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Published: August 7th 2007
Hello from La Calafate, a very touristy town in Argentina a few hours from the border with Chile. The main street is full of souvenier and over priced outdoor gear shops - but the main reason people come here is for The Moreno Glacier. It's around 80km away and meant to be a real spectacle. I'm visiting it tomorrow - so there will be photos on the next blog.
I´ve just arrived here from Puerto Natales, from where I did the famous "W trek" around the Torres del Paine national park. What an experience!! 6 days, 5 nights and almost 100km walking up and down steep valleys with some of the most stunning scenery you are likely to see anywhere in the world.
I really fancied "walking the W" (sorry - that's backpacker speak!), but was worried about doing it in May when all the refugios where you can stay en route are closed, the temperature begins to drop and the weather becomes more unpredictable. A people from the Navimag ferry wanted to do it too though, and we thought if we could get a gang of us together, we'd be okay. The hostel where I stayed in Puerto
Natales, an awesome place called The Erratic Rock (check out www.erraticrock.com), was run by a couple of Americans, Bill and Rustin, who put our minds at rest during a talk about the trek. It was possible to do it by staying at the campsites on the trek, taking a good supply of instant soup, noodles and pasta, and making sure you take enough layers to keep warm at night.
In the end, Will and Britney (two Aussies), Jen (from Canada), Wayne and Danny (from Manchester), Mike (from Italy), Clemence (from France) and yours truly decided to go for it. We hired all the necessary gear from Bill - tents, sleeping bags, sleep mats, stoves and mess-kits, and set off at 7.30am the next morning hoping for good weather.
The first day was an 18km trek from the Administraciòn office to the refugio beside Lago Pehue, this strange lake that looks turquoise because of the sediment from a nearby glacier in the water. The views on this day of the nearby mountain ranges as we walked took the breath away. Everybody walked at their own speed - I spent most of the first day with Mad Mike from Italy,
this crazy guy who spoke English, German, Spanish, a bit of Finnish and of course Italian. After finding out we had both run a marathon, we decided we would try and arrange to run the Rome marathon together next year - I think I'll need to start training now if I want to keep up with him!
We had a result on our first night when we found that the refugio by the lake was still open. Apparently it is the only one that stays open all year, even in winter. It was nothing flash, but with bunk beds with matresses, a kitchen with gas hobs and hot showers for us it was nirvana! We ended up huddled around the log fire in the refugio living room drinking red wine and trying to keep warm. There were some guys from Northface there who were organising an ultra marathon around the national park - involving a 250km run from Puerto Natales, around the whole circuit and then back to Puerto Natales! We decided anyone attempting that must be barking mad, but the Northface guys were expecting around 1000 entrants. Bill had told us about a guy that had recently run
the 125km park circuit in 18.5 hours - I don't know how these blokes do it! We also met up with a cool Belgian couple called Max and Clotilde around the fire that night who would end up spending the rest of the trek with us.
Day Two was an 11km climb up to Glacier Grey, this huge, brilliant blue glacier that ends at Lago Grey. The view of the glacier when Mike and I got there was sublime. Being the only two people there in this remote spit of rock, watching small icebergs drift past with a huge mountain to our right and this azure blue glacier stretching out ahead of us, was a special feeling. Our canadian "scout", Jen, led the group on the second day and got to the refugio/campsite by the glacier about an hour before anyone else. We had been given a tip that there was an open window somewhere at the Grey Refugio, so even though the place was closed you could still get into the place. What a team player Jen was! On her own she perched her rucksack against the refugio wall and clambered head first through a shower room window
six feet above the ground! By the time we got there, the front door to the refugio was open and the hot water was on for a much needed cuppa! With no electricity or water though it was pretty austere, and no light or warmth meant that most of us retired to the comfort of our sleeping bags very soon after the sun went down!
Day three involved a walk back down to Lake Pehue and an 8km to Camp Italiano, at the base of the Valle Francais. The weather was pretty foul this day and we arrived at the Lake Pehue Refugio (where we spent our first night) for lunch feeling wet and cold after a morning of drizzle. Will and Brit decided to stay at the Refugio for the night rather than walk on to Italiano - I must admit it was tough leaving the warmth of the refugio living room for the walk to the next camp after lunch! We made it after a few hours walking though, and were pleased to find a large open shed at the camp, which we could pitch our tents in and protect us from the wind and the rain.
We nearly lost Danny though after he took a wrong turn somewhere on the way - he turned up at the camp around 7.00pm just as darkness fell. "Jesus am I glad to see you lot!" he shouted - he also thanked me for having such big feet as he was able to follow my boot-prints in the mud and snow to the camp!! Even though it is prohibited, we created a very small campfire which managed to keep us warm for a couple of hours before we retired to our tents. In the conditions we needed something to dry wet clothes and warm cold feet and hands. We need not have felt too guilty though - Max and Clotilde had a bonfire going outside their tent that looked like a scene out of the end of "Apopolypse Now"!
By this stage the blandness of the food was beginning to get to everyone. That morning during our standard breakfast of instant oats with instant milk, Mike exclaimed "I cannot eat theese sheet anymore - eet ees dogfood!" The instant pasta wasn't much better - all you could taste was salt and cardboard. The Manchester lads, Wayne and Danny had
started mixing some old cheese we found at the Pehue Refugio with their instant mash potato to create a novel "cheesy mash" concoction. It actually tasted quite nice! We were warned that there was a big mouse problem at Camp Italiano - we took this to mean there were lots of mice there as opposed to just one really big mouse. We were told if we left any food in our tents the mice would gnaw through them. As a result we hung all our carrier bags of grub from the nearby trees, so our campsite looked like a scene out of The Blair Witch Project!
The walk up Valle Francais on day four was another highlight, with the 3050m high Paine Grande towering above us and Los Cuernos and the Torres to our right. The photographs really don't do this area justice - I had a lump in my throat staring up at this monolithic snowy mountain, watching small avalanches of snow cloud up high on it's peaks. The previous night I thought I could hear thunder, but now I realised the noise was these avalanches of snow that rumbled down the mountain. It was amazing to see.
Turning back to face the way we had walked, we were confronted with a view of the pristine Lago Nordenskjöld far below us, behind which there stretched yet another snowy mountain range. I sat down with Wayne looking down the valley and he summed it up when he said "it doesn't get any better than this".
Only Jen, Mike, Wayne, Clemence and I had made it up the valley - the others decided to crack on to the next camp. They missed some memorable scenery. Mike and I decided to have a closer look at a waterfall on the way down - bloody dangerous though as the nearby rocks were wet and very slippery. Once we returned Clemence told us of a near death experience when she fell into a waterfall in Ireland. Clem was a really nice girl from France who had been working in London as an osteopath for a few years. She tried to describe the feeling of helplessness when she was in the water, saying there was a phrase in french for being somewhere you really don't want to be. We had to laugh though when this was translated into English as "Like a hare
in a pan of hot soup"!! It became a bit of an in joke for the last days of the trek, and we all had at least one occasion when we had a "hare in a pan of hot soup" moment!"
We reached The Los Cuernos camp on day four after climbing back down the valley and walking along the lake for a few hours. The camp here was really nice, with lots of trees to shelter us from the the wind and any rain. Max did the job again with an awesome campfire that kept everyone from freezing on another sub-zero night. He had earned the nickname "Twisted Fire Starter" now, after The Prodigy song from a few years ago! The campfire games were now in full force, including name 10 movies with a certain actor (easy with Robert De Niro but not so easy with Demi Moore!), and 20 questions to guess the famous person. The 20 questions game always caused great merriment, with Clem always starting with her standard opener "Ees eet a man?". By the end of the night, Clem didn't have to open her mouth - whoever was "the famous person" would say at
the start "Yes Clem, "eet ees a man" - 19 questions left!"
Day five was the toughest by far - a 20km walk to the campsite nearest to the base of the Torres del Paine, with the last 3 hours uphill almost all the way. By this stage only four of us from the original group were up for it - Wayne, Mike, Jen and me. Everyone else went for another camp before the climb uphill. It was hard work, with strong icy winds blowing all around and muddy, rocky ground to walk up on. The last hour to Camp Azarano was particularly hard, with steep climbs and big drops taking their toll on already weak legs. We finally made it to the camp and were pleased to find another open air shed similiar to the one at Camp Italiano to protect us from the wind and the rain. To best describe the physical exertion, I had walked that day with a long sleeve top and a snow jacket, and my top was soaking with sweat when I took it off as we set up camp - so soaking in fact that when I wrung it my sweat dripped
onto the floor! Disgusting I know but it gives a picture of how hard that day was. We had to laugh though at mega-fit Mad Mike - we were all just sitting there at the end of this gruelling uphill climb, breathing hard, when Mike said "Hey there ees still two hours daylight left - why don't we go for a one hour climb to see The Torres tonight?"! The three of us just smiled and said "NO WAY!!!". It didn´t stop Mike going up on his own though - and he was there and back in just over an hour. The guy is a machine! He got some good pictures though.
It was a big effort to get up at 6am in the dark and freezing cold in order to climb up to the base of The Torres for sunrise. We knew Mike got up and down quickly last night, but clambering up large boulders covered with snow and ice in the pitch black did not seem very appealling from inside a snug sleeping bag. We got up though, and powered by our last bowl of instant porridge and a strong black coffee we made our way in
the dark with our torches lighting the way. Another couple who stayed at the camp, Seth and Katie from Minnesota (who were also on the Navimag ferry) joined us the last big climb.for Mike led the march, as he had been up once before, but it was tough going, and we lost the trail once or twice. In the end we climbing through freshly fallen snow to reach the summit - and on getting there we were gutted to find the Torres totally obscured by a blanket of thick white clouds. Still we could feel a great sense of achievement as the snow fell around us and we looked down at the icy lake nestled below the Torres - we had made it up to the end of the W, and we had a downhill stretch between us and the bus waiting for us 4 hours away. Saying that, the walk back down was hard on the knees with a steep drop back down the valley to level ground. We were all running on empty in the end, and the last stretch up and down a winding, never-ending road really finished us. The vision of the bus waiting for us
at the end, along with Clem, Danny, Brit, Will, Max and Clittele all there waving at us was a real sight for sore and weary eyes!
Everyone was chuffed to have got round - it was tough but rewarding and the trek is right up there with the highlights of my time away. There was a real sense of camradery in the end - I was very lucky to have done the trek with such a great group of people. We all went out for a slap up meal in a pizza restaurant in Puerto Natales on our return. Garlic bread has never tasted so good! We all vowed we did not want to even look at another packet of instant soup/noodles/pasta/porridge (delete where appropiate) again while in South America - it was certainly good to eat properly again.
So tomorrow I'm on a glacier trip, then up to Chalten for some hiking around the Fitzroy mountains for a few days (I know - glutton for punishment!) before heading back into Chile and Puerto Natales and a trip further south to Ushuaia by bus.
And last but by no means least - I´m a very happy hammer
this afternoon after watching West Ham beat Man Utd at Old Trafford and retain their premiership status. I watched the game with Wayne, a Man Utd nut, in a cafe here in La Calafate. All the locals were cheering on the hammers though because of our Argentine maestro, Carlos Tevez. The commentors shout of "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!" when we scored the winner was brilliant!!!
Ciao for now you people!!!!!
Doogs
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Wayne
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We´ve broke its back.......
Hi Sean The site looks great. Hope you are well and see you in Buenos Aires! Wayne PS Give me 20 Elvis songs!