Torres del Paine Circuit

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
~John F Kennedy

Thursday, January 22nd to Wednesday, January 28th 2009

The full Paine circuit takes 7-8 days and is considered one of the best treks in South America. I didn't planned on doing the entire circuit and wanted to walk a shorter variant called the W which only take 5 days to complete. In fact, since my partners thought about covering the park in 3 days seeing only the main attractions (and using boats instead of walking) I arrived to Puerto Natales on the afternoon of January 21st a little disappointed that I'll only get to enjoy a short visit to the park. But when I entered the hostel I met Ron. Ron was an old acquaintance from the old days in Huaraz, Peru and I was happy to see him after all that time. He was looking for partners for the full circuit and after about an hour of talking with him decided that it will be a good idea to join him even if just as training for the big ending I was planning for my trip. It was already 19:00 by that time, but both of us were experienced trekkers so by 23:00 we had our bags ready to tomorrow after I changed my flight back north, bought food and arranged transportation to the park. It rained all through the night, and apparently all through the days before, but in the morning the sun was shining and we expected good weather and flooded trails.

The bus picked us up early in the morning and dropped us off in the park entrance were we paid, got a map and waited in line with many other trekkers for a truck that drove back and forth below us since the river overflowed the bridge. After the we got off the crowded truck we had the choice of taking a minivan or walk to Hosteria las Torres some 7 km away - we choose to walk. The walk was an easy one on a wide unpaved road, not very interesting but with good view of the granite towers in the distance. Although the usual way to do the circuit is counter clockwise, we decided to take advantage of the good weather and go see the towers first. It took about 3 hours from the Hosteria to the campsite, a trail that would have been easy if we didn't had heavy packs with 7 days worth of food on our backs. From the campsite it was a steep 30 minutes climb to the view point, a nice lagoon directly beneath the towers that although were very impressive - were not as spectacular as Fitz Roy in my eyes. After seeing the sunset, we head down back to camp cooked our dinner and went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning and immediately realized that I had a problem. I had a really bad cold and other than a leaky nose I felt a little weak and fever started creeping in. I decided to continue despite my condition and a 20 km of bad trail with flooded parts took us to our next destination: the Italian campsite. I didn't felt better the next morning so I slept in until 16:00 while Ron climbed to the view point in the French valley. When he got back we broke camp and walked for about 2 hours more to the big organized campsite near Pehoe lake - a paid site that had a minimarket, nice grassy slots and more important for me, a warm closed place to cook dinner instead of doing it in the cold windy night outside. Next morning I felt a little better but needed more toilet paper for my leaky nose. I went to the minimarket but they didn't have any. A young girl heard me asking for it and offered in English to give me all she had left since this camp is the last in the W and this was her last day. I saw some familiar objects on the girl and asked her where she is from. When I heard she was from Israel (as I suspected) I thanked her in Hebrew to her surprise and felt proud to be Israeli again after what I saw in the Perito Moreno Glacier - after all she didn't know me or even recognized me as Israeli yet she offered me help without me asking for it - something that is unique to the Israeli backpacker community I think. I felt even better when 10 minutes later another Israeli stepped up and gave more paper since he heard that I was looking for some...

The trail north from the campsite took us away form the crowd and towards the Grey glacier - a huge patch of ice that you get only to see from afar if you do the W while we had the pleasure of walking above it - the best view in the park so far. We walked fast and got to the Paso campsite early and a lot faster than the time posted on the signs we saw on the way. The trail was usually wide but had some very steep parts particularly when crossing narrow gullies. We knew that we are going to have a hard day when we woke up the next morning. Not only we had to cross the John Garner pass, we also had a long walk to our campsite afterwards. The climb to the pass was indeed hard, even more so because we walked the circuit in the "wrong" direction approaching the pass from the steeper harder side. The view was well worth the effort though with glacier Grey below us and the Ice Cap in the background, however the relentless cold wind and the physical effort brought back the fever that I managed to keep under control for the last couple of days. After the pass we had a hard walk down and harder walk across muddy wetland until we arrived to the Perros campsite where we had our lunch. I was feeling bad at this point and we almost spent the night there but Ron convinced me to pull through so I dragged myself for another 3 hours of great scenery with glaciers, waterfalls and lakes until we hit the Dickson campsite and I went straight to sleep.

The last two days were mainly walking in a wide prairie with very strong wind and a lot of mosquitoes at the campsites. The walk was not interesting but since we walked against the normal direction I found myself in a mini reunion: I met Rotem from Bolivia, Arishay who traveled with me in Peru, Alexi from the rafting in Cuzco, Shaked and Ela from central Chile and others. Almost every 30 minutes we stopped to talk with someone we knew. It added interest to the walk but slowed us down a bit. Luckily this was the easier part of the trek and we didn't worried about timetable with the mostly empty packs we had on our backs by now. We finally got back to the entrance and boarded the bus back to town. We than realized that we had an amazing stretch of 7 days without rain - something that is almost never heard of in this part of the world... guess you need to get lucky sometimes...

Perito Moreno Glacier

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
~Dr. Seuss

Tuesday, January 20th 2009

The Perito Moreno Glacier is a glacier located in the Los Glaciares National Park. It is one of the most important tourist attractions in Argentinian Patagonia. Unfortunately this caused the prices of entrance and transportation to soar... The local bus companies will charge you no less than 80 ARS to get to the park and back a huge fee for the average backpacker. But you can count on the Israeli crowd to find an alternative solution. In this case, it turns out that car rental will only cost 225 ARS for 5 persons and even after adding the price of fuel you still get away with almost half the price. But there is also an ugly side to this story. Turns out that the park guards only arrive at 8:00 in the morning so all the young drivers simply wake up early and avoid the 60 ARS entry fee by driving pass the unmanned gates. I felt really bad about sneaking into the park and had a nasty argument with my partners for almost two hours before I lost the final vote by 2:3. So I woke up early drove through rain and rainbows to the glacier park and around 10:00 in the morning I thought I had my sweet revenge when a park ranger asked us for our tickets, which of course we didn't have... Unfortunately, the ranger didn't try to collect the money but instead throw us out of the park (after we saw all that we needed to see) spreading a big smile on my partners faces, who from their viewpoint not only that they beat the system, they also got caught and got away with it... I hope that the Argentinian authorities will do something both to lower the costs to more reasonable sums and will root out this ugly behaviour (there were about 50 other people with us that morning who skipped paying for the park). That incident later led to other arguments with other people about this despicable act, in which after many hot words many admitted that they knew that it's wrong and even felt a little ashamed doing it - so not all is lost.. (however it is a powerful example of peer pressure).

And how was the glacier you ask? well it was amazing. The pictures does not do it justice but you can still enjoy them (One note about perspective though: the glacier front wall is about 50 meters high and about 300 meters from where the pictures are taken - it looks much bigger in real life than in the pictures.)

Fitz Roy

"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind”
~Bob Dylan

Saturday, January 17th to Sunday, January 18th 2009

Even after many months of traveling you may still wander upon a place that will take your breath away. The viewpoint near laguna de las tres under the mastiff of the incredible Fitz Roy mountain was one of those places. But it didn't started that well... It started with a 13 hours bus ride from Perito Moreno to the small village of El Chalten across the bleak windy stretches of Argentinian Patagonia. The ride on a bumpy dirt road was not an easy one and the view outside the window was nothing like the lakes and glaciers of the Chilean side. Instead, for every direction there were endless grassy plains stricken by the relentless Patagonian wind that drove you to seek shelter as soon as the bus stopped for one of its planned breaks. The sky were clear for most of the ride but as we got almost to our destination the weather has changed to a violent storm that stayed with us as we disembarked in El Chalten. We knew that there might be a problem with finding an hostel in the village, but we planned to open our tents if we encounter them. However, the combination of wind, rain and low temperatures sent us mans outside to look for a roof over our heads while the girls stayed in the small restaurant that doubled as a bus station. It took almost 2 hours and after midnight we finally found a room with an outrageous price. Waking up to the same bad weather the day after, we at least found a good hotel and went to the park office to look at the forecast. It was Thursday and the weather forecast promised a clear day only on Saturday meaning that we will have to shorten our planned trek.

We stayed in the village for 2 more days and at last shouldered our backpacks and started walking for the Poincenot campsite our home for the night. The trail was not hard, climbing a little at first and than continuing on a plateau for the rest of the way. We got good view of the cloud covered mountain in the distance as well as some wildlife activity of woodpeckers and hares. It took less than 4 hours to get to campsite where we set our tents and went to the higher viewpoint of laguna de las tres. We took the wrong trail in the beginning wasting almost an hour of daytime before we started the steep climb for the terrace the laguna is situated on. It took another 45 minutes of climbing but I finally found myself in one of the best places in South America. Directly in front of me the rock spires of Fitz Roy disappeared into the clouds, to my right the deep blue laguna de las tres mirrored that view and the glaciers below it. To my left and below, Ice floats dotted laguna Suica and behind me I could see laguna Capri, the mother and daughter lagoons and the hills of the Patagonian plains. I stayed almost 2 hours up there waiting for the sky to clear until the cold and the wind drove me back down to my tent. After warm dinner I stepped outside and the sky were without a cloud offering a great (although a little dark) view of the mountain. We thought about getting up early to see the sunrise hit the mastiff but the wind and rain painted the sky in deep grey reducing visibility to almost nothing sending us back to sleeping bags. Luckily the sun was shining when we woke up few hours later and we had a pleasant walk back to hostel. The mountain was still shrouded in clouds and the wind kept blowing the entire time but this is what you should expect in Patagonia... The view is well worth it though...

Carretera Austral

"The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers."
~Dave Barry

Tuesday, January 6th to Tuesday, January 13th 2009

I got used to the road being the long bus ride that takes me between points of interest. But this time it was different, this time the road was the attraction.
The Carretera Austral (in English, Southern Highway) is the name given to Chile's Route 7. The highway runs about 1,240 kilometers (770 miles) from Puerto Montt to Villa O'Higgins through rural Patagonia. The road passes through snowy mountains, volcanoes, many lakes and on the south end many glaciers - it is considered one of the world's most scenic roads. There are many ways to traverse the road. Some do it by bicycle, others hitchhike interacting with the local population along the way, but I didn't have the time or energy to pedal for so many days or wait for the right car at the right time, so I went for the rental car option. Since the road is mostly unpaved, we hired a Nissan Pathfinder 4x4 truck for a week from a reputable company (Budget) so we can concentrate on the views instead of worrying about our car. I didn't want to drive and we had a strong argument about the importance of safety and the personal responsibility of the drivers before we started our trip. The argument almost led to the cancellation of the trip, but it proved important as the two designated drivers did a marvelous job in the week to come.

We rented the car in Bariloche and our first destination was the Argentinian Los Alerces park - a beautiful drive along the region lakes and forests. We hurried along the road stopping briefly to take a bath in one of the cold lakes since we wanted to cross the border into Chile in that same day. The border crossing at the small town of Futalefu went without problems and after buying supplies we found a great camping site next to a turquoise river. We woke up next day to a long and hard drive. we drove west until we hit the road at Santa Lucia and then turned north toward Chaiten, once the gateway to the Carretera with a good shuttle service to Puerto Montt and now a ghost town due the eruption of a volcano on May. We made a small detour to take a bath at one of the local hot springs and than continued north immediately noticing the piles of volcanic ash along the road. When we got to Chaiten we had a surprise waiting for us, the volcano was still active sending huge bales of smoke and steam into the sky - it made a perfect background to the ghost town with almost empty streets and very few inhabitants. We wanted to visit the Pumalin park north of the town but the offices in town were abandoned and a note on the door declared that the park is closed. We ventured north anyway through the magnificent vegetation that can be described as a cold jungle and witnessed the destruction caused by the volcano along side the road. We had to turn back after about an hour and a half due to a destroyed bridge - the voyage down the Carretera has started... When we got back to Chaiten, I noticed that we had an air leak in one of the tires and a friendly Chilean military truck used its compressor to fill up our tire. The temporary fix held almost until the town of La Junta were we were forced to change to our spare tire and find a place to sleep.

We woke up under a huge flies attack and hurried to get our tire fixed. We wanted to continue south, but the time we spent on the tire proved costly as the road was closed to repairs between 10:00 and 14:00. Instead, we went to explore a nearby dirt road but due to lack of time we turned back before we reached the ocean which proved to be a waste of our time - but at least we had an open road again... As we continued south we passed by the small fishing town of Puyuhuapi nestled on a beautiful fjord. About two more hours took us to Park National Queult with it's major attraction - the hanging glacier. We walked to a viewpoint 5 minutes from the parking lot and the view of the glaciers with the huge waterfalls below made me want to hike to the higher view point but nobody else wanted to come. Luckily they agreed that I'll hike alone and they will wait for me - I practically run up to glacier, got a rare moments of ice avalanche and run back down completing the circuit in 75 minutes instead of the advised 2 and a half hours... We spent the night at a nice paid camping site that unfortunately didn't have hot water. The next day we drove to the capital of the Carretera, the town of Coyhaique were we bought more supplies and spend half a day enjoying civilization. After we left the town we drove next to the impressive spires of Cerro Castillo and down an impressive road with glaciers appearing through the clouds on both sides. We found a great campsite in a small park that had an amazing wood stove to heat water allowing us to take long satisfying baths. The road continued south through lakes and small lagoons until we finally hit the shores of Lago General Carrera, a huge beautiful deep lake which is the second largest in South America. We took a detour again driving from Puerto Rio Tranquilo to the northern ice cap - one of the best parts of the Carretera with waterfalls and glaciers at every corner.

We slept on the shores of the lake waking up early to the sounds of a tractor being uploaded to a truck less than a meter from our heads! After this unpleasant experience we found old friends on the road and joined them for a short cruise to the marble caves, a nice although not overwhelming view of natural cave formations in the white-grey marble stone. The road took us east towards Argentina along the shores of the lake where we crossed the border in Chile Chico and went to sleep in the ugly town of Perito Moreno. The next morning Harel and myself woke up early and took the car to the drop off point in Comodoro Rivadavia driving through the bleak Argentinian side dotted with oil grasshoppers. After we dropped off our car we strolled along the shores of the Atlantic ocean - the first and probably last time that I'll see this side of South America during my travels...

Frey-Jacob

"Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
~Robert Anton Wilson quotes

Tuesday, December 30th 2008 to Thursday, January 1st 2009

The path was pure madness. Insane drops going down hundreds of meters of loose scree and huge rocks. The heavy backpack, riding high for more comfort, didn't help my balance as I sled down the sandy slopes (it was much more sliding than walking since the ground could not hold the combined weight of myself and the pack...). It was the first time that I honestly preferred going uphill than down since the steep decline hurt my feet and knees and it's not like that the ascents or even the straight parts were any better. The mountains were so rugged that you found yourself rock hopping all the time traversing and climbing huge rocks with your hands and knees being careful not to fall down the almost vertical mountain face to your right or left. The views were great though, at least in the moments that I took a breather or risked it and let my eyes scan the horizon instead of concentrating on the path ahead. And than after two days, the madness just stopped. The rugged mountain trail was replaced with a wide route running alongside a river in a lush green valley that took us back to main road in a few hours and back to Bariloche - just a few kilometers away the hard mountains were replaced by green hills and blue lakes, looking from below I could not see the path that I followed for two days...

The madness was a variation of the Frey-Jacob trek known as Lynch-Frey-Jacob since the Frey refugio is accessed from above through refugio Lynch instead of the typical access from the parking lot of the ski resort down below. Like in Pucon, my partners for the walk were Harel & Gili, by this time the three of us has become quite a team. It started quite easy with a cable card ride to the Lynch refugio where we traversed a small saddle and ate a quick lunch at a beautiful though windy viewpoint with the mountains around us and the lakes far below. shortly after the trail turned into the insane route described above. It took us almost 2 hour to cover the 4 km to the "Cancha de Futbol" another saddle where we took a left and headed down a very steep path to our campsite near the lagoon & refugio Frey. It was still quite early when we got there and after dinner I decided to climb up one of the local rock climber paths that are used to access Cerro Torre. While usually used by climbers, the path didn't require any special equipment or skills to reach the summit and enjoy the view, although, admittedly, the best views were from the beginning of the trail less than 15 minutes from our tent...

On the second day we left the small canyon through the same way we came in, climbing back to the "Cancha de Futbol", a climb that was easier and took less time than the decent we had a day before. Unfortunately after a short rest at the mirador at the top, the trail started descending very steeply to the valley below down a loose scree mountainside with very little footing. It took more than 2 hours to reach the riverbed below where the trail became flat again as it entered the wood. We had our lunch near a waterfall and continued up the trail that quickly got steeper and wilder again taking us to the top of a rocky pass. The descend down the other side was even wilder than the one before, but it compensated for it with better views of the Jacob lagoon and surrounding snowy mountains. After getting to the bottom we crossed a fast flowing river and a short walk through the wetland later we found ourselves at the campsite of refugio Jacob. It was already getting dark by the time we finished setting up our tents and ate our hot dinner but as the sun set the sky were colored in red and crimson making a superb backdrop to our new year's eve outdoors. The last day with a light backpack and an easy path we felt like walking and covered the 17km back to the road in less than 4 hours. Catching a lucky hitch and a bus we were able to get to Bariloche in time for a good steak dinner...