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...