Patagonia Adventure, Nov/Dec 2015

My travel journal for this trip involved only pen and paper, so I have no day-by-day “blog” this time. But as I look back over my musings from the trip, the word that reappears is “blessed.” I was blessed with great weather, great experiences, great people. But also blessed because traveling is a kind of nourishment for me. It never ceases to amaze me that I get to live this life. Here are some excerpts from my travel journal:

“Truly one of the greatest things about traveling is living in the moment. I can at last erase from the chatter in my brain the useless, futile worrying and ruminating…. I crave this type of experience and don’t feel alive without it. Nothing forces one to feel more “in the moment” than hiking, than hiking in another country, than hiking in another country with a strained knee while being shepherded by a kind but essentially total stranger whose job it is to make sure you get home safely and whose birthday you don’t want to ruin more than you already have. In those moments, I was there. I was truly present and alive to that moment, that experience, those thoughts, and no others….

“Part of me feels isolated and alone. After all, who goes traveling to the ends of the earth alone? Well, I do. As isolated as I feel, I also feel empowered, happy, content, full of anticipation…. I settled at this table in the bar, and I expect others will soon make their way to the bar as well. Who will they be? Will any become friends? Who will I meet? Who will I like? Does it matter? I will try to stop that useless chatter (again), accept what is, and not worry about what is not.”

OK, on to the fun part:

Part I of my Patagonia adventure was trekking the Chilean National Park called Torres del Paine (pronounced, I’ve now learned, Pah-ee-nay, which I’m told means “blue” in the indigenous language of local people who thought the stones of the mountains looked blue). Door to door, from my house to the entrance of my little dome at EcoCamp, took 48 hours. A full 48 hours, on planes and buses and with some stops at a hotel and restaurants. 48 hours to arrive at the place I had been imagining for months. And it was exactly as I imagined.

My little “standard dome” had two twin beds, no heat, no electricity, no bathroom. The first night was so cold I wished my mystery roommate had arrived solely so that we could pool our body heat within that tiny space. But the little window in the back looked right up at the towers (see them in the distance?), and because the sky is plenty light until 10:00 pm, and begins to brighten again before 5:00, I had opportunity to enjoy the view.

The 48 hours of travel made our whole tour group of hikers ridiculously excited to take pictures of everything that first day, but the amazing sights had barely begun. Despite my shamefully bad photography skills and total lack of patience to do much photo editing, I have a few photos I feel capture the wonders of Torres del Paine:

One of our first overlooks of the national park and Paine Grande, the highest summit in the park at 2,884 m (~9,400 ft).

Our group, ready for our first trek — 10 of us (all American) plus our two wonderful guides (not pictured), Cata and Mono.

First view of the Cuernos del Paine (the “horns”). The two-toned rock is created by the contrast between sedimentary (top) and granite (middle) rock (all of this our knowledgeable guide Catalina told us at the time, but as it went in one ear and out the other, I had to look it up on the Internet after the fact).

After hiking 10 km through the French Valley, we got a view of the horns from the other side.

Day 2: Hike up to the Gray Glacier, and our first glimpse of icebergs, floating in Lago Grey. The color still astonishes me, looking at them now in this photo. The ice of both the glaciers and the icebergs really is this blue.

View of Gray Glacier from high upon a lookout. You can see better its extent from this view, but we were going to get much, much closer.

Much closer: by boat! After an 11-km hike to a crag of rock by the edge of the lake, we were taken by very small boat out to a slightly less small boat, that brought us right up to the glacier.

Unbelievable color. I took about 20 photos trying to capture the size and the color. One key thing missing, though, is the sound — the ice cracks and shifts and pieces fall into the lake, but of course the sound reaches our ears after the process has already started, so we look to see where it is coming from, and the ice is already reaching the water. I tried and tried to catch a video of it but largely gave up so that I could enjoy the experience for real and not behind the camera screen.

Day 3: Hike up to the base of the “Towers” (not yet visible from this angle), a 22-km day. We were treated to the most glorious weather for the entirety of our hike, which we were assured by our guides is a near-miracle in the park. We credit it all to the fact that it was our guide Mono’s 30th birthday!! Sadly for him, there was significant uphill, on which I am notoriously slow. Cata had the lead, so Mono was “sweep,” which meant much time spent with me. The fact that I occasionally looked back to see him weightlifting with a couple of large rocks to increase his workout was not completely demoralizing. Oh no. That made me feel great!

I love this view. There is something about a babbling brook through a mountain pass that simply takes my breath away, every time.

“Vamos equipo!” was our encouraging cheer as Susan and I brought up the rear with Mono (Go Team!). We had to get a photo of Equipo Mono (“Mono” is his nickname, meaning “Monkey”; when I told this story to Anna, whose Spanish is good enough to know the meaning, she said, with perfect teenage sneer, “You were the Monkey Team?”)

Did I mention the mango sours served up top?

The part of Day 3 that I might like to forget, though, is that by the time I had reached this summit, with 11 km left to get back down, my right knee had begun to ache. Lifting it felt like gravity was pulling my knee apart, and I finally decided I had strained some tendons from three days of intense hiking (and I have done 3+ days of intense hiking before, with 40 pounds on my back, so I was not happy that my body was failing me this day). The result was a very, very slow descent, during which Mono stuck by me (poor lad). Once the ibuprofen kicked in enough, though, I forced him into the role of Spanish teacher. We arrived back at EcoCamp in time for Pisco Sours and a glorious full moon rise over the domes. None of my photos capture it, but it was truly magnificent, and a perfect end to my stay at EcoCamp.

And thus concluded Part I of my journey. I parted ways with both Americans and Chileans with sadness and many email addresses.

Part II began in Puerto Natales, where I checked into a small hostel, preparing to meet my cruise ship the next day. My arrival in Puerto Natales coincided with the first Wi-Fi of the trip as well as with Thanksgiving Day back home, so I was happy to be able to text and email and find out about Alex’s first trip home since leaving for college. After that, I promptly took a 2-hour nap, woke up for dinner, showered, and then slept for another 10 hours. I didn’t need to be at the ship until 4:00 in the afternoon, so I explored Puerto Natales and did some souvenir shopping. And then, Part II truly began.

It would be hard to overemphasize how excited I was to check into my little room, on the bottom-most deck of the ship (below the water line, no windows). I had my own bathroom! My own bathroom!!! For the first time in a week. With a hair dryer! That glorious, wonderful, modern amenity: the hair dryer.

This was the first time I have ever been on a “cruise,” and I absolutely loved it. I might have loved it more if there had been more people aboard under the age of 60, but there were some young Chileans who spoke English and allowed me to join them for drinks and games of chess and movies in the shipboard lounge.

And of course, I joined them for toasting to our incredible trip aboard a small icebreaker for a 2-hour excursion through Fiordo Calvo, during which we saw dolphins, crushed through large icebergs, and caught glimpses of nesting cormorants.

Ice. A lot of ice in the Southern Patagonia Icefield.

The “W” is the famous trek in Torres del Paine, named for the shape of the trail. If you are really ambitious, you hike the full “circuit,” which is the W plus the loop all the way around (shown here in green). My roommate who arrived at EcoCamp for my last two nights had been doing the full circuit. As you can see, we barely did part of the W — but they were the best parts, I’m told.

One of the many pictures I snapped from the plane. So amazing to see it all from this angle. The tongues of the glaciers are reaching into the archipelago and carving out the fjords, so much like where I had just been.

And a short (and amateurish) video edited down to the only (and not very) passable segments, but it does include an avalanche, a dolphin, and glacial ice falling into the sea.