Chilean Patagonia - Torres del Paine: 4th - 8th March

Our journey over the border did not get off to a good start as the absent-minded girl who filled out our bus tickets put the departure time as 8:30am. The bus left at 8, so we missed it. And had a good five hours to kill in El Chaltén before the next one set off. We finally crossed the Chilean border at around 7pm; of course, we had to stop for bureaucratic rigmarole not once but twice (once to leave Argentina, and then to enter Chile) and had our bags searched for fruit and veg.

Puerto Natales is not a picturesque town. After getting used to sturdy Argentinian wooden, alpine-like structures, Chilean houses look as if a few planks of wood have been haphazardly thrown together. Our hostel was no exception. Cleanliness standards weren’t too high either, confirmed by the smell of pee in the bathroom (all too common!) and the numerous infuriatingly-itchy spider bites we found ourselves covered with on leaving the establishment. However, the place was warm, so was the toast and the owner was very friendly which made things somewhat more pleasant.

The reason we’d come to this less than inspiring place was to see the Torres del Paine National Park, one of Patagonian Chile’s major tourist destinations. However, the park is not very accessible, being 120km away from town, mostly on ‘ripio’ (dirt road). Staying in the park is hideously expensive ($50 for a dorm bed!), the only alternative being camping (which also meant carrying your equipment with you). So we rented a car for a day. It wasn’t particularly cheap, but it worked out only slightly more expensive than doing a day tour in a bus with a load of other people (and a lot cheaper than staying in park), and gave us the opportunity to do our own exploring. We set off happily, in our dust-covered car, on the paved section of the road. Then we hit the ‘ripio’, and the inevitable washboard (how does this ghastly profile form on the road?) and our brains rattled around inside our skulls for the rest of the day. Of course, it wasn’t a 4×4 so tricky sections slowed us down considerably but it was a small price to pay for the couple of lovely hikes we did (one of them a particularly windy affair), and of course we got some excellent shots of the torres (towers, not towels as one tourist leaflet described them!!) and the cuernos (horns) in all their glory on this partly cloudy day. On our way back to Puerto Natales, covered head to toe in road dust, we went to the Cueva del Milodon (sloth’s cave) where we got to see a lifesize model of a sloth (an extinct vegetarian mammal that lived around these parts), and get an idea of how some of our predecessors lived.

After our easy, car-based tour of Torres del Paine, the next day, under a grey sky, we returned for some more active sightseeing and a walk up to the base of the eponymous towers. Having tied ourselves to the bus schedules which gave us a scant eight hours from drop off to pick up, and our map telling us the walk was four hours each way, speed was of the essence. After almost running through the first steep section of the hike (and panting and sweating heavily as a result), we realised we were already an hour ahead of schedule and wouldn’t need to rush quite as much as expected to get back in time. After a wind blown sandwich at the glacial lake below the Torres with far too many other people (and smokers polluting the air!) we were back down with hours to spare and while away in the Hosteria de las Torres bar with beer and tea as the rain fell ever more heavily outside (and feeling very content that we were not among the happy campers up in the mountains). As you will see from photos, snapshots are actually better of these imposing mountains from our roadtrip around the edge of the park than they are from right in the middle. The day finished with an excellent and well-deserved meal in Afrigonia, our favourite restaurant in all of Patagonia, so far.

Recommended after this visit:
Afrigonia - food so good we went there twice!
El Living - tourist/backpacker-oriented chilled coffee shop, but don’t expect any smiles from British owners

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