Torres del Paine National Park, Chile (E)

Most of the travellers on the ship were planning on trekking the “W”, one of South America‘s most famous treks in Torres del Paine National Park that looks like the letter W on the map. We disembarked the ship and met again later that day to discuss our plans. With Marleen & Anna from Holland and Toby from Australia I found three people with the same plans and we teamed up to hike & camp in the national park for five days.
The organisation took us much longer than we initially thought and combined with the fact that we found an excellent Pizza place, we decided to stay in Puerto Natales for another day. Once all the camping gear, food and transportation was organised, we prepared our backpacks and enjoyed a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.

We were picked up by a minibus early next morning and brought into the national park where we set up our tents and walked about eight hours to see the famous towers from up close. The impressive panorama of the towers and the green lake was well worth the effort and we stood there for a long time enjoying the view. Unfortunately the weather was not that good for taking pictures but we were glad we could walk the first stage of our trip without any rain or strong winds. Tired from climbing the mountain, we cooked dinner and went straight to bed.

The second day promised a walk around several lakes through beautiful scenery but it would be very tiring, as we had to carry all our gear (approx 15 kilos) to the next campsite. Weather & landscape were perfect and we managed to complete this leg of the trek in about seven hours. Our camp for the night, "Campo Italiano", is a very basic campsite without any infrastructure other than a little shelter where people can cook and eat. We prepared a huge pan of spaghetti and went for another early night as the chilly wind forced us into our tents.

Day three started promising with more blue sky and less wind. That day’s trek would be an easy one with only 3 hours walking up the “French Valley” to see the 360 degrees mountain panorama and another 2.5 hours back down to the campsite. We managed to reach the viewpoint in time for lunch and enjoyed the amazing views of mountains, forests and glaciers before heading back down to our tents. As we were early enough and still quite energetic, we quickly packed our gear and walked another two hours to the next campsite to shorten the next day’s leg as well as enjoying better amenities. We definitely preferred having showers & toilets and we even had a heated kitchen to cook and rest while the cold Patagonian wind made for a freezing night in the tent.

Perfect weather and postcard scenery at Valle del Francés
(click to enlarge)

We started our fourth day after a cold, sleepless night and with all our muscles aching from the previous tiring days. As the weather turned worse, we decided to spend another night in the same camp and finish the last leg of the W doing a seven hours day-hike without our full gear. This meant we would not have much time to see the main attraction of this day, the Grey Glacier, as we had to return to our camp for dinner. The hike was very enjoyable and we stopped many times to have a quick chat with other Navimag-passengers who were hiking the same leg that day. Glacier Grey was impressively big but the grey lake, grey glacier and grey sky meant there wasn’t much interesting to spend hours looking at. We returned to the camp and finished walking the 76 kilometers in four instead of the planned five days. We celebrated this achievement together with other travellers with some red wine in the camping kitchen.

It started raining during the night and we were glad we wouldn’t have to hike on day five. We packed our wet gear and headed for the boat and bus trip back to Puerto Natales, where another Pizza and hot showers were waiting for us.

With Toby, Anna & Marleen in front of the torres

Navimag Passenger reunion