141sleeps: Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine. Some spectacular stuff.

From big city Santiago to small smaller smallest little frontier towns in Patagonia. Heading to the far south of Chile, we flew to Puerto Montt (small), flew on to Punta Arenas (smaller), then bus to Puerto Natales (smallest). Cute little tourist town that exists predominantly to serve the Torres del Paine national park, which is where we headed next, for a few days hiking (yes hiking, yes us).

Supposedly it's off-season almost everywhere we´ll be in Chile, which is crazy in one sense, as pretty much everything is still accessible and definitely spectacular in autumn and winter. In another way 'off-season' is a great idea as, while we're seeing hardly any other tourists, apparently in summer it's like Pitt St mall out there.

Anyways, for us off-season did mean that all but one of the refugios inside the park were shut, meaning that, if we didn't have the gear necessary to camp out in the snow, there was only hike we could do. This saved us the dilemma of having to decide whether we were up to the classic 'W' circuit, a spectacular but somewhat tough 5 day track :). But I'm sure we would have done it if we could :). Needless to say, scenery was amazing, weather and wildlife were amazing, and good times were had by all.