Patagonian Vacation: Part I

Howdy and hello to all. As some of you now may have noticed, we've been dodging our blog responsibilities for the better part of two weeks. However, this was not solely to highlight the amoral nature of both Will and David. We've just been on vacation, and still are as a matter of fact. I'll bring you up to date.

Santiago was getting perturbingly hot, and work was getting mind bogglingly slow. My previous vision of working a grand total of two hours a week was a lot more glamorous than it has turned out to be in reality. It turns out that when you don't work, they don't continue to pay you (at least when you're paid by the hour, which we are). Boredom began to set in, and not even the sudden, massive availability of ice cream could fix the heat problem. Chileans love ice cream. The US love for ice cream pales in comparison. As soon as the weather turned hot, we started to see ice cream being sold in places it had previously not been. Everyone had it. Everyone ate it. It was a lot of ice cream peer pressure. I started eating a cone on my way home from work, but as previously mentioned, work being only two hours a week, it still didn't amount to that much ice cream by Chileno standards. So we left, and came south to Patagonia...and here we are.

We started our trip by flying into the port city of Punta Arenas. Punta Arenas used to be a big deal I suppose, and it looks exactly like you would imagine a city that used to be a big deal. Kind of in disrepair and larger in size than it can really support. I suppose its major downfall was the Panama Canal, because up until then ships headed for the Pacific had to make a stop down in the South of Chile. Now, no one stops there, except for tourists. As a result, Punta Arenas is stuck in the unenviable position of trying to milk as much money as possible out of tourists en route between the airport and the bus station. All things considered, they do a pretty good job of it. We stayed overnight, snapped some pictures of the perfectly molded mushroom-shaped, shrub trees which litter the city, and moved on to Puerto Natales.

Puerto Natales is a souped-up version of Punta Arenas. It also exists solely for the purpose of leeching money from tourists, but since it's the gateway city for the Torres del Paine National Park, it does a much better job of it. Every other building is a hostel, and all the others are stores selling over-priced camping gear and unbelievably delicious-looking lamb. I'll take a minute to elaborate. Imagine a full lamb, sans head, fur, and guts, splayed open in a spread-eagle-type position, roasting over an open log fire for most of the day. That's what they call cordero patagonico down here, and it's plentiful and reasonably cheap. And delicious. After another night in a hostel, we finally managed to make the bus transfer into the park, and the real vacation started. It would be difficult to explain exactly how huge and beautiful Torres del Paine actually was, so I'll wait until we can post some pictures. We got into the park the first day and did a quick 4-hour hike to where the real trail started. The route we hiked is called the "W," and it's named for its shape. The section of the park we hiked is made up of one giant range of mountains in the shape of a horse shoe. After we got onto the trail we began by hiking north along the western side of the range until we reached Glacier Grey, one of a couple of giant glaciers that are scattered through the park. All the water in the area comes from glacial melt, and as a result it is this amazing shade of blue and also 100% safe to drink. It's basically the same stuff people pay a dollar a bottle for, but its just everywhere and free. And delicious.

After our hike to the glacier, we spent the third day of hiking mostly back-tracking the way we had come, arriving in the evening at the southern end of the central valley, called Valle del Frances. Despite being French, it's actually quite a pleasant place, and turned out to be one of the most beautiful places in the park. Our fourth day, we hiked north up the river valley into the very center of the horse-shoe formation. The trek ended with an overlook surrounded by the mountains on three sides and a view of the lakes to the south. I tried to convince Erin to climb even higher up the trail and, unfortunately, was successful. After about 45 minutes of steep hiking in gale-force winds, she was completely pissed at me and we still hadn't found anything remotely as cool as what we'd already seen. So, cold and angry, we decided to go back and spent the next lovely hour or so relaxing at the overlook. It even started to snow a little bit, despite the fact that it was probably 70 degrees and sunny. It was calm and perfect, and we managed to do the rest of the return hike without incident or bad feelings, despite the fact that Erin couldn't keep from tripping over her feet even on flat ground.

Our fifth day was planned as a short, 5-hour hike, but didn't go according to plan. Since we were expecting it to be so easy, we started out late after a lazy morning. We didn't even leave the camp site until around noon. All went well to begin with, and after 4 hours of hiking in which Erin hardly complained at all, we arrived at a crossroads. One path would have been a relatively easy hike to a camp site one hour away; however, it would have taken us one hour in the wrong direction, which we would have to add to the next day's hike (already scheduled to be 8 hours of walking). We opted instead to take a 2 hour hike up the side of a mountain. About an hour into this trek, two giant blisters on Erin's heels that had been growing for two days despite her best efforts decided to burst. This put an end to the pleasantness of the day's hiking, and the fact that the entire walk was up hill didn't help her at all. Still, we ended up getting to the camp a half hour earlier than expected. That and a big meal of pasta and potato chips made Erin's feet feel slightly better. What didn't help was that the whole camp smelled like horse poop. The eastern section of the park is owned, apparently by a private company, which uses its monopoly on one of the most beautiful places on earth to charge exorbitant prices for camping, cabins, food, drinks, and smelly horse back rides up the mountain. They also place misleading signs everywhere, leading you to believe that all the free camp sites are much farther away than they really are. In short, nuts to them.

The next morning we woke up extra early with the intention of making the hike to see the actual torres (towers), for which the park is named. Erin decided not to go, which left me to make the hike on my own. It consisted of an easy 45 minute walk to the base camp, followed by an incredibly steep 45 minute hike up a crumbly rock tallus, during which the wind would frequently pick up pebble-sized rocks and use them to pelt the climbers. At the top, the torres themselves were gigantic and impressive, although not the most amazing thing in the park. They are meant to be most impressive at sunrise, when they change colors slightly. Still, waking up at 4:00 a.m. and hiking an hour and a half in the dark didn't appeal to me and definitely didn't appeal to Erin, so that wasn't in the cards. After my return hike to Camp Poop Smell, I convinced Erin to stop playing solitaire long enough to hike the rest of the way out of the park. We finished off the last of our energy bars, caught the bus back to Puerto Natales, gorged ourselves on as much food and beer as we could respectively handle, and fell asleep by 9:00.

That's all for today. Still to come: eating lamb in Argentina, eating steak in Argentina, and other slightly less interesting travel information.