After our two days of hiking to Condor and Cuernos lookouts and full day 20km Torres base, it was time to let our legs rest a little bit. On our third day we headed to Lago Grey and its glacier. The boat tour is about 3 hours and departs from the beautiful Lago Grey hotel.
Lago Grey hotel was a short half an hour drive from Rio Serrano where we stayed. We were able to buy tickets right there at the hotel and then had a nice beverage in the beautiful hotel lobby bar. It has huge wall sized windows overlooking Torres del Paine and the lake. Boat embarkation is about 30min walk from the hotel across flat gravel (lake stones?) surface.
This was the first glacier that we ever saw up close and we were duly impressed. Glacier Grey is 6km wide and 30m tall. In December when we were there we only saw a couple of small icebergs or floating ice pieces close to shore. We also had a pretty solid cloud cover and could not get those beautiful photos of sun reflecting from the ice. But it was still a majestic site and one did not have to hike! We thought it was a great start as we had many more glaciers ahead of us on the upcoming cruise around fjords in Chile and Perito Moreno in Argentina.
The cruise includes a pisco sour (or non-alcoholic beverage if one wishes) served with glacier ice. It is quite impressive to think that one drinks beverage part of which was frozen for thousands of years.
After the cruise we headed back to our hotel in time for excellent dinner and beautiful sunset views.
The next day was our last full day in the park. We still were not quite ready to hike again so we went for a drive around the park from Rio Serrano to Laguna Azul searching for wild life and even saw a puma!