Parque Nacional Torres del Paine

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31.III.
Up at 6.00 to catch a bus to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine with Eike and Rob (a poor helpless English boy we picked up on the cruise…..hmmm, that’s not a sentence I think I´ll be repeating that often), with the intention of hiking ‘The W’- a four or five day walk shaped, interestingly enough, like a W. We hired tents and took enough food to last a few days , and set off gleefully in the Patagonian sunshine. About half an hour later we were getting blown backwards down a hill and questioning our sanity. Apparently the weather changes quite quickly. We stayed at a cool little camp site in the woods that night and got up early the next morning to walk up to Los Torres for sunrise. It was pretty spectacular. We thought we might be some of the first up there, but we came accross a group of three pissed Argies who had been drinking wine and playing guitar for most of the night I think! (As per usual, my usual disclaimer- I have some great photos, but it takes about a million years (approximately) to upload them).
That day we walked about 25km´s to our next camp (including some slightly dangerous climbing, after losing the path- not easy with four days-worth of backpack on your back!). Another cool camp site at the base of a glaciar. Unfortunately, a combination of the noise of the river charging out of the glaciar, the wind, the rain (for some reason it only rained at night) and sleeping downhill with the beginnings of a cold collecting in my head, meant that we got approximately very little sleep that night. We could console ourselves, however, with the development of my comedy mosutache. An absolute shocker in all of facial hair history- 11 year old boys can grow better beards than me!
The next morning, we walked up the middle arm of the ‘W’ to a mirador, where we saw some fantastic views and ate some horrible ‘Manatec’ energy bars. I think they are made out of peanut infused MDF. The camp we stayed at that night was pure luxury-hot showers, a kitchen and a little shop where we could buy a carton of wine.
On the morning of the 3.IV. we walked up to a gorgeous campsite at the foot of Glaciar Grey- very surreal to camp down on a beach with bits of glaciar floating by! We did try to walk closer to the glaciar in the afternoon after we had pitched our tents, but we stopped to sit down on a rock and fell asleep. Oops.
We were on the move again at 9.00 the next morning to mission it back down to the previous camp site in order to catch the ferry accross Lago Pehoe and then the bus out of the park.

After five days of porridge, pasta and rice we were well ready for our parilla when we got back to Puerto Natales.Just the samll matter of handing over a toxic bag of laundry to the laundrette and then we headed to a restaurant to gorge ourselves on real food. Whilst I would happily have eaten anything fresh, I have to say that so far Chilean food has not quite lived up to its Argentinian counterpart.
The walking in the park was fantastic-hard work but well worth it. Again, I think it will be one of those situations where most photos just won’t do it justice unfortunately. Had a good time with the lads too. Initially I think Eike had had reservations about spending his time with people who he thought were only going to speak English and who he wasn’t going to be able to practice his Spanish with. Having said that, we managed to carry on speaking Spanish (teaching Rob a few key phrases, such as ‘I am hungry’ and ‘necesito hacer piss’) whilst also teaching Eike the importance of both the F word, (apparently it crops up quite often in English!), and the phrase ´Go big, or go home’ (the best we could manage was ‘Haga grande, or haga nada’….awesome Spanglish!).

So, not being ones to hang around, we got up at 7.30 the next morning (5.IV.) and took a bus accross the border to El Calafate in Argentina.

Note. Finished reading ‘the Last King of Scotland’. Can’t imagine that’s a happy film!

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