Around Patagonia
El Calafate and beyond: fitting in El Chaltén and Ushuaia
The glacier takes one long day. Here's how it sits alongside El Chaltén's trekking and the run down to Ushuaia at the end of the road.
See Perito Moreno trekking tickets on GetYourGuide ↗Building a Patagonia trip
| From El Calafate | Why it works | |
|---|---|---|
| Perito Moreno day | 10 hours, one day | Book first — it can sell out |
| El Chaltén | ~221km, ~2h40m by bus | Day trips or multi-night trekking base |
| Ushuaia | ~566km by air | The end-of-the-road city, its own leg |
| Rest day | In El Calafate itself | After an early-start, long trekking day |
| Order | Calafate → Chaltén → onward, or reverse | Both directions work; buses run daily |
Give the glacier day its own day
Mini-Trekking is a roughly ten-hour commitment with a pre-dawn pickup, so the safest way to build a Patagonia itinerary around it is to give it a day with nothing else scheduled either side — no early flight the next morning, no late arrival the night before. It's also the one activity in this itinerary that's genuinely likely to sell out, so it's worth locking in the date before building the rest of the trip around it, not after.
El Chaltén: the trekking capital, 2h40m away
El Chaltén, about 221 kilometres and roughly two hours forty minutes from El Calafate by bus, is Argentina's trekking base for Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre — a different kind of Patagonia day, on foot rather than on ice. Many visitors treat El Calafate and El Chaltén as a linked pair: fly into El Calafate, do the glacier, bus up to El Chaltén for a few days of hiking, then fly out from wherever the itinerary continues.
Ushuaia: the end of the road
Ushuaia, the southernmost city commonly used as a gateway to Tierra del Fuego and Antarctic departures, sits about 566 kilometres away by air with no realistic same-day road link — it's a separate leg of a trip rather than a day excursion from El Calafate. If it's on your route, treat it as its own multi-day stop rather than something to squeeze in around the glacier.
Building the order
A common shape is El Calafate first (glacier day, plus a rest day), then El Chaltén for trekking, with Ushuaia either before El Calafate or as a final stop before flying home — the exact order matters less than making sure the Mini-Trekking day isn't sandwiched between two travel days with no slack. Both directions work equally well; buses between El Calafate and El Chaltén run daily in season.
One caution about stacking travel days
The one combination worth avoiding is scheduling the glacier day immediately after a long travel day into El Calafate, given how early the pickup can be. Arriving the afternoon or evening before, rather than the same morning, gives you a proper night's sleep before a ten-hour day that starts in the dark for much of the year.
A rough shape for a longer Patagonia trip
Travellers building a dedicated Patagonia leg around these three places commonly allow something like two to three nights in El Calafate (covering the glacier day plus arrival and rest), three to four nights in El Chaltén for trekking around Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, and a separate multi-night stop in Ushuaia if it's on the route at all — with the exact split depending on how much hiking versus glacier-focused time you want. There's no single correct order: some visitors fly into El Calafate and work their way south to Ushuaia before flying home from there, others do the reverse. What matters more than the sequence is not compressing the Mini-Trekking day against a travel day on either side, given its own length and early start.
Weather margin, wherever you're headed
Patagonia's weather is famously changeable, and El Chaltén's trekking and Ushuaia's own excursions are both more weather-dependent than the glacier day, which largely runs regardless of conditions. Build a spare day or two into a longer itinerary if hiking around Fitz Roy or a Beagle Channel excursion matters to you, rather than scheduling every day back to back — a single bad-weather day in El Chaltén can otherwise cost you the views the whole detour was for, in a way that a cloudy day at Perito Moreno mostly doesn't.
Keeping the glacier day central to the plan
It's easy, when planning a longer Patagonia trip, to let El Chaltén's trekking or Ushuaia's own draws overshadow the Perito Moreno day in the itinerary-building process — but this is the one activity of the three that both sells out and runs on a single operator's fixed daily capacity, with no equivalent alternative if your date is gone. Lock in your Mini-Trekking date first, then fit El Chaltén and Ushuaia around it, rather than the reverse.