedback is appreciated.
Puerto Tranquillo
I am currently in Puerto Tranquillo, a small village full of guest houses, camping grounds and restaurants situated at one of the bigger lakes in South America. In this village are basically two things to do: walking on the Exploradores Glacier and a boat tour to the marmot caves on the lake. Most of the tour companies offer both activities as a package with discount.
Crampons on trail running shoes
Before we started, everyone in our group of 14 had to try crampons for the glacier. Since nobody had proper mountain shoes everyone was using his or her hiking, running or outdoor shoes, but this worked surprisingly well.
After a 75-minute drive over gravel roads through a beautiful landscape we arrived at the national park. We got a briefing by our guides and the park ranger and walked for about one hour over gravel and rocks close to the glacier. Once we reached the ice we put our crampons on and got another introduction on how to use them. Since it was Patagonia the weather was changing consistently. We had sun, clouds and rain changing at least every 5 minutes. The only thing that go consistently stronger and colder the closer we got to the glacier was the wind.
The glacier experience
The walk on the glacier was very nice, we entered some holes under the ice and everyone had a lot of opportunities to climb around and pose for pictures. Since there where many people in the group and the fitness levels were quite different we had also had to wait a lot for photos and slower hikers. But this was fine. Overall it was a very enjoyable activity. We were walking around for almost 6 hours so I’m quite tired while writing this text.
