Our adventure begins! We take only what we need to survive and we’re off to Torres del Paine. We arrive right before dark and set up our tents before it start to pour. We had joked that as “Noah’s Ark” we might have to have wild sex orgies to repopulate the earth. Well no sex orgies yet, but torrential rain – check.
The next day we’re off to see Grey Glacier. All in all it’s a 10 hour or so hike. We see awesome views of the glacier.
We camp that night. The next morning we lose the Italians to a leaky tent and bad weather. But we pick up an Israeli girl whose friends decided to bail. Because of the bad weather all we do is carry our bags to the next campsite and set up our tents.
The next day the weather is bad so everyone decides to take it easy. However this means that we’d miss the beautiful “French Valley”. For some (insane) reason I decide to press on ahead. I get to the base camp at the bottom of the French Valley and it’s pouring down rain. Everyone is huddling in a shelter and quietly munching away at lunch. It’s cold and no one really talks. I catch up with the German girls who were the only other two you decided to tackle the French Valley. One of them has a really bad knee and had to walk with it straight like it is some wooden pirate leg. Hardcore.
I arrive at the “Mirador” which is supposed to have the beautiful view of the French Valley. More like Mirador of Infinite Fog overlooking the Valley of Death. I have a good laugh at myself and just as I head back I run into the German girls. They made the difficult climb even with the bad knee, but I’m too cold to hang out and I head back.
I get back to camp completely soaked, but in the end I still have a fun day
That night we have really, really crazy winds. Every few minutes someone would run into the restaurant on the camp grounds and yell that another tent had flown off and we all run to help them secure it. One guy from Wyoming loses his tent completely only to find it the next morning in a tree:
The only way we are able to secure our tents is with comically large rocks:
The next day we have a very long walk ahead of us. We consider only doing part of it but in the end we hike all the way up to Campamiento Torres so that we could wake up early the next morning and see the “Torres” at sunrise.
On the way we picked up supplies at the beautiful Hostelaria. It’s a luxury hotel where rooms begin at $267 USD a night (VERY expensive for us poor backpackers). We hang out in the lobby but feel very uncomfortable being around normal people who are wearing fresh clothes and don’t smell bad. The clean bathrooms are an unexpected luxury.
Unfortunately the German girls do not hike all the way up to Campamiento Torres because of the bad knee. Once we reach camp (in the dark as usual) we run into two friends who we had met along the way and we all had dinner together. Afterwards we huddle in the snow drinking tea but soon go to sleep so we can get up at 5am to catch the sunrise.
The next morning we get up at 5am in the dark and race up the mountain. When we arrive at the top we are shocked to see the German girls there. They greet us with (a very heavily accented) “You’re Late!” Turns out they had gotten up at 3am from the lower camp and hiked the whole thing in the dark. Crazy. We cuddle up in our sleeping bags and watch the sunset come up over the Torres. Definitely an amazing experience.
In the end we hiked about 70 km. We get back to Puerto Natales and say goodbye to the English girls who have a ferry to catch and the German girls who have to move on. It’s the sad beginning to the breakup of “Noah’s Ark” :(
