23/03/2015 I was finished with all the hikes in El Chaltén, but had one more item on my bucket list near close-by El Calafate: Glacier Perito Moreno, one of the few growing glaciers in Patagonia. I knew it would be super touristy, but everyone I’ve met told me to go there nevertheless and I was not disappointed to do so. It was a perfect sunny day and the temperatures caused a lot of huge ice blocks to fall of the roughly 74m high glacier. You can see one of those video clips in this live update, while the complete video will come in a couple of months.

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My bus to Perito Moreno left at 08:30 in the morning, costing 300 Pesos for a roundtrip. Not cheap, but I slowly got used to the prices in Patagonia. I left the bus at 10:00 at the first stop, starting to walk my way up towards the second bus stop, which is located at the Main entrance including a Restaurant and other touristic stuff. I think I don’t have to mention that Perito Moreno is VERY touristic, especially lots of Asian people that I didn’t really see in El Chaltén for instance; guess they are just coming down here to see the glacier. One interesting fact about the glacier is that it is one of the very few growing glaciers, advancing about 2 meters each day! I just wonder how long it will take until they have to built a new viewing platform…

The park offers various hiking trails and you can easily spend four hours here walking all of them and constantly stare at the glacier whenever it bursts off another piece of ice, making some really cool cracking sounds first. It is in fact a very spectacular view, especially looking over the glacier from one of the higher viewpoints. First though, I explored the lower parts and always ran into the same people again. I was always ready with my phone camera and shot tons of movies, hoping to capture a bit of the action live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE4n5-ZxlsA

I was lucky to do so twice, once in the lower slopes and once in the higher ones (see the video above). It was pretty impressive to see those nearly 80m high Icebergs falling off and a complete different experience to my trip in Greenland and the Eqi Glacier, which you can check out here. Perito Moreno was smaller, but had much more action and it was constantly cracking down somewhere. You are also able to get much closer and I was especially lucky with the relatively hot weather.

I finished the upper and lower walks and then walked towards the end to see the glacier from a different perspective. I found myself a bit further away from the glacier then and could not see so much action anymore. It was still nice to see everything from this angle with the surrounding mountains on both sides. Heading back up, I was waiting for one more major “breakdown” of an iceberg with a nice motive of all the people staring at the lower slopes, but sadly nothing happened. I now spent over four hours here and it was time to head back towards the Restaurant, where the bus would pick me up again at 14:30 and drive me back to El Calafate. Next up was my flight to Ushuaia, followed by my long awaited cruise to Antarctica to see even more ice bergs 🙂

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