We landed in Rio Gallegos on time and got a taxi from the airport there shortly after 2am. The flight made quite the difference in temperature , probably a 20-degree fall. When we got to the hotel the woman who worked there seemed to be expecting us. She didn’t speak any English, but the standard amount of pointing and smiling and nodding got us through to one of the worst night’s sleep I have had here, and that is a relatively competitive field given the standard of beds in some of the hostels. For whatever reason I could not settle, and I was glad to see the light of morning.

We got up early enough to have a look around the part of the town we were in. There were almost no other tourists as we were not in the centre, and even in the middle of town there is not a lot to see. So it was a glimpse into what life is like in the better-off parts of South America. I don’t think Argentina has anything to offer like that town in Paraguay.

We got back to the hotel (after initially walking by it, inexplicably) and got a taxi to the bus station. Forums on the internet had indicated it was walking distance from the airport, but it was actually several kilometers, and showed once again why Everything On The Internet is to be treated with suspicion if not hostility. We had something to eat there which was on the very edge of making me feel ill – thankfully it stayed on the good side – and we got tickets for the bus to El Calafate.

We were sitting and waiting for it when a minibus pulled up, and Mike made the standard joke about our bus being there, and then our smiles were slightly less radiant when it turned out that was in fact our bus. We put our bags in the back and made ourselves comfortable, and the three and a half hours or so passed easily and uneventfully.

The hostel in El Calafate was only two blocks or so from the bus station so we picked up a map from the tourist office and walked there, then came straight back out to have a look around. The town is prosperous with long, wide straight streets lined with bars and restaurants and shops selling hiking and climbing gear, similar to Ushuaia but even closer to a ski resort.

We had something to eat and then made our way to one of the two museums marked on the tourist map. It was the equivalent of six euro in, which is pretty expensive by the standards of the place, and its main exhibits were posters. In Spanish. It was like someone had taken a farm building and expanded it with some corrugated-roof wings. There were two complete dinosaur skeletons, and the rough theme of it was palaeontology with some other bits bolted on, but its primary function was to take money off tourists.  At least it was open late enough for us to see it. There are, it turns out, quite a few major dinosaur sites in Argentina, and there is an incredible petrified forest, but all of them are difficult to get out without days to spend in the endeavour. They will have to wait until I return for my motorbike tour.

The following morning we were again up reasonably early, and were at the bus station not long after nine to find that the bus to the glacier at Perito Merino had left at 8.30am, and the next one was not until 1.30pm. We booked tickets on that, and went for breakfast; not a lot of other options were evident. The restaurants in the town were clearly not expecting a lot of breakfast traffic, but we found one that served us a sandwich with three kinds of meat and an egg, and if it had all been differently arranged it could have been a fry.

Mike had read about a nature reserve at the edge of the town so we walked out to that and found ourselves at a very pleasant lake, on which there are all kinds of bird life. The first we came across were pink flamingos. I had the binoculars with me, and through it they looked shockingly colourful, almost superimposed on the landscape behind. The trail wandered along the lake edge, and it was a lovely walk. In the winter you can go all the way around but in summer it floods, so we went as far as we could before the water made us turn back. It was one of those things that is not particularly interesting to write about after, but at the time the interplay of light on the water and the birds and clear air made it an enchanting experience.

We went back to get our bus in good time, and it was less then an hour to Periot Moreno, and what we found there was nothing like anything I have seen anywhere else, including the Antarctic, and may be the single most spectacular thing I have seen on this trip. In headline it is a glacier, roughly 30km long, flowing through a series of valleys and coming to an abrupt edge at a lake. It is in motion, hard as it is to believe – the ice at the back force it forward, and the ice at the front occasionally falls into the lake water, forming small icebergs. Or small at least relative to their southern brethren; some of them are still the size of a building. Of glaciers of the type that stay constant in size, it is the largest in the world.

But none of that comes close to the experience of the thing. I suppose I knew before I went there that a glacier is a big ice field, and that seeing such a thing would make an interesting day out, but I certainly did not understand in any visceral sense what it would be like to stand before it. When we arrived the bus dropped us off at a place where we could take a boat tour in the lake, which we duly signed up for. We waited for a while and then the boat picked us up and took us around the corner of a headland, and there ahead of us was a wall of ice sixty meters high. The top of it is jagged and sharp in huge curves and spikes, and the blue pressure-lines of ice run through it. It is not a continuous whole but rather split in places with deep crevasses, and from time to time a chunk of it will yield its position and fall into the water. The boat took us as close as possible to the places where it is less stable, and closer still to the more stable end where it touches land, and we took picture after picture. Is is of the same order of incomprehensibility as seeing a live dinosaur or a Neanderthal, something entirely out of place and time. Many times, much of the planet has looked like this, and the scene reinforces a sense of probability that our race is just passing through like the others before it.

Seeing it from the boat was quite literally awesome, but then we got back on the bus and were taken to where there are a series of observation walkways that allow you to see it from various upper angles. It stretches back as far as you can see, quite literally a river of ice. Following it with the binoculars gets lost in the haze of distance. And its top surface is a continuation of the spikes and blades of the front edge, except in three dimensions. There are spires and peaks and drops and troughs and crevasses all carved out of ice and pushed against one another, as if a city of cathedrals had been reduced to an eighth of its size. I looked and looked and wondered if there is a path through such madness made real, when progress would be blocked by sheer cliffs of ice and massive drops into crevasses, and I cannot imagine such a thing. I am sure it has been done, and may not even be unusual, but to look at the ferocity of that surface and conceptualise a crossing is beyond me.

We spent the rest of the day there, exploring all the walkways and watching it from every angle. You are afraid to turn your back on it because at any moment a truly gargantuan chunk of ice may fall off the front of it, in the process called calving, and if you look away the expectation is that it will happen immediately. The most spectacular sight at PM is caused by the fact that over time the front wall of the glacier pushes forward enough to form a dam in the lake, braced against rock on the opposite side. That causes the lake to rises higher on one side than the other. Eventually the water pushes its way through and leaves an arch of ice overheard, and eventually that arch itself collapses. This happens every three years or so, and you can see footage of it on YouTube. It cannot have been that long since the last collapse, as at the moment water is flowing freely between the ground and the glacier edge where the dam forms. To see the collapse, or to see the first emergence of the water through the ice dam, would be quite something. But if you do see it, you should make sure you enter the lottery in the same week.

The final assault on the sense is aural. In the Antarctic I heard the crash and groan of glaciers yielding under the immense pressures they generate, but here it was magnified. From time to time there was a noise like a cannon blast, coming from the distance of the ice field; you can tell the people who have just arrived because the look at the front wall expectantly,  but any action there would be followed by the sound of a splash. But sometimes there is a noise like a massive explosion – a minor sound at first, the crack of something huge yielding, and then a roar, the sound of something massive falling, It is a noise unto itself, not comparable to anything else I have ever heard. It rolls around the landscape, like the sound of gunfire in a Michael Mann shootout.

Leaving on the bus I kept my eyes on it until it was lost in a curve of the mountains, and one day I will be back. I often say, as I may have mentioned, that in my twilight years I will revisit the best of the places I saw when I was young, but I will be back before that. The magic and immensity of the place are hypnotic, greater even in my eyes than the Antarctic.

Our plan for the following day was to take a bus up the famous Route 40, and as I write this we have completed the first of two days. The most striking fact of it to this point is that there is a huge amount of nothing in the middle of Argentina. ‘Nothing’ needs to be qualified, though – there are hills and plains of scrubland, sand spatted with tough vegetation and the very occasional lama. But that view goes on and on and on for miles after mile, the repeating background of a cartoon. You can – and I have – stare out the window for an hour, and at the end of that time what you are seeing is fundamentally identical to what you were seeing when you started.

The total journey time was just over 12 hours, from 8am to 8.30pm, and while I found the last hour long the rest of it passed easily. We played games on Mike’s phone (I got over 10,000m on Canabalt, which is deeply pleasing to me) and watched a documentary on the Itaipu dam that I had downloaded in burst of pre-planning, we fell asleep intermittently and there were 20-minute stops at the truck-stops every few hours. For almost its entire length the road is not paved, and so going can be slow. We fantasized about what it would be like to take an Impreza WRX or an Ariel Atom on it, and such a thing would be beyond epic. The guidebook notes that there are few links between Barlioche (our final destination) and El Calafate (where we started) and once you make the journey ‘you will understand why’. I can certainly say I now have a good sense of it.

We are staying in a hotel in a town with the same name as the glacier, Poreto Moreno, though it is several hundred kilometers distant. I am writing this on a comfortable chair in a dark and silent hall as there is no WiFi reception in our room. I am just pleased there is WiFi at all. Tomorrow we are looking at much the same journey again, and then we will be in Barlioche, and as ever the specifics of the plan from there are a work in progress. Much idle thinking and staring out the window awaits.