Torres Del Paine

Right - once again we're quite a long way behind on the blog. Probably due to our spending half our lives on busses. In any case, this post is from Easter weekend, and describes our epic adventure in Chile's "Torres Del Paine" national park. We decided to pop over the border for 2 days from Argentina to see this park because, apparently, it's rather good ...

Now, because of our very tight time schedule (imposed by restricted availability to do the Inca Trail - grrr - more on this in a later post when I've calmed down) we only had one day in the park. Most people spend between 3 and 10 days there, camping in the park to get the full experience. We only had one day, so had to plan our route carefully. Added to our problems was the fact that we only had an afternoon to get everything ready for the trek, and that afternoon happened to be on Easter Monday. Needless to say - everything was shut.

Fortunately for us, our hostel organised the transport and even lent us waterproofs. Unfortunately for us, the only place open to buy food was a supermarket called SuperMac, henceforth known as the "Worst Supermarket In The World". They had no bread, meat, vegetables or fresh fruit and we found out later that the tinned tuna and tinned peaches we had purchased were the most disgusting things ever to have been created in the whole history of human existence. That left us with pasta and eggs. Decent trekking fuel, but not great on the taste front. But I digress...

For our one day excursion we desperately wanted to see the highlights of the park: the Towers of Paine themselves - huge 2500 metre plus granite towers rising out of the mountain tops. We were told however that this would be "difficult". It breaks down like this: Bus arrives in the park at 11am. Bus leaves the park at 7.45pm. There are no other buses. Walk supposedly takes 9 hours. According to this we'd reach the bus stop 15 minutes late, and be forced to camp in the park ... with no camping gear. We decided if we ran certain sections we'd definitely make it back in time. Sensible? Here's what happened:




We arrived at the bus stop to see this. We had to ascend and descend that thing in under 9 hours. Oh dear. We began walking with recklessly speed, occasionally looking back over the scenery:



We then entered a beautiful river valley:



Towards the top, the terrain became increasingly steep and difficult to negotiate, but finally we got there, and the incredible Torres Del Paine loomed into view:



We actually made it to the top in just over 3 hours, over one hour quicker than we were quoted. Come on! I think the times were for really fat people or waterbuffulo or something. We even had time to relax at the top for an hour, and took a longer route back. A much longer route as it turned out - we only just made it! Oops.

AND FINALLY: At the top of the mountain, in front of the Torres, I was taking a picture of Liz when a huge gust of wind nearly knocked her over. Here are the pics: