Torres del Paine

The bus came to pick us up from the hostel at 7:30 on Monday morning. It´s a three hour ride to Torres del Paine. The entrance to the park costs 15000 Chilean Pesos. This extortionate price also includes a really bad map of the park, so it was all bad...

The first day was quite fun. It was pretty difficult, as it was quite hilly, and our bag was at its heaviest since we had not eaten any of the food yet. The weather wasn´t great on this day, and it was actually quite cold by the time we got to the camp site. We found a group of Israelis which we had met in Puerto Madrin, and played cards with them to make the time go by.

On the second day, we went to see the Torres del Paine peaks. They were very nice. We stayed there for a while just taking pictures. We actually got quite lucky, as the sky cleared up by the time we got there. Everyone says that there is very little point of doing this park when the weather is cloudy, and I can see why that is. But as nice as those peaks were, we had to move on to the next section of the park. We went back to the camp site, packed up all our stuff and moved on to the next camp site which was 24Km away. It took us about 8 hours to walk all the way, and we weren´t sure if we would make it before the sun went down. By the time we got there, not only was the sun still up, but we had enough time to pitch the tent, and start cooking before it got dark.

The third day was a bit of a disaster. It didn´t stop raining, so we took the cowards way out and stayed in the tent all day. In a stroke of genius, we had brought some playing cards with us. This kept us occupied for the rest of the day. It was quite nice to relax for a bit, as the previous day was very demanding.

By the fourth day the weather had cleared up, and we went up to the French Valley. It was quite nice. It´s the only place in the world where the formation of the mountain is made up of one layer sedimentary, one layer of granite, and then another layer of sedimentary rock on top. Frankly, neither one of us knows what that means, but it sounds impressive. This was again another easy day. The whole trek lasted maybe 5 hours, and we didn´t have most of our equipment with us, as we left it in the camp site.

On the fifth day we decided to go home, as we'd had enough of the whole camping thing, and the only thing left to do was to go see yet another glacier. Plus we only had rice left to eat, and we were getting mighty sick of it.

It was really nice getting back yesterday and having a shower, some meat, and a drink. All of them were well deserved, I think.