Parque Nacional Torres del Paine - Part 1
Day 84-86 (24.-26.01.23):
Would you like to buy an O?
Or a W?
Not sure if you remember or know Lefty from Sesame Street. He is a shady-looking salesman in a trench coat who speaks in a whispery voice. And usually tries to sell a customer (often being Ernie) such esoteric items as a letter O.
We didn't find a shady salesman, but definitely some letters from the alphabet on offer for our hiking trip :).
Some background on the Torres del Paine National Park and how to plan the trip: Very much like El Chaltén, the trekking capital of Argentina, the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine and its classic hikes, the W trek or the O circuit, are a must for trekking aficionados and are generally found in the bucket list of most Patagonia visitors.
No wonder: if you search the internet for images of Torres del Paine, you'll be blown away: Glaciers next to turquoise lagoons meet lush green forests and, of course, the vertical granite columns, the Torres (towers) themselves.
Since we live in a world of social media and the park provides so many Instagram-worthy spots, it has gained even more popularity over the years. This has led to a strict (and complicated) reservation system for overnight stays, which had almost been our downfall. But one thing at a time.
As already mentioned, the classic hikes in the park are the O and the W trek. The O is a loop that can be realized in 7-9 days. The W is a part of the O, skipping the backside of the loop, where you are able to see the highlights like Glacier Grey, Valle de Francés and the Torres, within 4-6 days.
We wanted to do the W trek in 6 days (5 nights), sleeping in our own tent and sleeping bags, taking food for the first 3 days and book full board for the remaining days to achieve a compromise between costs and weight: tent vs bed in a refuge, cooking ourselves vs full board.
We knew in advance that due to the high season in January and February, it would be difficult to find free spots last minute. If you like to visit the park in these months it is highly recommended to book at least some weeks in advance. Why? The organization CONAF (Corporación Nacional Forestal), which is responsible for the management and maintenance of all Chilean national parks and the entrances to the parks, will not sell you a ticket for anything other than a day visit unless you can show reservations in advance for ALL nights of your stay.
Now, with the Patagonian winds and rain that can hold you up for a few days and delay your progress on a motorcycle trip, long-term planning is almost impossible.
It wasn't until we knew it was realistic to be in Puerto Natales, the starting point for most visitors to Torres del Paine, that we began booking.
By January 18, we were confident that January 24/25 or 26 would be a feasible start date. An alternative would be around February 8/9/10, when we would travel back north after visiting Ushuaia.
I thought finding a Galapagos cruise was a challenge, but this was next level puzzling.
The park´s campground and refuges are managed by three different parties. Two of them are commercial ones, Vertice Patagonia and Fantastico Sur which have a kind of dealership with the publicly owned National Park. Thus, they are allowed to operate the facilities and make money from them. The non-commercial party is CONAF, whose campgrounds are for free, but with limited services (pit toilet and no showers).
This means if you want to book on your own without paying fees to agencies, you need to check three different homepages and booking systems from the different parties at the same time to mix and match.
First I planned the hiking route with the different campgrounds and refuges along the way, including potential alternatives. And after two days of struggling with the different booking systems, I gave up.
The combination of slow internet, very poorly designed and overcomplicated booking homepages, the limited availability of free places and the fact that you have to book all the interdependent parts of the trip with three different providers drove me nuts. This took hours, with no reasonable result for any of the dates.
Giving up didn’t mean giving up on the trip altogether, but instead I involved a travel agency, Booking Patagonia. I contacted them, hoping they would help plan the trip and easily verify the available dates and combinations. They did to some extent…
In a nutshell, they offered a homepage that was easier to use than those previously mentioned, but did not answer most of our questions, did not respond to a missing booking confirmation, and charged 10% of the final price for their "service".
In the end, I managed to put together a trip with a decent day program that was much more expensive than expected, but still cheaper than it could have been: The campgrounds where we planned to stay with our own tent were the following:
Grey
Paine Grande
Italiano
Chileno
Las Torres (also called Central)
And the campgrounds/refuges we were able to book:
Paine Grande (our tent)
Paine Grande (dorm bed)
Francés in an 8 person lodge (let’s not talk about money...)
Las Torres (our tent)
Las Torres (rented tent)
Especially the fact that you had to pay for a bed in the dormitory or rent a tent, although you had pitched your own tent one day before exactly at that spot, was frustrating. In Las Torres we were allowed to spent the second night in our own tent, although an equipped tent was waiting for us, because the campground was far from full. Unfortunately, they claimed they were not able to cancel the booking of the equipped tent and process the refund, because „no internet, we are in the mountains“.
Mountains maybe, but still within civilization: In all the refuges we visited (refuge = building with dormitories next to the campgrounds), WiFi was sold. And it worked perfectly. There is a well-developed infrastructure, at least in the larger facilities on the W trek, so the claim that there is no internet in the mountains is just a lazy excuse not to care.
Occasionally my storytelling gets a bit negative, and yes it is, and I'm sorry to say it, but it is going to get worse for some time.
After I finish my grumbling to let it all out, I'll get to the nice part, I promise.
Here comes the rant (if you just want to read the nice story, please scroll down and skip to the next part after the dotted lines, I just need to get it off my chest and save the memory for future-me and learning purposes):
What was killing my mood was the horrible catering in the refuge/campground Las Torres. I believe it was the largest lodging/catering facilities in the park, as it not only had a refuge and a campground, but also a hotel and special EcoCamp lodging option, and it hosted the Welcome Center for day tourists.
The site was huge and unlike the other lodgings, this one was accessible by road. Which means that all tourists making a day hike to the Torres del Paine arrived here. You can imagine that there were a lot of visitors and a lot of goods and people passing by here every day.
We had booked full board for the last two days, which meant breakfast, lunch box for the hike and dinner, not only to save some weight in our backpacks, but also to get some fresh food and not only packet soup. I believed (or hoped) the 88 US-$ per day was money well spent. That was the biggest mistake I made on the whole trip so far.
For dinner and breakfast 8 people were squeezed onto a table where only 6 would fit properly. At least it was a nice opportunity to meet people that were also ranting about the rip-off of the catering :).
For breakfast, these 8 people had 8 slices of bread, 6 slices of cheese, 6 slices of ham, about 10g of butter, 30g of jam and two tiny plates of scrambled eggs. Some oat flakes and two other types of cereal were available in buffet form, for which at least you didn't have to ask the waiter for refills several times. For drinking, you could choose to put cheap black tea, milk powder or instant coffee in the hot water. When we tried to pay for a decent coffee from the Italian coffee machine at the bar, we were told in the morning that it was not available during breakfast, and in the evening we were told that it was pending repair which would be earliest in two months, even though the coffee was advertised on several menu chalkboards.
Dinner was served in 3 courses: appetizer was a soup in a tiny but only half-full bowl, main course was a small portion of dry chicken on dry rice on the first night and on the second night delicious salmon (yep, it was good) on dry quinoa. The size of the portion of chicken/fish was about 100-150g. Dessert was a cookie once (declared as a slice of lemon pie) and on the second night a serving of caramel pudding the size of a soup spoon.
On the second night, a Chilean couple sitting next to us asked the waiter, not entirely seriously, if they could have another portion of salmon because they were still hungry.
The sad part is that the hunger was no joke. When you hike between 15 and 25 km every day with about 600-1000m difference in altitude, occasionally with heavy backpacks, it’s just not enough.
The lunch box consisted of one piece of fruit (apple or orange), a cereal bar, a handful of nuts and dried fruit, a small chocolate bar, and a sandwich made one or two nights before with the dry chicken from dinner and some soggy lettuce.
And all that amazing food for only 88 US-$…. We were hungry for two days.
We can imagine that for smaller campgrounds and refuges that are only accessible by foot, getting fresh food is a challenge and expectations have to be managed. But that wasn’t the case at Las Torres, where several buses arrived every day.
Since all the facilities are privately owned, I can’t believe that the park itself and its maintenance and preservation are benefiting from it, which is the saddest part of the whole thing.
If I would re-do the trip and the circumstances of accommodations did not change, i.e. tent-bed mix, I would change the alimentation and bring all my own food.
Now the part with nice stories about hiking and the landscape. Because in the end, it was all absolutely worth it!
We did it! After several hours behind the screen, on January 20 we succeeded in organizing a trip that started on January 24 in the morning and ended on January 29 in the afternoon. I wanted Helge to spend his birthday in a memorable place, so it was either Torres del Paine or Ushuaia, and fortunately the first choice worked out.
On the 24th we started our day in Puerto Natales with a short 15min walk to the bus terminal. Luckily, we could leave our bikes and other, non-hiking stuff, for a small extra fee at our lodging in Puerto Natales, where we spent two nights before and two nights after the hike.
We arrived by bus at the park entrance around 9 am, where we registered as visitors. Other hikers who wanted to do the W trek in the other direction (east to west) or the O trek switched the bus, while we got back on the same bus and continued our journey to the ferry landing.
The ferry crossed Lago Pehoe and took us to the Paine Grande campground. We arrived around noon and after checking-in at the campground, we set up our tent in a strange mix of drizzling rain, sunshine and ever-present wind.
We knew in advance that the weather was going to be interesting: The forecast for the first few days wasn’t too good, and besides, the park is famous for its spontaneous weather changes. You can easily experience all four seasons in one day.
We experienced the capricious Patagonian wind already in El Chaltén while camping: It can be so intense, that you need earplugs at night because your tent gets so loud from the wind.
The campground was huge, with one part reserved for individual campers and the other part for the campground owned tents. Since we didn’t arrive at our first camp until late noon, we didn’t plan to hike that day, but just explored the close area and the facilities, including the showers and quincho (cooking area for the campers). We were very tired because of the late night packing the day before and had an early dinner to get up early the next day for the hike to Glacier Grey.
At dinner we had a strange and funny encounter. We cooked a kind of stew with chickpeas, lentils, peppers, zucchini, onions and salami. It looked interesting, not necessarily spectacular, but another hiker in the quincho asked if he could take a picture of it. Of course he could. So our dinner was captured for eternity in another hiker’s photo book, which is a nice thought :).
The second day we were going to hike to the glacier Grey viewpoint was also Helge’s birthday. We were hoping for a weather change, but the drizzling rain had turned overnight into a continuous rain and it got even colder. Since we didn’t have to hike to the next lodging, but just hike there and back to the glacier (11km one way) and later sleep another night in Paine Grande (in a bed), we decided to just go for it. The weather can change quickly, which means it can also get better quickly.
It did not.
After 30min of walking with headwind, with hail and by now completely wet pants, we decided to call it a day and turned back. Honestly, other hikers are much better prepared than us, all guides tell you to bring water-proof jacket AND waterproof pants.
But since we were on a motorcycle tour, we were just lucky to have an extra light water-proof jacket and not only our huge and heavy waterproof motorcycle gear. So we were half-lucky, half-well prepared and half-wet :).
When we got back, we had a hot coffee in the refuge’s bar (not soluble coffee, but only slightly better from a Nestle coffee machine) and I put on some dry, warm pants. Helge decided to dry his pants with body heat and when the rain partially stopped two hours later, we went for a small walk south along the coast of Lago Pehoe.
In the evening we made pasta with a “guilty pleasure” sauce: cream, lots of blue cheese, zucchini and onions. No one wanted to take a picture this time, but the smell definitely spread around the whole quincho and there were some envious looks from people who prepared their weight-optimized "astronaut food" when we cooked on our fuel cooker.
Side note: If you want to take your "own" tent and sleeping bag etc. for the trek and save a bit of money, but also don't want to bring everything from home, there are countless agencies and stores in Puerto Natales that rent backpacks, tents, sleeping mats.... just rent everything, for less money than in the accommodations along the trek.
Back to our cooker: We call it our little fuel dragon because it is very loud when we use it and it sounds a bit like hissing. It does draw attention ;).
At dinner we met again the other hiker who took a picture of our dinner the night before. He and his girlfriend entered the quincho soaking wet. They were well prepared: waterproof clothing from top to bottom. They told us that they were going to do a day hike to Valle Francés back and forth, but also aborted their trip and returned earlier freezing. The weather was too bad and got worse as they went on, and it became too risky to keep going up especially when the wind grew stronger every hour.
Hearing that, we hoped for better weather the next day. At least the distance from Paine Grande to the lodging at the entrance of Valle Francés was mandatory for us to reach our bed for the next night. Preferably with dry pants.
After dinner we took a very hot shower and went to bed in one of the refuges dormitories. Earplugs are a must here as well since you can’t expect all of your roomies to go to bed as quietly as possible ;).
On the second morning we packed all our things and set off with one large trekking backpack, which I have owned already for over 25 years, and a small day backpack. The weather had slightly improved, it was almost not raining anymore, now and then the sun was coming out, and it was less windy. In the beginning we put our waterproof overcoat on the backpacks to protect them from the drizzling rain, but soon took the one off the big backpack. With the wind the overcoat always blew like a sail and made walking much more difficult.
In order not to overburden one or the other, we decided to switch backpacks every hour. Our daily plan was reasonable, but still challenging for casual hikers like us. It included an easy hike of 9km hike to the refuge Francés with all our equipment and then another 14km with the lighter baggage to explore Valle Francés until the Mirador Britanico and return to the refuge Francés.
The route in Valle Francés is famous for its views of Cerro Paine Grande to the west and the back of the Torres del Paine and Los Cuernos peaks to the east, especially in clear weather. We had mixed weather, Cerro Paine Grande preferred to hide partially behind some clouds, but we could still admire it as well as the other peaks.
Between the Mirador Francés and Mirador Britanico viewpoints, the light drizzle turned into light hail. At least the weather lived up to the name of the viewpoint and we were happy, proud and very excited when we reached the end of the trail at Mirador Britanico.
We stopped for a few photos and a little lunch break and left quickly for our way back. Partly to to hike in the light, but also because it was freezing cold at that altitude, with rain, hail and wind.
We made it back to refuge Francés at around 7:00 pm and decided to postpone the shower until after dinner. Cooking was a challenge, because the wind grew stronger in the evening and unlike most other refuges, camp Francés did not have a cooking area (quinchos) protected from the wind. As a result, when we tried to season our dinner (pasta again, this time with tomato sauce, tuna and olives) with black pepper and oregano, the spices flew away and to compensate, the wind „seasoned“ our dinner with some sand. It tasted great if you ignored the crunching. Afterwards we were very happy when we could take a hot shower with very full bellies and crawl into our very warm goose down sleeping bags.
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