Torres del Paine

Hola!

We came back yesterday from our crazy 5 day hike in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. The trip was quite spectacular, I´d say. First of all, I´m having trouble uploading my pictures to the internet in the internet cafe where I am now, so I´ll try to stick a few in directly to the blog here and when the link of all of the pictures is ready, I´ll post that too. (In the meantime, the link for the pictures up until this hike is here)

Okay back to my description of the hike. So we hiked a trail known as the ¨W¨ because you hike up and down in the shape of a...W, I guess. We did the W backwards and tacked on an extra night (the typical W is 4 days and starts with the Torres on the first day but we saved it for last instead). In total we hiked 75 km, which is approximately 45 miles, I believe. We sweat a lot and my muscles ache, but I´m stronger now than I was before and I feel a grand sense of accomplishment.

The first day we went up to see Grey Glacier, which made us excited because the Israelis had never seen a glacier and it had been quite a few years since I had seen one either. We slept at a campsite that night and hiked back down the path the next day, to the campsite where we had started. The third day we hiked up Valle Franceis, but not all the way because it was cloudy and some people who came down told us that the view from the first viewpoint had as good visibility as the top viewpoint did, so we relaxed a bit and didn´t do the whole chunk of the trail. We stayed at another campsite that night, and on the fourth day hiked up the path to Torres del Paine. We slept at the bottom of the Torres and woke up before sunrise to hike up and catch a glimpse of the Torres at sunrise. It was a beautiful, cloud-free morning (in general we had the best weather we could have asked for), and we felt great as we said goodbye to the view and hiked out of the park. I promise that the pictures are worth it, once I can get them up.

Anyway, tomorrow we´re off to El Calafate, Argentina, to go see the Perito Moreno Glacier. I´ll write more about that one in my next post...