puerto natales/torres del paine

09.12.
awake at 6 due to my two israeli roommates getting up early to leave. we made an omelette for breakfast and caught a bus to puerto natales. we crossed the border to chile again, so we had to throw out all remaining fresh food that we had. our hostel in puerto natales was a totally run-down ramschackle house, but kind of awesome.

10.12.

departure for the national park torres del paine. we had been planning on staying in a "refugio" there but it turned out they were booked out so we had to camp. ugh. i was not overjoyed about that. we had to rent camping gear in puerto natales. after arriving in the park we took a boat to our campsite, set up our tent, and started off on our hike, to a scenic viewpoint of the grey glaciar. the hike was okay, but it was really, really windy, to the point where sometimes it felt we would get blown off the trail into the water.

11.12.

we took a bus/hiked to a different campsite where we spent the night. we met some cool isrealis there who were just stopping for coffee on their way further up the trail. (the whole park was full of little groups of young israelis). the next morning we got up a before the crack of dawn to do the obligatory "las torres at sunrise", where with the right light and no clouds, the torres are supposed to turn red, like this:

obviously, the whole getting-up-early-and-hiking-in-the-dark-on-an-unknown-trail-in-order-to-see-some-dumb-rocks-at-sunrise was not my idea. but i did it anyway. my flashlight was not nearly strong enough to be useful and gave up the ghost soon anyway, so we were mainly walking in the dark. it was difficult, the trail was short but quite steep, i don't remember how many meters altitude difference. it took us a couple hours. when we arrived at the outlook point to the torres (we were the last to show up, of course, since we left much later than everyone else, haha) there were a bunch of other tourists there, including the israelis from the evening before. it quickly became apparent that it was not going to clear up enough for the sunrise to be worth it. it was really cold, even more so as my clothes were literally soaked with sweat from the hike. i wasn't interested in hanging around in the cold and we were the only losers without thermoses of hot tea and stuff, so we left fairly quickly. back at the campsite i went back to bed. later i got up and treated myself to a real actual breakfast at the refugio, with eggs and coffee, where eventually the same group of israelis showed up on their way back down:

at some point i got around to asking them why there were so many israelis travelling in patagonia. they said it is customary to travel after their 3 years of military service. they travel for several months, like 5 or 6. so apparently there are huge concentrations of israelis travelling in south america and in asia, where you can travel for long periods of time, switching countries, and not run into visa problems.

anyway, so we took a bus back to puerto natales and the next day caught our flight back to temuco from punta arenas...

the end.

photos:

puerto natales

torres del paine