That's right, the southernmost part of the world. This weekend I was about as far south as you could get without going to Antartica, however I was very tempted to hop on a plane or boat to go there! When I think about this past weekend, all I can say is "wow." Never in a million years would I have thought that I would've ever had such an experience in my lifetime, and I am so glad that I had this opportunity.
We arrived in Patagonia in the city of Punto Arenas by air early Thursday morning, about three AM. At that time, no buses were running leaving us with no hope of getting out of the three-terminal airport to travel to our destination city of the day, Puerto Natales. We got off our plane and left the "secured" part of the terminal and made ourselves comfortable to take the following four hours to wait for the rest of our group arriving in a later plane, sleep, and figure out what bus we needed to catch to take us to our next stop.
[One thing of note that I have learned about national flights through this past weekend is that security really isn't all that tight in these airports, or as tight as we expect it to be based on experiences from the United States. We all got through security with our bottles of water that we brought with for the flight on the way out, and on the way back Mia managed to get three boxes of matches and other "banned" items such as gel through the security check. Thankfully the likely-hood of something bad happening is very slim.]
The bus ride from Punto Arenas to Puerto Natales gave us a taste of how beautiful and amazing our trip was going to be. It's difficult for me to describe, so I'll be posting pictures to show what I wish I were able to convey in words. The wind in Patagonia tends to be super strong, so much that most of the trees in the region are formed in a windblown state that is kind of lopsided. With that in mind, Patagonia can be really cold but a lot of it is a mix of the wind and the cool temperature of being at the end of the world. When we arrived in Puerto Natales, the bus took us along the shoreline of the port and it took my breath away. We made sure that we found our way down to the shore while roaming the city, and we pretty much fell in love. Mostly we spent the day relaxing and planning our camping trip in Torres del Paine over the following days. After packing our backpacks, we tried to make it as early of a night as possible since we had to wake up early the next morning for another three-hour bus ride to the park.
We woke up bright and early Friday morning to eat a quick breakfast and caught our bus that would take us to our starting point of our camping weekend, and the biggest adventure of my life. Once we made it through the entrance to the park and paid our entrance fees, the bus brought us to Lake Pehoé where we would catch a catamaran for a thirty minute ride across the lake to the site where we would be setting up camp for two nights. We got to the lake early enough where we had some time to take a short hike up to a waterfall that "emptied" water from Lake Nordenskjold to Lake Pehoé and decided to continue our hike a little bit further than the waterfall to see more of the park. Two of the girls stayed back and returned to the boat launch and boarded the catamaran waiting for us to return near 12:30 for our shuttle to the other side of the lake. Little did we know that we misinterpreted the sign until we returned to the boat launch at 12:10 to find the Catamaran, and our two friends, gone. Apparantly the catamaran leaves the other boat launch at 12:30 and it left the one we were at, at noon. Our visit to Patagonia was two weeks before tourist season started, so that was the ONLY chance we had to take the shuttle across the lake, unless we wanted to pay five-hundred dollars for a charter. Nuh-uh. So our only other option? A five hour, seventeen-and-a-half kilometer hike (almost eleven miles). With our roughly twenty pound backpacks loaded with our tents, sleeping bags, food and other camping and hiking gear. Obviously a huge change of events for us, but thankfully the four of us girls kept our spirits up and took it as everything happens for a reason. The hike turned out to be wonderful, and we made it to our campground just over an hour before sundown allowing us to set up camp in the daylight. We were also fortunate that Courtnie and Stephanie, the two girls who managed to make it to the catamaran on time, had spent their time waiting for us talking to the workers of the lodge (in which we were not allowed to enter because we were lowly campers...). I say this, because as we were preparing to set up our campsite and make dinner, one of the workers there offered to cook our food for us, to which we gratefully accepted. Not only did this man risk getting in trouble for cooking our food for us, he also threw in some additional ingredients to our spaghetti, he gave us some bread and orange juice as well, and invited us to a "party" with all of the workers. Most of us declined, opting to jump into our sleeping bags and pass out, but some of the girls took the opportunity to meet some new people.
Saturday morning we slept in a little bit, opting to recuperate from our change of events the day before, but once we woke up we got ourselves fed and ready to hike a trail that led to Glacier Grey. This hike being an eleven kilometer hike one way, twenty-two kilometers round trip and about seven hours if you don't dilly dally... Which we did... But not too horribly. It only turned out to be, ohhhh lets say, nine, ten hours? Anyway, it was so worth it. I still can't find the words to explain the vastness of my feelings about the experience. You can see pictures of a glacier and be like, yea, cool, gigantically huge chunk of ice. But seriously, in person, it's like the dawning of a new day. It was massive, amazing, gorgeous and indescribable - and the hike wasn't all that bad either. Beautiful in and of itself in it's own way, at a much, much smaller scale.
I'll say that we spent a lot of time hiking during the first leg, so much so that we had to really truck it to make back before sundown and before the store at the campsite closed since we ate all of the pasta we had bought the night before. Poor planning? Not really, we were just very hungry the night before after our impromptu hike. I literally stopped maybe once, at most twice an hour during three or so hour hike back. We again made it back just about an hour before sunset with enough time to get to the small store and buy the supplies we needed for dinner that night. The rest of the night there really isn't much to tell, we were all pooped again and just worried about eating, showering and making it to bed. One thing that we were all surprised about was how comfortably we slept those two nights at the campground and how warm we stayed despite the typical cold during the day and at night in Patagonia. We were really warm and toasty in our tents to the extent that we were able to sleep in a t-shirt and pants and we probably would have been fine in shorts as well. We have the amazing sleeping bags we rented from our hostel for that.
In the morning we woke up to pack up camp to catch the 12:30 catamaran back to where our bus would pick us up, and yes, this time we made sure that we were going to be catching that boat. Otherwise we would have been stranded at the park another day, which was in no way going along with our plans to see the penguins before we left on Monday. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, we caught our buses to get us to Punto Arenas where we would be flying out of and where we would be seeing the penguins early the next morning. Let me tell you, the penguins were ADORABLE, and super fun and interesting to watch in their natural habitat. When we were there they were basically working on courting and mating as they had just reached Punto Arenas earlier in September for the breeding cycle of the year. I have a few videos of them that I'll share. Later though, because this post is getting super long, but only because this last weekend was amazing and made me realize how lucky I am to have this opportunity to study this semester here in Chile. This weekend I'll be heading to Pucon (southern Chile again) with my program, so hopefully I'll have some interesting things to say about that when I return. :)
