Laguna San Rafael

Our second morning at the Termas de Puyuhuapi, we arose at 6am to board a catamaran down to Laguna San Rafael — a day-long boat ride among the fjords down to see one of Chile’s most spectacular glaciers. The boat itself was pretty darn classy — it felt like flying business-class, what with the constant meals and seats the folded all the way back. And the views were pretty amazing too:

When we arrived at the glacier, they took us out in little Zodiac boats so that we could get a closer look. I had never been so close to a glacier by boat before; our guide took our boat right up to some of the floating icebergs, so close that we could touch them if we wanted to:

We got to see some amazing instances of calving — when a chunk of the glacier breaks off and falls into the water below. The danger of a big calved piece of iceberg falling on top of you is the primary reason that you can’t take the Zodiac boats up even closer to the glacier:

Back on the catamaran, they had grabbed part of an iceberg out of the water, which they were using to serve whiskey and pisco sours:

And even on the catamaran, the driver wasn’t afraid to get really close to icebergs so that we could get a good look at them. No Titanic-like situations for us though, fortunately…