Puerto Natales

PN is the gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. Torres means “towers”. Not clear to me what paine means. I think it might be someone’s name. It refers to these three towers of rock at one end of the park, which rise to 2800 meters. The entire mountain range is not part of the Andes system – according to the informational signs, it’s a chunk of granite that thrust up through the overlying sedimentary rocks 12 million years ago, and has since been eroded. It kind of reminds me of Mt. St. Helens, in that it’s a bowl with a lower opening on one side, that you hike into. It’s not volcanic, though, and it’s not a blowout that caused things to collapse, but erosion (wind, so far as I can tell.)

Anyway, more on that once we get there. PN is also the drop-off point for the Navimag ship south – this is passengers riding on a freight ship south through Chile’s version of the inside passage from Puerto Montt. It takes three or four days, and is on our list of things we will go back and do someday. Lots of glaciers, and a close knit atmosphere. The guidebook advises bringing an open attitude, playing cards, and plenty to drink – this is a real working ship that’s been half refitted as a cruise ship. You have to reserve in advance, and it would have cost about another thousand for two bunk beds in steerage, so we didn’t do it. But, it’s on the list. We flew instead, saving three precious days, and a little bit of money.

On getting into town, we decided we needed two nights to get ready for the trip into the park. We didn’t bring backpacking gear, other than packs, so we needed to rent tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and stove. We also had very little information about the park itself. The town has the feel of one of those towns just outside an American national park, with guide services, restaurants, hotels, and shop after shop full of touristy crap. We vaguely remembered an important thing that the woman we went on the wine tour had told us: go to the Erratic Rock hostel for the “three o’clock talk”. This is a talk given by the American owner of the hostel, about how to hike in the park, what to see, what to take, etc. This was invaluable. This guy (Bill is his name, I think), bills himself as a backpacker, not a businessman, and he does run his hostel that way, but he knows his shit. He’s done all the hikes hundreds of times, and told us exactly what to do.

So, there are two major hikes in the park, and tons of minor ones, and tons and tons of supported treks/boat trips/horse trips/etc. The major backpacking is either the “W”, or the circuit. The W consists of walking up one side of the Torres massif, then back down, doing the same into the middle of the bowl, the back down, then over to the other side, up and down. On the eastern side, you can climb up for a close-up view of the towers themselves (this is a spectacular view, and the one you see on all the calendars, but the others are pretty spectacular as well.) The circuit does all this, but also goes around the backside. Most people do the W in 5 days, east to west. Bill suggested we do this, but add a one day approach hike, and do it west to east. This way we avoid a pricey boat trip for the pick up at the end, and we see slightly fewer people (and we do the easy stuff first, and have a chance to walk off a few pounds from our bodies, and eat a few from our packs.)

We decided that although his gear rental prices weren’t the absolute lowest in town, we were so happy for the advice, and trusted him so much afterwards, that we rented from him, for about 15 bucks a day. The gear was decent, although they did give me a crappy old down bag instead of a synthetic bag, despite my request, so I was a little bit cold (check this before you leave.) So, if you’re taking an extended trip, just rent the stuff when you get down here instead of carrying it all the way. Maybe there’s a problem with supply in late February, but in December, it wasn’t a problem. If you’re worried about supply (as we were, irrationally, but in accord with what every other traveler told us), just email Erratic Rock and ask them to reserve some stuff. They also don’t charge you for the day you rent it, figuring you can’t use it that day – a nice touch that other gear rental places were not willing to extend.

Anyway, we spent the rest of the day running errands, trying to gather all the food we needed, etc. I really wanted to just sit at a coffee shop or bar and relax and write up some blog posts, but every time we turned around, there was another thing to do. We didn’t want to come back to the same hostel after the hike, so we needed to get packed, and drop our stuff off at erratic rock (where we’d reserved a room) before the evening was over. Of course, there was no chance of this happening, so it had to be dropped off early the next morning, before getting on the bus. We left a Toblerone bar to make up for the inconvenience, which got us nice treatment when we got back (people seemed to know who we were.) (By the way, you’ll need either matches or a lighter to light your stove, and since you don’t smoke, you probably don’t have one. The Spanish word for lighter, as a kindly shopkeeper told us after some farcical “Spanish” and pantomime on our part, is incendido. We donated the two lighters we bought to the hostel afterwards, and encouraged them to just include one with each camp stove from now on – their gear guy thought that was a good idea, so maybe that will happen.)

Puerto Natales has a brewery, and we found a nice pizza joint pouring their beer. After two weeks of no beer (we once tried a bottle of the national brew, Cristal, and it’s… not as bad as our national brew, but that’s not saying much), their pale ale tasted awfully good. It’s called Cerveza Baguales. There’s another little coffee shop/pub a few doors down the street from the pizza place that sells it as well. Right on the Plaze de Armas. It was fun sitting there and reading three or four year old Spanish language music magazines from Barcelona while Ev typed away. It's light really late here. The outdoor picture (of the Plaza de Armas) was taken about 11PM.

Anyway, we were up and waiting for the bus in front of our hostel at 715AM, like they told us. We figured, with a three hour trip, that we’d be hiking by 11. We didn’t read the guide very closely. The bus picked us up, and then proceeded to drive through town many times, past every hostel and hotel that exists. Many people were not ready, and so we waited for them to bolt some breakfast and get their shit together (I am particularly unenamored of a certain German woman with bad sunburn dandruff who made us wait, and then sat in front of me for three hours and scratched at her peeling scalp. Ten days later, as I write this, I still hate her.) We stopped at a gift shop at the edge of the park, for no good reason other than to buy stuff (like we’re going to load up on touristy crap on the way in - this was the same stuff you see in any store in any national park. DVDs, posters, little gimcracks you’ll never look at again.) We stopped in the middle of the road for 15 minutes, with no explanation. We were distracted by the antics of a guy who managed to get on the wrong bus and seemed to want the bus driver to do something about it (no sympathy for this guy, but it does seem like the driver could check the tickets before letting people on.) Long story short, I can’t claim that the other bus companies are better than Buses Gomez, but they couldn’t have been much worse. We finally got dropped at our particular trailhead at about 1215PM, and started hiking.

On the way in, I did see lots of wildlife. Lots of guanaco, and one rhea. Didn’t see any of this stuff again until the bus back out 5 days later. I guess the guanaco like the open plains where the puma can’t sneak up on them, and the rhea must just be rare or something. (This is from the window of the bus. I couldn't get the camera out in time to get the rhea I saw.)