some stuff for tea and a bottle of vino, and made our way back to the hostel. After a veggie curry we spent a very pleasant evening drinking wine with some fellow travellers and swapping stories from around the world!!

After our fireside storytelling night we woke up a teensy bit hungover, but after a half-decent breakfast we were raring to go!! The weather didn’t look too bad, so we decided to go ahead with our tour. We were due to head off at 2pm, and sure enough, at exactly then a taxi showed up to take us to our bus. The bus then proceeded to pick people up from various hostels so we were a little confused why we’d been brought in a taxi, but hey-ho, we were on our way!! Our guide was called Jorge (pronounced “Hor-kay), and was quite a character. When we’d started to do the Spanish courses on our CDs, the first lesson was pronunciation of Spanish names, and we found the way that they

said Jorge quite amusing, so it was hard to keep a straight face when he introduced himself!! As we drove along the lake Jorge pointed out what everyone thought were boats on the water - in fact they were icebergs, and quite big ones too. There are a good few glaciers which end in this lake, and when the wind is blowing in the right direction (as it almost always does in Patagonia!!), the icebergs float on down the lake towards El Calafate. They were very blue, and quite an impressive sight.

Next stop was by one of the rocky outcrops where we saw some Andean Condors circling high overhead, they are huge birds, only the albatross is bigger, and they do look quite imposing circling around!! About another half an hour brought us to the entrance to the National Park, where we had to stop and pay our fee. At this point Jorge asked us if we wanted to see some Puma footprints, to which everyone