All The Way Down: Southern Patagonia — The road liss traveled

After Christmas it was back to Lima! I flew via Miami, my Latam connection flight was supposed to leave at 1am, it then got pushed to 3am, then 4, then 8, then finally left at 9am. Brutal. I tried as best as I could to sleep on the floor at the airport. They did give us a $100 cash or $200 Latam airlines voucher for the inconvenience, which I was not expecting. I had only one night in Lima – NYE – which I went out with some of the people from my hostel. But I was exhausted and had to crash shortly after midnight from the lack of sleep. The next day it was back to the airport where I flew to Santiago, Chile, and then all the way to the southern tip of Chile – Punta Arenas.

I got really lucky and had the window seat on the right side of the plane, which is perfect seeing the Patagonian landscape. Probably some the best views I have ever seen from a plane! There are whole swaths of mountainous terrain completely covered in ice and snow leading right up to the ocean. I’m not used to seeing places where the snowy peaks get so close to the ocean, even in the middle of summer! And then there’s the green fjordlands consisting of an impossible number of island chains. Just spectacular. As we reached Punta Arenas everything flattened out and the land was dotted by lakes and inlets. The sun was just starting to set and it was about 10pm!

I shared a taxi into town with a Spanish guy and found my hostel. The hostels here are a bit different than the ones in other parts of S. America. You’ve got main room and a kitchen, but it’s more like living in someone’s home than your normal tourist mega-hostel. No bar and no happy hour from 7-9! The main thing to do in Punta Arenas is to take a boat tour out to see the penguin colony, but it was really expensive and I’ve seen penguins before so I took a pass. The town of Punta Arenas isn’t anything special, it’s rather bleak looking. I couldn’t imagine living here in the winter with only a few hours of daylight! The first thing you notice, especially after traveling in Peru, is the prices! It’s more like traveling in the US than most of South America. I could get a burger on the street for $2-3 in Colombia, here it’s more like $10. I did know this ahead of time though, nobody said Patagonia was going to be cheap!

In my hostel I met a kind of strange Israeli guy, who when I told him my plans (hiking in Torres Del Paine), he said he was doing the same thing, and asked if he could go with me. So umm, sure? It was a little awkward having someone basically latch themselves on to me for a week within minutes of meeting, but hey you always meet some interesting characters traveling. This guy hadn’t been out of Israel much didn’t really know a lot about backcountry camping or anything like that, so I had to make sure that he would get all the right gear to rent. I kind felt like his Dad. Even in the kitchen he was blown away by the two-handled can opener, apparently they don’t have those in Israel!

Anyway, back to our plans in Torres Del Paine NP. We wanted to hike the W trek, which is probably now the most famous trek in South America. It’s route shaped like a W of course, and each prong takes you up into some beautiful valleys, with one of them being the lagoon where the park’s namesake (the towers) are located. A few years ago you used to be able to just show up and secure campsites, but in the last few years they all book up months in advance. Some might call it the instagram effect! But talk about a pain in the ass. For someone who likes last minute planning, this was not ideal. Me and Haviv didn’t have any campsites booked at all, so our plan was to stop in the offices that run the campgrounds in Puerto Natales and see what they say.

The W. The black squiggles is the part we weren’t able to do. Oh well.

The next day we took the bus to Puerto Natales, checked in our hostel and headed out to the camp offices. Although we forgot to plan for siesta business hours, they were all closed from 12:30 to 3:30. Annoying! The crazy thing about getting these campsites booked is that 3 separate companies operate camps throughout the park, not just one (like every other single national park in the world!). So for one section of the W you have to book with one company and for another you have to book with a different company. The first office we stopped into had no open campsites (which we expected), but we could stay in one of their tents for $55/night. Nahhhh. The other company we tried was able to give us two different campsites, one at the Grey Glacier, and one at Paine Grande. Excellent! I think we got lucky, but I’m not sure. $11/night.

Haviv had to rent gear, so we stopped in a bunch of rental places, a process that I would have preferred to have not been involved in! If you’ve traveled with Israelis you’ll know why. (Sorry for stereotyping!) After visiting every rental place in town we returned to the place that most acceptable prices to him (also the first place we went) and we were all set! We bought our food for the next few days at the grocery store and we caught the bus to the park the next morning. Although I really wish I would have brought freeze dried meals from the US, you can’t find them here, so pasta and ramen dinners here we come!

Had time for a small hike waiting for the next ferry. Paine Grande in the background

The jagged rocks in the background are called the Cuernos

To get to our started point we needed to take a bus which connects to a ferry. Our 6:40 am bus was supposed to link up with 9am ferry, but we stopped for 10 minutes to photograph pumas on the side of the road and missed the ferry! So we had to wait until the one at 11. The ferry took only 35 minutes (and cost $35!) and dropped us off at the Paine Grande refugio. These aren’t just normal campsites, there’s basically a small hotel with a restaurant (for the richers) and then another building to check into if you’re camping, a small store, and a kitchen for the campers – in addition to all the actual campsites. We weren’t staying there until the next night, instead continuing onwards towards the Grey Glacier, 8 miles away. Me, Haviv, and Peter – a German guy also in our hostel, started hiking there together.

The start of the hike. Sadly a forest fire killed off most of the trees around. It gives it kind of an ominous, creepy vibe though.

It was an informative hike, as I learned all about Kosher rules from Haviv, who was very strict about that kind of stuff (as opposed to most Israelis I’ve met). No pork obviously, nothing that has been cooked in a pot that has cooked pork, no cheese on top of meat, if you eat cheese before meat you must wait 30 minutes, if you eat meat before cheese you must wait 6 hours, some seafood is okay as long as it has gills and a fin, clams and mollusks are definitely not. The rules are complicated and endless! Anyway after a few hours of hiking we finally got our first view of the glacier, a massive ice wall a few miles away. It makes any glaciers I’ve seen in Glacier NP look like little babies!

Soon we checked in and set up our tents and then had a walk to the viewpoint, which features a bay full of little icebergs. Very cool! The glacier is part of the southern icefield, which stretches for hundreds of miles in this part of Patagonia. Excellent for photos!

Haviv and I made our pasta + tuna dinner, which was excellent. He’s not a person I would normally spend lots of time with, his knowledge of the world is minimal, he’s very right wing, very religious, believes 100% in Zionism and seems to have a bit of disdain for the liberal Jews living in Tel Aviv. So kind of like a Trumper from a small town traveling abroad. So good on him for getting out there! And he’s a happy go lucky guy, which is more than I can say for myself! But I wasn’t going to get deep into religion or politics with him, I’d like to think I know better by now. Although I think his brain broke a little bit when I said I wasn’t sure if I wanted kids lol. In his world you might as well just curl up and die without the blessing of children! Anyway, we met up with Peter for some overpriced drinks in the restaurant, it’s hard to say no to some brewskies after a hard day of hiking! We also picked up another Israeli guy to our crew, a guy name Guy, from Tel Aviv.

The next morning we hiked up to get a better view of the glacier and caught some strong winds and rain along the way. It’s Patagonia, you never know what kind of weather you’re gonna get! But it was an easy hiking day, as we only had to hike back down to Paine Grande. We took our time and got into camp around 4pm, setting up our tents in the whipping wind. As the name suggests, the campground is at the foot of the Paine Grande mountain, a scenic location, but little protection from the wind. We cooked our ramen for dinner and spent the night playing cards, a game I was just taught, called Cambio, which I really liked as it’s got a good amount of strategy involved.

Peter, Haviv, Me, and Guy. These pants make me look like the marshmallow man when the wind blows!

Paine Grande campsite. The yellow tents are the campsite owned ones - not cheap!

Unfortunately the next day Peter had to bail out as he hurt his foot and it was only getting worse, so he took the ferry out. To rub some salt in the wound he had $250 of refugio reservations the next two nights, which are completely non-refundable. So me, Guy, and Haviv went up into the next prong of the W, the Frances Valley. We didn’t have time to hike until the farthest viewpoint, which is supposed to be the best, but the scenery was still really nice. On the way down Guy and Haviv argued politics and I kept my distance. By the end of the hike they wanted nothing to do with each other, heh.

The Cuernos look a bit different from this angle

We could watch the mini avalanches from here

To link up this part of the W with the last part, you would need to get one of the most sought after campgrounds, which was just not possible. So we returned to Paine Grande and took the ferry back, then took a bus, and then a minibus to our next campsite, Torre Central. What people don’t tell you on the internet is that you don’t need a reservation to camp here! It’s huge and you can just rock up and they’ll let you pitch your tent for $20. Hell if you wanted to you could easily just pitch your tent anywhere and not pay, they don’t really check. Haviv was not happy that we paid $20 when we could have just camped for free! The next day we would do the last prong of the W, the most famous place in the park, the Torres Del Paine mirador!

Hiking into the valley, no sign whatsoever of the Torres

The viewpoint is located about 3.5 hours from Torre Central, and if we were motivated enough we could have woke up at 2am and tried to get there for sunrise. But we were not. According to the forecast, it was supposed to be cloudy until around noon and then clear up – if you can rely on weather forecasts in Patagonia! We reached the top at 11:45am, in a hailstorm. No visibility. Freezing cold. And then 10 minutes later the clouds parted and we had beautiful shining views of all of the towers! It was perfect. This was the first time since the first morning that we had any extended period of time of pure, unadulterated sunshine!

Excellent timing. These mountains/rock walls here in Patagonia are really something else. There’s not many places in the world where the rock faces are so sheer and jagged. We took photos and admired the view for an hour and then giddily made our way back down to camp, packed up and took the bus back to Puerto Natales. A successful trip of Torres Del Paine NP! We did about 80% of the W in total, without making any reservations in advance, not bad!