sorry, only google translate
When you travel through Patagonia, there are two things you cannot avoid and many of them fly so far for a few days to the south of the South American continent. We already had the Torres del Paine and the second one is so close that it is almost inevitably our next stop. The Perito Moreno glacier. Every climate change skeptic knows it and is therefore probably one of the few glaciers that even Donald Trump can find on a map. It is one of the few intact glaciers, has even grown over the past 150 years and moves up to 790m per year in the direction of its calving front. That is why it has to be used repeatedly as a “yes but” argument against the man-made global decline in glaciers (which is easy to disprove, but we don’t want to be too political here clip_image001).
For us, however, the glacier is actually interesting for another reason, namely that another of these “I’m standing in front of a kitschy canvas” moments is imminent. The way there leads us back to Argentina in El Calafate. A small town that actually only seems to exist for tourism. Since it is a bit of a drive despite only a few kilometers as the crow flies – and we still have to deal with our Argentinian SIM card for a while – we only arrive in El Calafate in the evening and spend the night on a quiet beach directly on Lake Argentino which the city is located.
After a short tour of the city the next morning, we decide to postpone the visit to the glacier until the next day, because bright sunshine is predicted. That is why we enjoy a quiet afternoon at Lago Roca in the Los Glaciares National Park, where the Perito Moreno Glacier is located.
The next day we arrive at the entrance to the national park at 8 a.m. to avoid the biggest tourist crowds – which are predicted for around 10:30 a.m. Unfortunately, the weather today lets us down, only sometimes the sun blows through the cloud cover, but the glacier still pulls us under its spell.
The Perito Moreno ends in Lake Argentino and due to some local geological and climatic peculiarities, the glacier ends relatively abruptly in front of a small island. In front of it, its end rises at a height of 40-70m and since it is squeezed by the mountains on the edge of the lake, it calves almost continuously and we see small and large chunks of ice falling away. The glacier and the island are only about 10-20m apart and the latter forms a kind of natural barrier, which is why the glacier has been producing ice continuously since its last permanent enlargement in the early 20th century, but its area and volume remain constant. Now one wonders how a small island can prevent a glacier from growing. Every few years the glacier grows up to the island and builds up the lake by up to 30m, this rise in water and the current in turn cause the lake to “eat” through the glacier, form a tunnel and cause it to collapse.
We are denied this phenomenon, but we can hardly see or hear the glacier and the constant sound of calving. Therefore, despite the less than optimal weather, we spend almost 6 hours on the trails along the island and watch the glacier. In the early afternoon it gets so full (and also cold) that we leave the sight and drive back to El Calafate. Again, however, for such a highlight in the high season we would have imagined the number of tourists to be much worse.
We will explore the Los Glaciares National Park even further, but further north and hiking is again the order of the day. But that’s another story …
) doch etwas spät geworden ist, sind wir erst gegen 21 Uhr am Nationalpark und werden vom Ranger mit einem kostenlosen Eintritt belohnt. Auch nicht schlecht und nachdem es hier im südlichsten Süden noch bis locker 22:30 Uhr hell ist, ist die späte Stunde auch kein größeres Problem für ein gemütliches Abendessen im idyllischen Park neben einer Gänsefamilie.