The ¨ W ¨

It´s been a while since I last posted. I´ve been busy. I have been traveling around Southern Patagonia for the last two weeks. It is an amazing place. And now I am back where I started, in a town called Punta Arenas waiting to catch my flight up to Lima.

About two weeks ago I was in this same Internet cafe waiting for my friend from Spanish school, Christina to meet up with me in my hostel so we could do a 5 day hike in the Torres del Paine National Park together. She never turned up. I waited and waited and finally I got an email from her sister saying she was in the hospital in Santiago because she fell off a horse and slipped a disk in her back. And obviously she wasn´t coming down to meet me. That was the last and only thing I heard about her before I left for hiking. I was really worried about her because I didn´t know anything about her condition or if she was ok, but it turns out she is fine and back to traveling. This meant I had to find a new hiking partner and FAST or hike alone (which I didn´t have a problem doing but it´s cheaper and lighter to split the equipment.) So I went to the jump off town for hiking - Puerto Natales to rent gear, buy last minute supplies and find someone to hike with. Luckily I ran into this woman named Susie from San Fan that was also looking for a partner. We decided to hike together and got all of our things ready to head out the next day.

After all the gear was rented and the bags were packed we got up at 6:30am to catch the bus to the park. We had amazing weather that first day. It was 25 degrees C and Sunny. This is a park notorious for bad weather and instant weather changes. But the whole day was warm and sunny. It was hard hiking- harder than I expected, and it was the first real exercise I have had since I´ve been in South America. But luckily I got into the swing of things quickly. Also on the first day we picked up a lone hiker named Emma from Ireland. She wanted some company since she wasn´t comfortable hiking alone. I soon learned that Susie loved to talk A LOT but was a really nice person. So she kept us entertained with stories about her life in San Fran for the rest of the week. The first couple days were hiking to and around the Glacier Grey. An impressively blue and low hanging glacier that reached out into a lake and occasionally spit out icebergs.

The next day we hiked to a valley called the French Valley (valle de fraces) which was a bowl in the mountains surrounded by beautiful peaks. This day we added on four more people to our rag-tag gang of hikers. Susie knew a couple from the States that ended up hiking the ¨w¨at the same time as us, and they knew a couple hiking at the same time too. They were all very sweet people and my solo hike was turning into a group adventure.

The second to last day was the longest where we hiked to the actual torres de paine (the blue towers). They are an interesting rock formation caused by glacial activity. We spent the night at a camp about an hour hike away from the base of the torres. It poured rain all night and we woke up in a big puddle. But the rain stopped around 5am- in time to get up, hike to the torres in the dark and see the sunrise from the top. Wow, it was amazing, but VERY cold. It had rained at our camp, but it had snowed everywhere higher up. So it was snow dusted and the torres were obscured by snow clouds. But we were prepared and brought up sleeping bags and hot chocolate.

Finally after seeing the sunrise, we returned to camp and packed away the wet tent, but by this time it was snowing at lower elevation. So we quickly scurried out of the camp and hiked out of the park. The end of the hike is pretty awkward because you have been in the woods for 5 days without showering and the hike ends up at luxury hotel. So around 2pm (in time to catch the shuttle back to town) about 30 smelly dirty hikers end up at this fancy smancy hotel. Lucky they are used to it there and no one made any bad comments, but I felt very out of place and had no idea what to do with myself. I think most of the hikers felt this way because very few ventured inside for a drink or to use the bathroom. Mostly everyone hung out outside even though it was cold.

This was probablyone of the most beautiful places I have ever been in my life. Every turn seemed to unveil something new. I saw wild alpacas, emus, horses and lots of birds. I even saw my first iceberg. And what I thought would have been a solo trip into the woods turned out to be a very social trip. It´s amazing how things can change so quickly but something amazing comes out of it.

After the hike, I came back to town and took a long hot shower. Then I headed down to the self proclaimed ¨end of the world¨ Ushuaia, Argentina. But I´ll get into that later... Now I´m off to catch my plane.