Perito Moreno Glacier

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
~Dr. Seuss

Tuesday, January 20th 2009

The Perito Moreno Glacier is a glacier located in the Los Glaciares National Park. It is one of the most important tourist attractions in Argentinian Patagonia. Unfortunately this caused the prices of entrance and transportation to soar... The local bus companies will charge you no less than 80 ARS to get to the park and back a huge fee for the average backpacker. But you can count on the Israeli crowd to find an alternative solution. In this case, it turns out that car rental will only cost 225 ARS for 5 persons and even after adding the price of fuel you still get away with almost half the price. But there is also an ugly side to this story. Turns out that the park guards only arrive at 8:00 in the morning so all the young drivers simply wake up early and avoid the 60 ARS entry fee by driving pass the unmanned gates. I felt really bad about sneaking into the park and had a nasty argument with my partners for almost two hours before I lost the final vote by 2:3. So I woke up early drove through rain and rainbows to the glacier park and around 10:00 in the morning I thought I had my sweet revenge when a park ranger asked us for our tickets, which of course we didn't have... Unfortunately, the ranger didn't try to collect the money but instead throw us out of the park (after we saw all that we needed to see) spreading a big smile on my partners faces, who from their viewpoint not only that they beat the system, they also got caught and got away with it... I hope that the Argentinian authorities will do something both to lower the costs to more reasonable sums and will root out this ugly behaviour (there were about 50 other people with us that morning who skipped paying for the park). That incident later led to other arguments with other people about this despicable act, in which after many hot words many admitted that they knew that it's wrong and even felt a little ashamed doing it - so not all is lost.. (however it is a powerful example of peer pressure).

And how was the glacier you ask? well it was amazing. The pictures does not do it justice but you can still enjoy them (One note about perspective though: the glacier front wall is about 50 meters high and about 300 meters from where the pictures are taken - it looks much bigger in real life than in the pictures.)