(Almost) Touching the Glacier

The 2.5 km-wide Perito Moreno glacier

Peter - my Canadian traveling buddy - and I returned to El Calafate, at the South of the P.N. de los Glaciares. This is the "base camp" for the Perito Moreno glacier "expedition". And it must be quite an expedition to make your way among people on the balconies to take a peak at the glacier during high season. Thankfully, this is the lowest of low season and we are about 100 in the park. The setup makes me think of Iguazu falls, where entire buses of tourists are guided to something grand and amazing. I guess I like better to hike for 7 hours to enjoy something like this almost by myself - like yesterday - but the Perito Moreno glacier is enormous and unique and loud (it advances 2 meters per day, makes loud cracks and loses huges pieces of ice to the lake every so often). It was also one of the milestones of my trip, something I have wanted to see since I heard about it a few years ago. I probably won´t come back, but I´m glad I saw it because it´s definitely something that would be hard to see anywhere else. The boat tour was also quite amazing, since it brings to about 100 meters of the icy cliffs - themselves 80-meter high.