After a few days in El Calafate, we headed south, crossing the border into Chile, to Puerto Natales. There, we met up with our guide Serkan (who is actually Turkish), and got ready to spend 3 days trekking through one of Chile’s most famous national parks, Parque Nacional Torres del Paine (National Park Towers of Blue; Paine means blue in the native Tehuelpe language). During our three days in the park, we got to see three pretty cool places:
- Las Torres. The towers themselves. These are pretty tremendous rock formations that have been carved by a combination of wind and ice (there are a few glaciers in the park, too). Our first day, we spent about 3 hours hiking up to them, and three hour hiking down to return to the Refugio, where we spent the night.
- The Grey Glacier. Our second day was spent transferring to one of the other lodges in the park, and then 4 hours hiking to the glacier and back.
- The French Valley. On our third day, we hiked up into the French Valley. We saw some amazing avalanches on the side of the towers, a few waterfalls, and ran into some people we had net earlier in the park.
Oh, did I mention the weather? The park is known for having four seasons in one day, and (especially on the higher stretches, like the exposed boulder-field ascent to the towers and the later sections of the French Valley) very high winds. All three days, we had bright sunny days, and almost no wind. It was great hiking weather. Even our guide (who had been guiding in the park for over 5 years), said he hadn’t seen anything like it. We got to really enjoy the park – it’s been protected ever since the mid-60s, and has only suffered one major fire; in 2006 or 2007 a few backpackers left their fire burning and it got out of control, taking out more than 10% of the park.
A couple of other interesting things happened:
- Our van driver (who looked almost exactly like Robert Dinero) had to remove the mirrors from his van to make it over one bridge because the van wouldn’t fit otherwise.
- We ran into our friends Richard and John from our Antarctic cruise on the trail to Las Torres (they were coming down as we were ascending the final part).
- We learned the ins and outs of crossing the border between Argentina and Chile.
- Neither country likes the other very much, so most border crossings involve a few kilometers of “no man’s land” after you’ve left one country but before you’ve entered the other (This isn’t the case at Los Horcones, but seems to be true everywhere else along the Andean border).
- It usually takes much more time to enter Chile from Argentina than the reverse (at the same border crossing). Chile is MUCH more sensitive to fruit and animal imports than Argentina, so they scan all incoming baggage, but Argentina doesn’t. We think that this is because the land on the Chilean side of the Andes is much more arable than the land on the argentinian side (because the pacific clouds rain down on chile before crossing the Andes).
- No food, fruits, or meat, and you should be fine getting into Chile. The fewer people you have with you, the better (tourist buses always take longer because there are always a few people who don’t know how the system works and slow everyone else down).
Two more sets of photos:
Lago Nordenskjold
The Waterfall
Enjoy!
