Although there is pavement most of the way from El Calafate
to Puerto Natales we elected like most of the other cyclists we were in touch
with to take a bus. Our reason was that it was mostly out in the pampas and
likely to be windy and without much scenery. That turned out to be the case.
The bus we took down there had to slow down numerous times for the wind. The
bus was a very nice modern one like many tour buses in the area. They
decided to show a disturbingly violent American made prison movie
that was hard not to keep looking at. It was a good thing the bus was built to
be so quiet so we could appreciate all the grunting noises in the non stop fight
scenes. It is so comforting to
see American values being exported around the world. I googled the news last
night to read about this week's shooting rampage in the US, this time by a high
school student. The bus was the only bus we could find the next day out of El
Calafate and did not go quite to Puerto Natales but rather to Rio Turbio.
Rio Turbio it turns out was the polar opposite of El
Calafate. It is a booming coal mining town and as far as we could tell we were
the only tourists. We had to ask quite a few places where there was a
restaurant and we were on the main drag. Also we did not see a single hotel of
any sort. We ended up getting something to eat at the supermarket to go. We
were actually wanting to experience a non touristy Argentinian town so we got
our wish. The plan was to ride the twenty five or so kilometres from Rio Turbio
over to Puerto Natales before dark and maybe find some place to camp in
between. Just out of town there is a
long but not too difficult climb up to a ski area and the border crossing back
into Chile. The border crossing was uneventful and we sped down the other side.
At the bottom of the hill it started to spit rain and did not look so good to
the west closer to the ocean. Welcome back to Chilean Patagonia. The north
cross wind was blowing so hard all of a sudden at the bottom of the hill we had
a hard time staying on the bikes. After about fifteen minutes of this battle I
became concerned we might become seriously cold and stuck my thumb out as far
as it would go for the next vehicle. He
stopped! I was so thankful to be saved I picked up the fully loaded bikes
directly into the bed of the little pick up. One of these days I am going to
throw my back out. The driver said the wind was blowing a hundred kilometres an
hour but it was unusual. He was commuting to his job at a pizza parlour. I kept
looking back expecting to see the bikes blow out of the bed of the truck on to
the highway. Riding in windy conditions on a not so sleek fully loaded touring
bike is harder than just going up a steady grade. It is like you have some guy
who weighs a lot more than you do grabbing the back of your bike off and on.
This puts you in about as good of a mood as if someone actually was doing that.The guy took us into Natales where there was no wind! The local variation in weather in southern Patagonia has to be experienced to be believed and there is not necessarily any consistency to it either. We immediately liked Puerto Natales better than El Calafate. It is touristy being the gateway to Torres del Paine but nothing like El Calafate. At least half the stores here are for non tourists and it is a port town.
Luckily we found one of the better hostels in the area right off the bat. After a little recon we decided to take one of the many buses up to Torres del Paine with a couple of rented backpacks from the hostel. This was a good call as well as much of the ride would have not been all that scenic and there was a fair amount of gravel plus lots of big buses. We started out doing one of the main treks that people do called the W for the pattern of the trails in and out of some valleys. This is no seldom visited trail that is the domain of only seasoned adventurers. On the first day of this hike up to the Torres or towers we must have seen three hundred day hikers or backpackers. The majority of the backpackers looked like total beginners based on their bulging packs with lots of items dangling off here and there. Most of the beginner backpackers were young so they will probably figure out better ways to do it with more experience. We encountered this before on the West Coast trail in Canada and wonder how much of it has to do with hostels that rent gear to anyone with the cash. We remember an oriental guy who owned only flip flops reading about it on the bulletin board and thinking it sounded like a good idea. The guy at the front desk had to convince him he needed better footware. They evacuate about a hundred people a year there. Here probably many young backpackers thought that having all the other foreign backpackers to party with in the kitchen areas was a really cool deal. Laurie commented more than once on the number of good looking adventurous single women from around the world in the Hostels here. Young guys in America need to ignore all the media fear about world travel other than Europe and come on down! It is so dangerous here most of those women are hitch hiking around.
There are more Americans here than anyplace we have encountered in Patagonia so far but still they are way outnumbered by Europeans and Australians. German speaking people again get the prize for the most well represented. Not bad considering Germany is about the size of Montana. Laurie learned that the Germans are all required to take several languages in school and speculated this may have something to do with the travel bug. Most of the Germans seemed to be better equipped for back packing as well. Interestingly many of the Americans were foreign exchange students in Santiago on summer break mostly from Universities in California. In one twelve person train of day hikers being led by a guide, an overweight American guy, who looked like he was going to have a heart attack any second was explaining to a perplexed looking Australian guy how all government workers do nothing all day and are a drain on the economy. Laurie wanted to ask him what he was going to do without Medicare down here if he had a stroke.
The other thing we saw a lot of was love bird couples that made you think that being lovey dovey was the standard for international backpackers. Well Laurie did a little survey and was three for three for couples that were on their honeymoons. So after that we did not feel so dysfunctional for not passionately French kissing at some breath-taking view point we just spent four hours hiking too. The newlyweds came up for air occasionally too. Nothing like massive rock towers to get the romantic juices flowing. Laurie and I are just thankful that after nearly two months of traveling and sleeping in a small tent that we are still talking although I am sure Laurie wishes I would stop talking especially on some of the more frequent themes.
Torres del Paine being a national park is heavily regulated although surprisingly they do not limit the numbers of hikers and backpackers. They do require you to stay at certain campgrounds which because they are limited pretty much determines your itinerary depending on weather you do the W or the circuit tour. Because of that you end up seeing a lot of the same people every day. Even though we must have seen a thousand people in four days amazingly the park was not too trashed. Forget about solitude unless you manage to get a climbing permit. I could see that there were some good routes that could be had from valley to valley passing by some of the more impressive towers but that would not be permitted. Those sorts of restrictions common to many national parks are not real conducive to the kind of back country exploration I prefer to do so I have to suppress the frustration. The climbing permits from what we could gather were hard to come by. We had extremely good weather both in El Chalten and Torres del Paine when hiking but only saw one couple coming out with climbing gear. I kept scanning the areas shown on the maps with climbing icons but never saw any climbers.
After seeing many magnifico places in Patagonia further north it got me to wondering why Mount Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine are about a bazillion times more popular than the rest of Patagonia. About all i could think of is that in addition to having granite towers and glacier covered mountains in close proximity is that they are also famous climbing destinations in lots of pictures and movies. But just because a mountain does not have grade A rock for climbing doesn't mean other mountains are not scenic. The vast majority of the tourists here are not doing any climbing. The human propensity to do what is popular always amazes and scares me. You never know when you are going to go for walk downtown one day and everyone is going to be wearing polka dots or swastikas. But here i am down here doing the W hike in polka dots so I was influenced just the same.
Most of the Torres del Paine hiking routes could be done by staying at refugios next to the campgrounds if you made reservations well in advance. They served meals as well but that route would run around two hundred a day per person. The refugios sold a few things to people who weren’t staying there. All of them even the private ones stocked five things canned potato chips, Oreo type cookies, chocolate bars, wine and hard liquor in bottles. Curiously things like power bars are pretty uncommon even in the more sporty places like Puerto Natales and El Chalten. There are a couple of shops in Puerto Natales that did have large selections of dried fruit at reasonable prices including my new favorite dried Kiwi. The fruit and vegetable store we like in Puerto Natales also stocks hard liquor but not much else. You have to be in the right mood for chopping vegetables with a sharp knife.
Ironically for all the tramping around we did inside the park the best views were on the ferry boat back and on the bus a couple of miles after being dropped off from the ferry but the bus did not stop for that.
Not that we had a lot
of goals to start with but now that we have ridden the Carratera Austral, seen
Monte Fitz Roy and the towers of Torres del Paine we are not sure what to do
next. There are some other really cool looking glaciated mountains to the west but my map doesn't show any trails. Maybe I need a more detailed map. We are told the penguins outside of Punta Arenas are a must see but we
are thinking the climate penguins like would be even colder than here so we are
having some reservations about continuing further south. Touching the South
Pole is not on our bucket lists. Today we are looking into a bus ride back to
the Lake District on the Argentina side or possibly a flight to Buenes Aires to
tour the coast of Uruguay. We road past Futaleufu on the way down and we haven’t
been to the El Bolson area which are on our to do list.
We miss the adventure of the Carratera Austral and the camaraderie of fellow cyclists we met sharing the adventure. Maybe if there were only a handful backpackers in Torres del Paine it would feel the same instead of just being one of thousands.
Here are some more pics
