Mexico, Central & South America > Chile > Patagonia > Torres del Paine National Park > Landscape > Articles > Down Around Chile's Ankles

Patagonia’s a bit of a long way to go for a walk. In fact I’d guess that most British trekkers think of Patagonia, when it troubles their minds at all, as a handy metaphor for off-this-planet, never-coming-back remoteness. Which is understandable because, though it may have all the history, myth and geographical furniture of a stand-alone country, ‘Patagonia’ is no more than an imprecise label for those chunks of Chile and Argentina lying south of the 42° line of latitude. Patagonia seems, and perhaps is, more of a concept - a sort of Timbuktu with rain - rather than an actual place one might think of flying into for a few weeks of pleasant strolling around.

Yet a surprisingly large number of British travellers, intent on plying their Vibram soles, do head to Chilean Patagonia. Or, more specifically, they over-fly the dull stuff - the immense, flat grasslands with all the allure of Belgium-sized pieces of sisal matting, and the million hectares of the Southern Ice Field forming the biggest slab of badly defrosted natural fridge outside the Poles - and touch down far to the south for a bracing yomp around the Torres del Paine National Park. And it’s a smart move.

Because, quite simply, if Patagonia in general is everything below South America’s knees, then the Torres hangs around the sub-continent’s very shapely ankle, in a chain of jewel-like peaks, glittering glaciers and sapphire lakes. The park arguably packs more gob-smacking, brutally impressive scenery into its 2,400 square kilometers than any other comparable area in the world. It’s as if God had scrunched the best bits of Alaska, Norway and Iceland into an area small enough to walk the highlights of in a fortnight. Though with enough wonders to keep one busy, even as a full time gob-smackee, for a month. Or a year. Or a decade.

The Torres landscape is spectacular. Twenty and more peaks soar above the 2,000-meter mark, cathedraling up from dead flat plains or springing out of their own reflections in the silvered lakes. Glaciers squeezing out like fresh-mint toothpaste between the molars and incisors of the massifs’ jaws. Torrenting rivers freighting icebergs down to the sea. There are deeply gouged valleys, tangled forests of southern beech, wide grasslands. And always the mountains. The names tell you plenty about their shapes and sizes. Los Torres, Los Cuernos and Los Cumbres. The ‘towers,’ the ‘horns’ and, the ‘hills,’ which ironically – do the Chileans do ironic? - includes the highest peak of them all, the 3,050 meter Cumbre Principal.

And then there’s the wildlife. Regular condor fly-bys. Herds of doe-eyed and ballerina-limbed guanaco. Two flavours of fox. Gooseberry-green Austral parakeets. Shrimp-pink Chilean flamingoes wading the edge of jade enameled lakes, before turning into rippling, Day-Glo-scarlet slashes as they take flight. Ñandu –ostrich-like and barely smaller– stalking around the pampas with the aggressively, bored concentration of traffic wardens. And you probably have as much chance of seeing a puma, here in the Torres, as anywhere in the world.

Make the long journey down to the Torres once and you risk becoming Patagonian-ised. It’s happened to me; two trips so far, and both times only the winter snows drove me out. Some people I met returned year after year. Others had just given in, started businesses and stayed down there through every summer. Alec Quevedo and Lian Hayes, the American/Ecuadorian and English founders of Blue Green Adventures, first came to the Torres a decade ago. Since then they’ve been leading trips in and around the park, using horses and kayaks, as well as walking, to take the intrepid - and plenty of the wisely trepid as well - to those areas most other people never reached.

Alec was evangelical about travellers – not just his clients - getting the most out of the park. “It’s crazy to come all this way and then just walk on the two or three most popular trails with everybody else,” he told me, “yeah, of course they’re good treks, that’s why they’re so popular, but there’s so much else to do. It makes sense to go further – to get out to the working estancias on a horse, paddle one of the rivers, and do the walking as well.”

A horse is the key to getting off the well-trodden trails in the Torres. Luckily, Patagonia has good horses. The four-leg-drive local Criollo model can gallop for kilometer after kilometer, scramble up rock faces, and swim rivers dodging the icebergs as it goes. They don’t need fancy riding skills, and their saddles are draped in sheepskins for Pullman seat comfort. Horses are what the locals use for getting around on, as well as for herding sheep on the estancias, and packing supplies to the park’s refugios, ranger stations and scientific camps.

The Patagonian cowboys – baqueanos – are horse-opera heroes, trousered in voluminous bombachos, booted and spurred, hung about with shawls and knives and lassos. They’re good guys to ride with; tough, fun and knowledgeable about their land and its wildlife. Though their favoured headgear is the Benny Hill beret – about the only hat that can resist Patagonia’s scouring gales and storms.

The south of Patagonia can produce more ‘weather’ in a day than most other landscapes manage to scrape together in a year. Sun, snow, rain and wind. The lot. Especially wind. “I came over the pass and my contact lens blew right out of my eye,” one English walker complained to me, when I met him on a, by local standards, moderately blustery day. “But,” he cheerily added, “I found it stuck to a rock, twenty foot away – luckily it was glittering in the sun.” I must have met ten people who’d been knocked off their feet by blasts of katabatic wind. One woman claimed her horse had been blown over as well. Weather stories in Patagonia are like drinking stories in Ireland – the currency of traveller’s conversation. Most don’t even need much exaggeration.

For the first three days of a nine-day ride around the national park cold rain fell solidly. If I’d breathed too heavily, I’d have drowned. Still, a bunch of us were sitting on top of sopping wet horses to get to the glacier at Pingo Lake. The night before we’d ridden up through the southern beech forests, camped out at the clapboard hut at Zapata, and cooked up a pot of stew. Shirts and socks dried around the stove. The world and our lives were washed in the sepia tones of a 19th century Daguerreotype of early cowboy pioneers. Finally reaching the lake, we broke off chunks of two thousand year old ice to put in our shots of whiskey. “One time we came up here, in a warm spell and the only icebergs for the drinks’ ice were way off shore,” Alec told us, “One of the baqueanos unhitched his lazo, threw a loop and roped an iceberg into land just like he’d catch a cow.” As he talked the rain was watering down our whiskies nicely.

By the afternoon, though, the sun had come out, waterproofs were tied behind our saddles, and we set off on a long rolling gallop across the lowland pampas. The peaks of the Paine Grande made up the northern horizon, its jagged serrations ripping into a tight-guyed flysheet of luminous blue sky. Don, a Vietnam veteran who’d barely ridden before the trip, was out on the flank, smile ripped across his face, his camera tripod hitched across his back like a bazooka. Hares and snipe exploded from under our horses’ hooves like fur ‘n’ feather landmines. The hot, sweet smell of sun drying the last drops of rain from the grass filled the air. Don, and Holly, Janet, Marcia and the rest of us were hootingly, intoxicatedly happy as our horses rocked and thudded under us. When we finally pulled to a halt, Holly was the first to speak – or more gasp; “Ooooh! Man!” She was definitely gasping; “Oh, i have just cantered my brains out.” Walking a rucksack over a similar distance might have been fun. Even a lot of fun. But, really, not that much fun.

But most people do come down to the park to walk. And they do tend to trek one of the two most popular trails, the roughly 8-day ‘ big circuit,’ or the 5-days or so up and down the ‘W.’ Both are rewarding and challenging routes to follow as they wind tightly around the mountains’ flanks. From them you’ll smell the granite and see the wind - la escoba de Dios, the ‘broom of God’ – whipping the snow off the summits in swirling contrails. You’ll hear the rolling ‘THRUMMPPS’ of avalanches falling from the cornices high above the valleys. And you’ll definitely see condor turning slow cartwheels through the sky.

Take those trails, though, and you’ll also, in all but the low season, meet plenty of other people seeing and hearing the same things. Some 60,000 visitors a year get down this far, and though plenty just take a tour bus on one of the few dirt roads into the park to look at Grey Lake and its icebergs, plenty more are out there camping or staying in the refugios and footing it across the landscape. I headed off to join them, on a stroll up and down a couple of the ‘W’s legs in early April.

Winter was getting close. I’d waxed my boots, and bought some dried fruit and a bottle of pisco 40° proof spirits in Puerto Natales. I had a bivvy-bag and inadequate waterproofs, and technically, according to park rules, shouldn’t have been walking alone. But, seemingly, I was still better prepared than many. In my first hours of walking from the Torres campsite towards the Cuernos refugio, I ran into a quartet who I’d last seen in Natales’ only Karaoke bar. They’d already had an adventure. On their first night in the park they’d got lost in the dark on a tree-covered hillside. Kerry, the English quarter of the foursome, described their self-rescue technique; “We couldn’t see a thing, so we wrapped Stefan’s shirt round a stick and set fire to it, and then his tee-shirt, then another shirt.” All available clothing burnt, they next fired off the red-eye reduction flashes on their cameras, running forwards into the brief nano-seconds of strobing light.

Finally, batteries dead, they navigated by the stars. “We found Castor and Pollux, the heavenly twins…,” Kerry explained. Stefan added, “….yes, and they pointed right at the camp.” I missed the smart science in their take on astronomy. But, still, they were alive and seemed to have displayed a fair amount of initiative in the face of mere bad luck. Or so I thought, until one of them spotted my map. “Oh, gosh, can we have a look at that,” there was a sheepish grin, “ uh, ‘cos we haven’t actually got one and we don’t really know where we are.”

In the Cuernos refugio that evening there were hunks of boiled mutton for dinner. A five-stringed guitar. Mugs of wine. Forty campers and hostellers. And forty more stories. Stories of lost trails. Blisters. Sprained ankles. River crossings. Temperature drops. Rain. Hunger. Most were the stories of those who, on a whim, had hired kit in Natales, jumped on a bus and found themselves on an unplanned walk, and dependent on their own feet and common sense for the first time. It was the paradox of the ‘signposted wilderness.’ The next morning I walked onto Pehoe.

Early one morning, just few days after finishing the walk, I pulled on a nylon blouse, a rubber skirt and some, frankly, fetishistic mittens. I gave a little twirl. “How do I look in this?” I asked Pamela and Chris, a Scottish couple who were in Patagonia for a fortnight of riding, walking and kayaking. They were pulling themselves into the masochistic-bondage outfits of the next-stop-Antarctica ice paddler. The day before, we, Alec, and Fransisco the river guide had ridden a conveyor-belt of zinc grey river current for 50-kilometers down the Rio Serrano.

Now after a camp breakfast we were ready to launch the two double sea-kayaks onto the waters below the snout of the Serrano Glacier. Blocks of ice bobbed around the kayaks as we paddled towards the ice wall. A thick fog hung between the dark cliffs above us, hiding the bulk of the glacier from view. But there was the occasional muffled and soft sounding CRUUUUMMMP of an avalanche from high up in the cold heavens, as we threaded ourselves between the towering white and neon-blue blocks of ice. Strands of mist curled off the water’s surface. Dipping my blade in and pushing us onwards i felt like the ferryman chap who rows the dead across the river Styx. Except the afterlife was proving to be much colder than I’d imagined it might be. Oh, and much, much more beautiful and haunting.

Maybe Patagonia is a long way to go for a bit of a walk, but add in some ‘paddle and saddle’ time and doesn’t it suddenly seem a lot closer. Because where else can you walk one of the planet’s great long distance trails, play at being a cowboy, and kayak amongst icebergs? Do all three in the one trip and you’ve got a bargain. And the weather – that’s the family-sized, party-mix pack of weather – you get for free.

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