El Calafate is a pleasant and agreeable small town. The main street is modern, prosperous, and well-maintained. It has multiple banks and many stores selling crafts and souvenirs. There are many good restaurants, including an excellent café/pub called Librobar Borges y Alvarez, in a small pedestrian shopping area, which has a second-floor outdoor seating area.

The Librobar, El Calafate

For most people, El Calafate is just a stop off on the way to El Chalten, Torres del Paine, or a day trip to the Perito Moreno Glacier. There is a National Park museum and a Glaciarium in town (which we did not visit) and the Laguna Nimez bird sanctuary down by the lake, which made for a pleasant stroll.

Lago Argentina and Glacier

The glacier, about 75km west of town, is well worth a day trip, and by itself justifies a visit to El Calafate. The pictures have a hard time capturing the scale of the phenomenon. The Southern Patagonian Ice Sheet is the third largest ice sheet in the world, after Antarctica and Greenland. At Perito Moreno, a part of it slips into Lago Argentino, the biggest lake in Argentina. Instead of petering out in a mess of rock and dirt like many glaciers, the Perito Moreno slips into the water still huge and blue, forming a 70 m tall ice wall in the lake.

Visitors viewing Perito Moreno Glacier from catwalks.

The glacier can be viewed by boat, by an elaborate system of catwalks on the other side of the lake, and by taking a mini-trek to hike on the glacier itself wearing crampons. Once in the water, the glacier starts to break up and chunks of various sizes calve off and fall into the water, forming icebergs. Tourists wait at the lookouts, and a shout goes up when someone hears an icefall, which happens several times each hour.

Logistics

Transportation
The airport is a nice modern structure. It is small, efficient and has the usual facilities of a small airport.
There are offices for a variety of bus companies. Each office only sells tickets for one bus line, so you may have to check out several offices to get the ticket you want. For example, we arrived at about 4 pm, having taken the 12:15 pm Aerolineas Argentinas flight out of Buenos Aires. One company offered an 8 pm trip directly from the airport to El Chalten, but another company had a 6 pm departure from the bus station, so we took a taxi to the bus station. The airport is 22 km east of town, and the bus station is in the eastern suburbs. We were charged $US 18 for a taxi between the two, which seems a bit steep. The standard rate for a taxi (e.g. with CondorTaxi, remissescondor@cotecal.com.ar) from downtown to the airport (which is a longer ride) is 600 pesos or $US 15. By the way, you do not need to tip taxi drivers in Chile and Argentina, and drivers are very happy if you give them an extra dollar or two.

The bus station is fairly basic. It is clean and spacious and sometimes has working free WiFi. There are clean washrooms, but the only toilet paper dispenser is before you enter the washrooms. There is no food served in the bus station, but there is a café and convenience store across the road.

Accommodation
We stayed at Refugio del Lago, just off the east and of the main street. This is a group of four modern and spacious apartments above a store. The facilities were reasonable, and included use of a laptop with WiFi. The beds were very firm and we had some difficulty getting adequate hot water. The manager had little English but responded promptly to text messages.

Glacier Tour
There are many companies which offer similar tours at similar prices. We went with Heilo & Aventure, who have offices at 935 Av del Libertador, on the south side of the main rod towards the west end of the main shopping area. They gave the best description of what they were selling and offered a door-to-door service. They picked us up at 8 am, and we drove for a bit over an hour, with a couple of short photo stops. The guide gave a brief account of the glacier and the local landscape in English and Spanish. At the park entrance, a ranger got on, took 700 pesos from everyone (Argentinian cash only), then returned to distribute the tickets.

Perito Moreno boat dock

For our tour, we were dropped off at the boat dock. Our guide issued us tickets and we boarded a large boat a few minutes before it departed for a 50-minute cruise along the south face of the glacier. When we got off, our bus was waiting to take us to the viewing platforms. The bus dropped us at a café with washrooms and a convenience store. We had a bit over two hours to explore the elaborate arrangement of catwalks which offer spectacular views of the glacier. We brought a picnic lunch to maximize our outdoor viewing time. We headed to the right to see the north face of the glacier and ended up walking the whole length of the blue trail to a second café where there is a free shuttle bus back to the first café. We were dropped off at our hotel at about 4 pm. We felt that this was enough time to see the glacier in a leisurely fashion.