Punta Arenas again: Seno Otway Penguin Reserve

There aren’t a lot of good connections into Argentina from Puerto Natales. And, once you get down there and look at a map, you realize just how vast Argentina is (I think it’s something like the 8th largest country in the world.) We didn’t feel like a 36 hour bus ride to some point halfway to Buenos Aires, and weren’t quite sure what to do.

But, while in PA the last time, we had noticed all the signs for penguin tours. So, we decided to go back down and see some more penguins, while we took one more day to make up our minds about where to go next.

I tried to get a place to stay in PA that night, and couldn’t find anything – all hostels seemed to be fully booked. We asked the erratic rock people (hostel we were in our last night in PN), if they could call their local outfit in PA, and they said no problem, and we had a room reservation. On getting there, we discovered the town was nothing like full, and that it had just been a problem with the reservation system. The nice woman who had given us cups of tea on our last arrival was waiting by the bus station, trying to scare up business. She said something about how the reservation system must be broken, as she was nowhere close to full that night. Too bad, we wouldn’t have minded staying with her.

We were looking a map on the bus, figuring out how to walk the 5 or 6 blocks from the bus station, when another American couple in seats next to ours asked us if we knew how to get to Erratic Rock. We had two of the flyers with a map on the back, so we gave them one. Then, we get to the hostel, and discover they beat us there, and took our room. The people in charge of Erratic Rock are nice, but not the most organized bunch in the world – they figured: American couple, this has to be them. That’s what we get for being nice. So, not that big a deal - we slept in a dorm room, by ourselves (the town really wasn’t full, as nobody else showed up the entire day.)

Then, we headed out to get a spot on a Penguin tour. We had seen signs when we were in town last. There are two tours you can take – one takes you to Isla Magdalena, and requires a boat, more time, and more money. The other takes you to Seno Otway (Otway Sound), an hour’s drive away, to a penguin reserve with walking trails.

This was the best money we spent the entire vacation – it was the same price as the other penguin tour we did in Ancud (about 20 bucks a person total, with all the park entrance fees, etc.), but sooo much better. In the other, we saw penguins from a boat, 50 feet away. On this tour, you’re the one in the zoo – you stay on the trails, and the penguins are wandering around. They were close enough to touch, and didn’t seem to take much notice of us. And, it’s chick-raising season, so they all had one or two fluff-balls they were taking care of. I had no idea, but these penguins burrow into the ground to make their nests. There were networks of canyons and tunnels through the grass they had dug, and were kind of hiding in. The young penguins are kind of dark grey in color, and covered with really fuzzy down. They were almost the size of the adults, who were themselves about 18 inches tall (these were Magellanic penguins.) Mid to late December seems to be the best time to go to see the chicks.

They gave us an hour to wander around before taking us back on the bus (I didn’t get this, as we all would gladly have paid to extend for another hour – we had to run back to the bus, as we were afraid of it leaving us. The driver could easily have made another few bucks if all five of us on the tour had chipped in a little extra, and I don’t think any of us would have argued.)

We snapped many many pictures, and discovered the camera takes decent movies as well. We got a great movie, almost a minute long, of a group of penguins lining up to go under a footbridge, kind of eyeing us nervously (we had to back off from the bridge before they would go under), then heading under all in a row, and taking off away from the bridge. Then, Dick van Dyke comes in, and does a silly dance, and sings "Oh, it's a luvly 'oliday with Ev'lyn."… no, wait, that’s someone else’s movie. Anyway, I would post it, but it’s something like 100 megabytes, so I will wait until we get back, and see if I can upload it to youtube or something. (I'd post more pics, but the connection I'm on doesn't have great upload. You'll just have to find us in person to see the rest and see the movies.)

One thing penguins do that we didn't get on film is they walk up to each other and start sword-fighting with their beaks. Penguins can't do anything without being hilarious, so this almost made us fall down. They just go clack-clack-clack... until the dispute is resolved in some way only obvious from a vantage point of 18 inches. Other thing they do that I'd never seen is throwing back their heads and letting loose with the penguin call/song/craw - whatever you want to tall it. It's not a pleasant noise - imagine if seagulls tried to imitate crows - but, again, really funny. They also do this funny thing with their wings, where they flap them up and down rapidly, in what appears to the observer to be an attempt to take off. Sometimes this was combined with the noise they make.

Other than the trek in the park, this was the coolest thing we did on vacation (just edging out Buenos Aries, about which more later.) Make sure you have an extra day in PA to do this when you come down – the tours all seem to leave at 4PM.

Afterwards, we made some dinner, found a little bar in the basement of this really ritzy building off the Plaza de Armas where men were playing cards and there was a guard at the gate who ignored us. Looks like sailors have been coming here for a hundred years. And debated how to get out of town.

The next day, we decided to look up bus ticket prices to Bariloche, Argentina and plane tickets as well. Problem is that there are no direct flights from PA to Bariloche. Only back to Puerto Montt, Chile. Again, the plane tickets turned out to be only about 100 apiece more than the bus, and take two hours instead of days. So, we did it. But, the plane was leaving in about 2.5 hours from the time we bought the ticket, and the travel agent insisted on cash. So, I had to run out, find a cash machine, hope that wasn’t more than the daily limit the bank warned me about (it was, but they seem to ignore the limit, and I didn’t argue), and run back. Then back to the hostel to pack, and find a cab. Our plan was to spend a few hours wandering around Puerto Montt (the ugly town from the trip down), then catch the latest overnight bus to Bariloche. On getting there, we discover (at about 4PM), that the last bus to Bariloche leaves at 3PM, so we have to spent the night in town.

A nice woman kept bugging us to stay in our hostel, and so we agreed. Turns out it was the same woman that our Australian friend in Talca had told us about (“look for a woman named Mercedes in the bus terminal.”) Lucky we ran into her.

Day Five – Camp Los Torres to the park exit.

This went so much faster than we thought it would. We were nervous about getting down in time, but we beat all the posted times, sometimes by a factor of two. So, the times on the guide were inconsistent, to say the least. We did notice that as we went from day to day, we actually got less tired. My feet were aching at the end of day one, couldn’t even feel them on day four. Same with shoulders. I guess that’s the real secret to long distance backpacking – just do it every day, and by day four, you’re fine.

We had a running joke about the condition of the trails (that was interspersed with the jokes about the CONAF workers' parentage.) Ev decided that at some point, there would be no trail, and we'd just run across a frayed, knotted rope. We need to stop telling jokes.

One minor (possibly major) hitch is that something popped in Evelyn’s knee on the way down. From that point on, downhill was painful. So, we took lots of breaks to try to stretch things out. Even then, we were flying, and saying hello to lots of day hikers on the way up (including a horse team - I say getting to the towers doesn’t count if all it cost you was some oats and you messed up the trail for hikers. Goddammit I hate horses.) (One woman in particular saw fit to sing as the horse carried her – her fellow equestrians didn’t look as though they were enjoying this any more than we were – and as she came upon us on the side of the trail, stretching, made little “poor baby” noises at us, as if she were talking to a child with a skinned knee. She’s lucky I didn’t have any rocks in my hand. I suspect recreational pharmaceuticals. Nobody’s that weird.)

I had been wondering where all these day hikers were coming from. At the bottom, we found out. There’s a very ritzy resort someone has deposited there, where the rooms cost 300 dollars a night per person. (You have to admit, though, that there probably aren't many resorts in the world with a nicer location.) We snuck in and used their bathrooms, and washed up a little in the sink. Then we started hiking out the road to get back to where the buses were – my suspicions were confirmed and there’s a shuttle bus to take you the last 7 kilometers that only costs a few bucks. I was pretty much done walking after five days, so that was fine with me. We sat under a shade tree for several hours and waited with a bunch of other backpackers, including the Canadian couple again. I finished the issue of the New Yorker I was reading (we brought three issues along, and have read each of them cover to cover, and discarded them in hostels as we go.)

Back home, where the pizza place we liked before was open (on Christmas – sucks to live in a town full of tourists from the other hemisphere). We stuffed ourselves, and dropped off laundry at a lavaderia that was open on the day as well (18 bucks to wash two loads of laundry - we didn't even blink, as we really wanted to set our clothes on fire at that point.) On getting back to the hostel, the owner dragged us to his Christmas barbeque a few blocks away, where someone had made some mulled wine. We talked to another couple from Seattle, who’ve been touring/trekking for the last 5 months, and aren’t going back for at least a year, sounded like.

Debated about where to go next – this was the only event on the trip that was planned at all. Finally decided to go back to Punta Arenas, so as to see some penguins again, this time with a fully charged battery. And put off the decision as to how to get to Argentina one more day.

The hike was probably the coolest thing we’ve ever done on vacation – it was only 5 days out of the entire trip (plus another day of prep.) If we could do it over, we’d probably spend a few more days trekking, either in the this park, or in one of the thirty other Chilean or Argeninian parks that span Patagonia. So many glaciers and mountains down here, and we only looked at the most famous ones. And that’s just the southern Andes (and Torres del Paine isn’t even part of the Andes system, they say.) If we were a little harder core, we could spend a month doing this (and if we did it for a month, we’d certainly be that hard core – Evelyn’s knee notwithstanding – jury’s still out on that.) So much to see.

If you’re into birds, this is also the place to go, as even the little brown birds down here are different (one camp bird in particular – same niche as a sparrow – has a neat orange patch on his back, that makes him very pretty.) We say ibis on the lake shore, more condors than we could count, and there are always penguin trips to make. And, this park in particular offers every range of support you might need - from going it alone in the backcountry to staying in really nice places inside, to doing the mix we did, camping, but having a shower most nights. Plane tickets are only about 1500 bucks.

One other funny thing that happened on the shuttle bus ride out of the park, is that there's this bridge across some river, where the bridge is only just wide enough for the bus (they have to fold in the side mirrors, giving maybe an inch of clearance on either side.) They make all passngers get off and walk, so that only the driver is with the bus. I suppose it's nice they care enough to make sure that only the captain goes down with the ship, but it didn't inspire confidence in that bridge.

More pictures of the Torres

It's kind of all the same shot, since there's really only one place you can stand without a lot of serious climbing, but that didn't stop us from snapping a lot of shots.








We got up there just as the sun was tucking behind the big rock on the right - nice halo effect that washed out a lot of our shots.
















The now traditional taiwanese photo greeting:

Day Four: Los Cuernos to Campamento Los Torres, and the Torres themselves.

We made great time on this section. We marched straight up a very long hill, then down again, then up again, then down again (why they don’t just follow the lake edge when they make these trails is anybody’s guess.)
There was a fun, wide, boulder strewn river to cross, that the British couple had warned us about. There’s really no way across without getting at least one boot wet. Someone has strung a wire all the way across, which will hold you (and, I mean, a wire. About 4 gauge.)Mainly, there are so many people bunched up that there’s someone fairly nimble footed to help anyone who needs it. Again, walking sticks would have helped a lot. We kept catching up to a Canadian couple on this section, and sat with them a little under a rare shade tree and watched the river.
The terrain in general on this hike is far less forest-y than I expected (I’m used to the pacific northwest.) Mainly, it was open fields of scrub – the first day was pampas, but the rest is scrub. Occasionally there are groups of trees which give shade and a little shelter from the wind, but also harbor flies – the great thing about the wind is that there are no bugs. The trail conditions are: giant rocks, with a little dirt in between. Hopping from rock to rock was pretty common, especially on the inclines, where it’s a lot harder for a dirt trail to take hold. The dirt parts were the best, as they’re so gentle on the feet and joints. After five days, you can really tell you’ve been walking on an incompressible surface – like running on concrete.
There was a shortcut indicated on all the trail signs, but not on the map, that saved us an hour. This shortcut, though, appeared to just go straight up a hill, until we were waaaay above the trail that we were shortcutting. We could see people on the trail, way down below, and we were mad that they didn’t have to climb like us (they eventually did catch up to us in elevation.) We found another shade tree at one point and looked out across quite a landscape, and disturbed a little mouse/kangaroo rat thing who thought it was his patch of shade.
That was one of very few mammals I saw. I mentioned the rabbit earlier. No squirrels or chipmunks. Saw lots of birds, and especially condors, anytime you looked up the mountain, you could see them circling, riding the winds. Never could get a decent picture of them – they’re just the black dot in so many pictures of otherwise plain old scenery.
We finally crested the hill, and could see into the last valley (the last, rightmost leg of the W.) And we descended sharply for awhile, only to have to climb and get back most of the elevation again (CONAF – Corporacion Nacional Forestal or something like that, got some nasty things said about its employee’s parents right about then.) We stopped briefly at Campamento Chileno (many camps are named for the nationality of the person who first camped there – Italiano, we skipped Brittanico, but they’re both in Valle Frances, then Chileno, and we never made it to the climbers camp, called Campamento Japones.) Chileno is also nasty, fully of bugs, and crappy campsites. Onward another 2 hours to Camp. Los Torres.
Again, the trail was awful. Given the number of day hikers from the resort below, we’re bewildered at how they don’t do something to improve it. We’re also bewildered at how some of them make it. There were 60 -70 year old people on that trail, who looked like they would have trouble walking a mile on the flats. They were very carefully planting each walking stick and each footstep. It’s an eight hour round trip from the resort at the base. I just don’t see how they did the hike, let alone the scramble to the towers at the end. Quite impressed.
We were exhausted on getting there, but the camp was nice – it’s a free camp, so no amenities but a toilet. We dropped our stuff, set up camp, then put on day packs to ascend the final hour to the Torres themselves. Many people get up before sunrise to see the towers then, but we heard there were going to be clouds rolling in, and we figured there wasn’t much chance of us getting up that early. So, we went up. Turns out it’s only a kilometer or two, but it’s a scramble straight up over a boulder field. I know I said that the hikes before were scrambles, but I was exaggerating a little. Not this time. This climb was a 5.6, and our knees were tired at the end of the hour (much different from running, btw. I challenge anyone’s knees to hold up when it comes to boulder hopping. A day later after the hike, walking on sidewalks, I felt fine again.)
But, we made it, and saw the little bowl of a lake at the top. It was amazing, and well worth a five day hike. There are three towers, all of this reddish rock. They’re about 10,000 feet tall, and rise I would guess 5000 feet over the vantage point. There’s a glacier than just kind of drops off right across the bowl from the little lake. The wind blows like crazy. It’s like the little glacier we hiked to in Glacier National Park, but times 10 – the mountains in the background are just otherworldly. Wish I could do more justice to them in words, but it just kind of has to be seen to be believed. The pictures look neat, but the camera doesn't begin to capture it.
Getting back down wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Slept very well that night, Christmas Eve.

Day 3: to Refugio Los Cuernos

So, this accomplishes the leftmost lower part of the W, then takes in as much of the middle of the W as we think we have time for. We had decided to try to make the 3PM bus back to town on the last day, and we were finding that the hiking times indicated on the map were too fast for us by about 20 percent. We decided to hike some extra this day, along the bottom of the W, so as to make days 4 and 5 a little easier. And we know that today, we’re traveling with full packs again, and it’s the third day of hiking in a row, so we’re going to be slow.

The middle leg of the W goes up into the bowl formed by all the parts of the Paine Massif. There’s a huge glacier in there that you can watch form avalanches on a regular basis (this makes a loud rumbling, so you have time to look, and find the moving snow to look at from across the inside of the bowl.) It also takes you up to see the backside of the Torres themselves. We hiked up about an hour into this (it’s supposed to take 2 – 3 hours). This was far enough for great views of the glacier, and to see the Torres poke up above the closeby ridges. Pretty neat, looking at the towers, but we were more interested in the glacier and the rumbling avalanches, and the really cool river the glacier produces.

The water here is all glacial, and so has that weird pale blue color that rock milk gives things. The lakes, the rivers, all that strange color. The wind blows so hard across the lakes that it kicks up these walls of spray that you can watch travel across the lakes. Often, there are two wind gusts in different directions, so they patterns get really intricate, sometimes resembling little hurricanes. Not just the spray either, as the wave patterns are constantly changing on the surface, as the wind changes direction and strength from one minute to the next. The guy at the hostel urged us to abandon bottled water and just drink the river and lake water. Make sure you’re upstream of any camps, and just don’t worry about it. It all made sense, and I managed to suppress the brief thought that popped into my head: “you know, he says it all confidently, but there’s most likely nobody who’s ever sat in this room who knows more about drinking water than you.” Screw it, I decided, and the water situation got a lot simpler. We didn’t get sick, and the water actually tastes great (cold water always does.)

Campamento Italiano is where we would have stayed (not an actual refugio, just a campground), had we not decided to press on further. We’re really happy we did that, as it’s a really nasty little campground. Don’t stay there if you can avoid it. Toilets overflowing, steep slope to the ground. I expect it’s buggy at dusk. Really cool cable bridge over the river, though, with a few planks missing, and others not looking very safe (and unlike the other trail complaints, if this one fails, someone’s going to die, rather than merely get muddy.)

Pressing on to Los Cuernos: Los Cuernos refers to the “horns” – a particular rock formation in the Paine system. On the way, we found the strangest beach. The trail goes down to a beach made of smooth lake pebbles – maybe an inch or two in diameter – big enough that they hurt to walk on barefoot. This beach is only two or three hundred meters long. The funny thing was that I for some reason was thinking that it reminded me of the beach at the end of the movie “Contact”. A few minutes later, Ev says, “reminds me of the beach in Contact.” I guess we’ve been hanging out with each other and nobody else for too long. It looks nothing like that beach, but it has such an otherworldly feel that it must have sparked the associations in both our minds. The wind is fierce and variable on the lake (this is the closest we actually got to any of the lakes), and we sat for awhile and watched the weird wave and spray patterns racing across.

All the hikers who were backed up here managed to spread out across the beach and separate by 20 meters each, to give the illusion of privacy. You do see a lot of other people on the hike. We’re told it’s not nearly as many as you see going east to west, so that’s a side benefit. One thing we’ve noticed is that there’s a hikers’ etiquette, about standing down for people going the other way on the trail, especially if they look like they’re working harder. Typically, this is: stand aside if you’re going downhill, let the people going uphill keep at it if they want to. At the very least, say hello (here, this is “hola” – no matter what nationality you’re sure they are, hola is the lingua franca here, so say that, at least.) We found that not many other people believe in this. The first few days, we always got out of the way, no matter what. We always said hi. Plenty of people reciprocated at least the greeting, but plenty of others couldn’t even bother a grunt. Not to mention occasionally getting out of our way. By days four and five, we were a lot less willing to stand aside.

I was getting pretty grumpy and tired by the time we got to that beach (I think I was just really dehydrated and low on calories – when we finally got there and I drank a few liters of water and ate something, I felt fine.) We finally get to the refugio, and it’s kind of being run by teenagers who like to sit in the doorway and smoke, so you can’t actually get in to pay your bill (as teenagers will do.) (I figure this must be the place where the British couple was denied refuge.) Here, for our 14 bucks, we got a campsite, but no kitchen privileges. The campsites were rocky and sloped. The whole place did have a killer view, though. We picked our campsite during a rare moment when there was no wind, got all set up, then were cooking dinner when the tent blew away (it was held in place by the one stake we’d managed to drive into the rocky ground.) Okay, this is the only spot left, and it has no shelter from 50 mph winds, let’s try again. So, we redid the stakes by trying everything thing to big rocks instead, and throwing our gear inside. This helped, but it was still scary, and I was expecting a rip in the tent or a snapped tent pole that night sometime. (Despite my bitching about the campsite itself, let me re-emphasize: there has never been a better view from a tent than we had. Ludicrous view of the horns.)

(We discovered a pretty severe rip in the rain fly later, than must have happened earlier in the trip. We told the hostel about it when we got back, and were expecting to have to buy a whole new rain fly – it’s a Eureka tent, so I wasn’t expecting this to be an arm and a leg. The hostel guy took a look, said he’d let me know. He comes to me later with a solemn look on my face, I’m expecting him to tell me I have some disease or another –“It’s a pretty bad rip. I think our guy can fix it, but it’s going to cost. It’s going to be … five bucks. Sorry, man.” This on a tent that cost 15 a day to rent anyway. I suppressed, “why are you telling me this?” and managed, “oh, wow… Okay, well, let’s settle everything up then.”)

This leg of the hike, even though we cut a lot off of it, took us way longer than the guide indicated it should, so we were pretty nervous about making the whole thing and still making the 3 o’clock bus the last day (there’s a 6 o’clock bus as well, so it’s not that big a deal, but we wanted some time to decompress back in town afterwards.) So, we got going as early as we could the next day (this turned out to be about 815, by the time I went running, showered, we made breakfast, and packed everything up.)

Day 2: Day trip to Glaciar Grey and back

We decided to leave our stuff at the campground, and just take a day pack to the glacier. This is the first (leftmost) leg of the W, and since we didn’t want to camp up there, there was no point in carrying all our stuff. It’s a 21 km round trip.

The first three or four km is some steep climbing, to get from the valley we were in to the valley Lago Grey is in. The view once you finally crest is pretty amazing. There’s a tiny little interim lake that tricks you into thinking you’re at the real lake, but they you realize how small it is. A little more hiking (wind still blowing like crazy in your face), and you finally see the big lake, and you can spot little icebergs floating in it, sometimes beached. One little cove that the wind beats against in particular had a large collection of drift ice in it. We keep at it, paralleling the lake edge, on fairly level ground, then we finally catch a glimpse of the big glacier off in the distance. This glacier is huge (it’s the one in the post I referenced in my last post), and has several branches that split around an island in the lake. You can take cruises to get up close to the glacier and see it calving, from a completely different location in the lake – this would have been a multi day trip to accomplish this. Not for backpackers. A nice mirador, then more hiking to get a lot closer. The weather started to go downhill, and I started to feel a little rain.

We started heading steeply downhill, down a pretty poorly maintained/defined trail. This didn’t make us happy, as it’s kind of a downhill scramble more than a hike, and my knees don’t like downhill very much. A walking stick or two, which we’ve always hated, we decided would come in very handy (translation: we may finally be old enough to need walking sticks while hiking.)

The trails in general in the park are not up to snuff. We paid American national park admission prices, and American amenity usage prices every night, and the trails just aren’t maintained all that well, in my opinion. I think the government of Chile could probably get a lot of response if they posted ads about “internships” in various hiking friendly places in the US and Europe (Seattle, Boulder, etc.), and had people come down and work on trail crews (I did later see a crew of white folks with shovels, speaking American accented English, so perhaps they have done just this.) We found place after place where a small creek had re-routed itself onto the trail, and was turning it into mud. Then they allow horses, who churn it into foot deep mud.

(God, I hate horses. Could a smellier, dumber creature have been invented? It’s so much fun to smell horseshit when you’re on the trail. Anything that dumb and stinky ought to be kept in feedlots and eaten.)

Finally, we get to Refugio Glaciar Grey. Not nearly as nice as the one we were camped at, and we were really glad it was a day trip. It was cold and the wind blew, and it started raining in earnest. A very wet looking campsite, and no shelter for cooking, etc. We went to the close-up mirador, and looked at the glacier for a bit before being driven back. So, we’re now halfway through, we’re getting rained on, and we’re already tired. Remember that scramble down that was hurting my knees. Now we have to go back up.

Eventually the rain passed us over, and the wind blew us dry. We finally got back, made dinner, and passed out. At this point, I was a little nervous – I was pretty tired and grumpy after two days, and wet, besides (wind-drying doesn’t count in terms of warming you up.) I was wondering how much worse it would be the next day with packs, if it was that tiring the second day with only day packs.

It doesn’t start to get dark until 11PM, and we were never able to stay up that late, so we never did see stars in the park.

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine

First, read this, which is far better written that these posts will be, and was my original inspiration for wanting to come down here.
This is widely regarded as the best national park in South America. I believe it. It’s huge, it abuts other national parks (O’Higgins, I believe, picks up where this one leaves off), and it has glaciers and rock that will make you gasp. We got a start later than we thought, so we needed to knock out 17 km in our first half day.

Day One: Administracion to Refugio Grande Paine
Let me tell you about wind. You know how, every now and then in November or December, you get one of those really windy days in Seattle? The local news freaks out, predicting the end of the world, they shut 520 down, usually one person dies somewhere on the Columbia, having gone out in their boat. People have trees attack their houses, and we find out that Microsoft doesn’t have a secure power supply. For winds that are 40 – 50 mph, with stronger gusts. Now, imagine a big plain of grass (I think pampas is the proper word), with winds that strong, and you’re walking straight into them. All day.
The trail is a rut through the pampas, in places almost a foot deep. Wide enough to walk through with no problem (about a foot wide.) Unless the wind is blowing so hard that when you lift a foot, and you’re slightly off balance (that’s how we walk, after all), the wind will blow you around so that you aren’t quite sure where your forward foot will land. We were afraid of twisting an ankle, and we were walking on the flattest land you can imagine. It was that hard to keep your balance. Now, imagine that you’ve got a big backpack strapped to your back, to provide more of a sail for the wind to catch.
We saw very little wildlife, other than birds struggling to go the direction they wanted (if it was downwind, they were happy, and got there ahead of schedule. If it was any other place, they usually struggled, aloft, more or less motionless, for awhile before giving up and landing again.) I did see one rabbit. There was a camp/wind shelter about halfway, where we had some lunch. That was a nice break, and we met another couple who were in their mid 50s, I’m guessing. They had no gear, and had been hiking from refugio to refugio each day. If you have reservations, you can stay in these hostel-like accommodations, and so not have to carry anything more than a day pack (walks between refugios are about 10 – 15km on average.) But, you need to reserve these months ahead of time, I gather, if it’s high season (December – February.) WE had been thinking we would do one night in a refugio halfway through (it’s quite expensive), but when we saw the availability, we gave that up.
Anyway, this couple were British, and they told us that they try to take a few months off every winter, and go somewhere in the world. This year it was South America. Our eyes got big -we get universal pity for being Americans here – everyone knows the story of how we get essentially no vacation compared to the rest of the civilized world. We are the only people we’ve met who are here for “just” a month. She saw our surprise/admiration, and said, “Well, you’re a long time dead, right?” I’ve never heard this phrase before, but assume it continues with something like “and only a short time alive.” Good advice.
They told a scary story of being denied at one of the refugios, even though they had a reservation – apparently the place overbooked, so decided to honor only reservations that were pre-paid (nobody told this couple this in advance, I’m sure they would have been happy to comply with any rules.) So, they rented them a tent, but were out of sleeping bags. After huddling for warmth in the tent a while, and deciding it wasn’t going to work, they went back in and begged for something, so they guys rented them a few duvets and they made it through the night. Ass-clowns. I think if you’re the ones who’ve screwed up, at least let the people with a confirmed reservation sleep inside. For free. On a couch if you have to.
Towards the end of the plains, we finally got to hiking up and down some hills, but the wind didn’t stop – that kind of wind on cliff edges is even more fun. Finally, we got to the refugio, paid our 14 bucks for a campsite, and discovered that the camp was quite nice – they provide showers, bathrooms, and an enclosed cooking area, with a plexiglass-ed in shelter and picnic tables, and gas stoves to cook on. Turns out they also have a full restaurant and internet access if you’re willing to pay for it (we weren’t – we bought a can of cold coke for 3 dollars, and shared it. Tasted pretty good.) We set up camp, made dinner, cleaned up a little, and passed out.