Welcome to Patagonia

I grew up with a huge framed picture of a Patagonian sunset on the wall, for so long I have wanted to visit this unearthly place at the end of the world. And not at any point did it disappoint.
We flew out of Puerto Montt and went 3hrs south to Puerto Natales via Punta Arenas. The airport was more a house with a runway. The wind was incredible, straight off the Pacific, all the way from the Antartic, chilling to the bone and almost flattening us and we stepped off the plane.
The most incredible flight over Patagonia, clear skies and perfect views of all the snow capped peaks, ice fields and lurid green glacial lakes. We even had the map out trying to figure out what was what. 

Puerto Natales is the town you go to if you want to do the infamous 'W' track, the 5 day trek that winds around the Torres del Paine National Park. We had no intention of hiking for 5 days with all our gear. There are rufugio's you can stay at, but that was a far too expensive option. So we chose to do a day trek up to the base of the towers. Strangely, all the people who had just come back from doing to full trek kept saying to us, "That's a lot of hard work just for the day". We didn't understand what they meant to begin with.
We set off at 7.30am, caught a bus for 2 and a half hours up into the park, with park ranger explaining on the way all the do's and don't's. Late last year an Israeli soldier lit a fire in an area he was not supposed to. It quickly burnt out of control and destroyed a huge section of the park. There is now nothing but ash for over 14,000 hectares.


So the rangers are strict with their rules, no fires, no smoking, no rubbish.

The bus leaves you at the foot of the mountains, and the path winds steeply uphill for most of the 9km trip to the Torres del Paine. Incidentally, it does not mean the Towers of Pain, as one would guess, especially after walking the 18km round trip, in the local native language it means the Blue Towers.
The walk, apart from the uphill bits, is wonderful, following a river course, through forests that look like faeries and elves would be very at home in, across mountain sides of shale, and finally up a huge bolder field. And then as you come over the final small house sized rock, still lying where the last ice age left it, you see the towers, huge and imposing above a glacial lake the greenblue colour of an excited cameleon.

We just sat and took it all in for an hour. We saw 3 avalanches, loud cracks echoing off the towers as the ice tumbled down the glacier.

Once we had built up our energy again we braved the walk back down again. Seeing 4 condors gliding high above as we went.

It was such a long day, we realised what all the other hikers meant at that point, by the time we got back to our hostel at 10pm that night we were simply shattered.