El Calafate is famous as the base for visiting the Perito Moreno Glacier. As a result it's bustling with western tourists clad head to toe in shiny new North Face adventure gear, buying maps and boasting about their amaaazing 6-day trekking exploits. The phrase "all the gear, no idea" seemed to apply to about 90% of them......

Despite being something of a tourist mecca, El Calafate still has a local feel: on the day of our arrival, there was a music festival happening in town. The music could be heard as soon as we stepped off the bus from Puerto Madryn, and we eventually discovered it was taking place in the field next to our hostel. We had thought about going along once we were settled in, but as a) we could hear every word from our room and b) the 'music' was shit, we decided not to bother. The festival didn't finish until about 1am, which went down really well with us both, especially as this was meant to be our first proper night's sleep after a 26 hour journey.....

We took the next day as a 'rest day', making time to visit the local Laguna Nimez, a pretty nature walk around a couple of lakes which are home to a family of flamingos and various other birds. We didn't get quite as excited about the wildlife as a lot of our fellow visitors (many of whom, armed with binoculars and notebooks, seemed to be proper birdwatchers) but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It also gave us an excuse to get out of the hostel and escape its owner, a young and at first seemingly friendly girl who quickly started to unnerve and then terrify us both. It seemed we could do nothing right - we took the key outside the hostel with us when we weren't supposed to, we stored food in the fridge and then had the audacity to try and cook ("You aren't really supposed to, but I'll make an exception this time" she said, with a smile that could freeze the blood in your veins). Creepy.

The main event here was predictably our visit to the glacier. Perito Merino has special status amongst the world's glaciers as it's the only one that's still advancing. It moves forward at a rate of 2m a day, but at the same time pieces break off from the glacier's face, and so overall, it pretty much stands still. Everyone who'd been before had told us how fantastic it was, but were still blown away by our first glimpse. Even partially obscured by swathes of mist, it was absolutely spectacular - an 18 mile long river of ice. Our bus stopped to let us get off and take pictures – right from the get-go, I was a little trigger-happy. By the end of the day, we had taken some 470 photos between us! Whilst we were taking photos, our guide told us a bit about the local flora and fauna - the firebush, so called because the plant's bright red flowers look like tiny sparks, and the calafate bush. The calafate bush has a berry which locals use in everything from jam to sandwich cookies to ice cream. As you'd expect in these mysterious southern parts, the berry also comes with its own legend. Those that eat the berry are fated to one day return to Patagonia and, if unmarried, likely to meet and marry a local girl. I kept James well away from the fruit, but I later tried a sample of the calafate ice cream - it had a slightly odd taste, like a bitter blueberry.

Next we took a boat ride, right to the south face of the glacier. I'd heard horror stories about boats crammed with 300+ tourists, and although our boat wasn't small (about 130 people on board), it had a viewing deck that ran all the way around its outside, meaning everyone who wanted to got a great view of the glacier. From here, we could appreciate just how enormous it is - some 60m high, it towered over us, its pointed peaks glinting menacingly in the sunlight like teeth. As the light changed and changed again during our hour-long trip the colours in the ice changed too: from flat white, to turquoise to bright blue and back again.

I could happily have stared at the glacier for hours. Luckily, that's exactly what happened next. Flush from the exorbitant entrance fees, the National Park authorities have actually done something useful with the money and built a large network of wooden walkways in front of the glacier - close enough for you to observe it from several different levels, but far enough away that you don't get hit by pieces of falling ice. Every 20 minutes or so, we'd hear an almighty rumbling like thunder directly overhead, and a chunk of the glacier would sever off and splash into the icy cold waters below. The noises were deafening - often out of all proportion to the small pieces of ice that made them. In 2004, a piece of ice broke off causing an explosion so loud, it could be heard some 10km away! No one can predict exactly when and where the next 'big one' will happen, but anyone planning a Patagonian holiday in 2013 could be in luck......

We managed to catch one of the chunks falling on video - sort of.  James would particularly like to draw your attention to the 'atmospheric' water drops on the lens in the following clip: