Torres Del Paine & The Epic Road Trip

“Are you doing the W trek?

“Which hikes are you planning?”

“Where are you camping?”

These are some of the embarrassing questions various hitchhikers asked me, as I casually went for a drive around the Torres Del Paine national park, home to one of the world’s most famous hiking trails.

In place of a rain-soaked backpack and battered trekking poles, I had a giant bag of salt and vinegar crisps and stiff legs from cramming my 6 foot 4 body into a hairdresser’s rental car.

If you choose to see the park as I did, you’ll probably feel a bit left out as hikers and climbers share stories in the numerous cheap campsites and hostels. And your environmental conscience will feel as dirty as the hiking boots on everyone’s feet but yours.

On the plus side, however, you’ll be a lot warmer and drier, eat more crisps and get home to a hot shower sooner.

So this is my story of the alternative, albeit slightly lazy, way to see the 8^th wonder of the world.

Oh, and a road trip that turned out to be a bit longer than planned.

Torres Del Paine

Somewhat embarrassingly, I didn’t know Torres Del Paine existed until a week ago. Neither did I know that the National Geographic voted it in the 5^th most beautiful place in the world, and readers of a travel magazine informally voted it the 8^th wonder of the world.

Situated in Chilean Patagonia, the park is perhaps most famous for the 3 majestic granite peaks, with their impossibly steep faces towering proudly over the park. They’re a colossally humbling reminder that you’re a small being in a very big world.

And when the weather takes a turn for the worse – which it will – they also kind of make you feel like Bilbo Baggins walking into Mordor. Which makes you feel even smaller.

As much as the spires are the centerpiece, the staggering beauty of the park extends well beyond this picture-postcard scene though.

It encompasses a bewildering range of snow-capped mountains, glaciers, lakes and valleys, all teeming with wildlife and fauna that creates such an utterly spell-binding setting, your camera will remain as glued to your hand as Bilbo’s ring.

The best thing about Punta Arenas is…

In my previous article, I wrote about some of the best things to do when visiting Punta Arenas. I apologise if you’re from there, but probably the number 1 thing really is to leave town and drive 400km north to Torres Del Paine.

I didn’t have months to plan the famous 5 to 9 day hikes around the towering mountain peaks, nor did I have the time right now. I also wasn’t keen on spending a fortune on hiking gear that I’d only use for a few days before heading north to warmer climates.

I thought about doing a bus tour – by far the most common way to go about visiting if you’re not doing a serious hiking trip. But the itinerary sounded horrible – get up at 5am, drive 4 hours there, spend a few hours being hurried around the park, then drive 4 hours all the way back. No thanks.

So instead, I decided to rent a car and drive there and back in 3 days. The girl in the car rental place told me it was a long drive, but possible.

She also told me I’d need a map and some advice about which points to drive slowly because the wind is so fierce it sometimes tips cars on their side. Hmmm…that sounded like a recipe for crushed crisps. And I don’t like crushed crisps.

One map and some hastily drawn warning symbols along the more dangerous roads later, and the spur of the moment road trip was on.

Puerto Natales

It’s a 280km drive from Punta Arenas to the closest town to Torres Del Paine – Puerto Natales. I was expecting amazing scenery, being Patagonia, but it’s actually just totally flat nothingness for 3 hours. Sure, the bright yellow grass and occasional flamingo are very pretty, but it soon gets boring.

Puerto Natales, however, is a lovely town. Situated right on a lake, with its own snow-capped mountains and waterfront coffee shops, and it’s a nice place to base yourself for a night or two.

The hitchhikers

There are 2 entrances to the park, with the north entrance being considerably further away. My plan was to enter through the south entrance and drive north, but I picked up 2 Argentinian hitchhikers who “accidentally” gave me directions to the entrance closest to Argentina.

During the 2 days I spent in the park, I saw relatively few vehicles. I later learned that they encourage ecological travel (oops) and so bus tours are more common.

Though it’s also probably because it’s in the middle of nowhere, and not many people fancy battering the crap out of their cars, driving for hours on dirt tracks riddled with stones, boulders and cluster bomb-sized potholes.

Either way, it seems that empty car seats are gold dust in the park and I picked up no less than eleven hitchhikers of various nationalities in the two days.

Lost, abandoned by their tour, fed up of battling against the howling wind – they all had a story to tell and awkward questions to ask me about my lack of hiking plans.

Two had hardly eaten for the last 60km of their hike after packing too little and not finding anywhere in the park to buy more. There aren’t many coffee shops here…

I felt like a park employee, ferrying hikers / hitchhikers from one landmark to the next, drying their clothes with the heating on full blast and boosting their rations with my crisps.

Still, it helped me atone for my environmental sins.

The route through the park

So here’s the way it works. You drive forever to get to one of the two entrances. The signage is totally useless, so you might a bit get lost, anxious and tired.

Once you get to the park, you find a ranger’s outpost. You go the the toilet, pay an entrance fee and get a 3 day multiple entry pass. They give you a map and explain where to go, what to see and answer any questions. You feel less lost and a lot happier.

Then you basically have just one very long, terribly maintained, road to drive to the other entrance. At one or two points there’s the choice to go down another road to a different lake, but it’s basically one route to follow.

And  along the way you’ll find many points to stop to go for a walk, head off on hiking trails of varying length and difficulty, take photos and just soak it all up.

And it doesn’t take long before you realise that the park, without a shadow of doubt, deserves to be up there among the most beautiful places on the planet.

It’s utterly breathtaking.

Magical places

It’s hard to really describe the beauty of the park. I think I must have gotten out of the car to take photos 100 times on the first day. Everywhere you look is so beautiful, colorful and captivating, it’s as if it was somehow put together by magic.

Let’s see if a few photos can in some small way do it justice.

A visit to lake Grey

On the second day I decided to go all the way back to the park to visit the famous lake Grey, with the promise of seeing a glacier for the first time.

I’m not sure why it felt worth the effort, considering how exhausted I was after the first day’s epic drive; I guess it was just another of those things I just felt I had to do.

Things didn’t quite go according to plan, however. As is so often the case in this part of the world, the warm sunshine from the previously glorious day was long gone, replaced by a vicious car-tipping wind and at times sideways rain.

I also didn’t realise you have to book the boat trip across the lake to see the glacier up close at least a day in advance. So no glacier for me.

On the plus side, I did finally get round to some hiking. And even though it was just 3 hours up to the lookout point across the lake to see the glacier from a long way off, I still finally felt like I’d done what you’re supposed to do in the park.

And I treasured every second of that cold and rainy walk, a welcome respite from what turned out to be a very long road trip.

What a road trip

The first day was a marathon 9 hour drive. The second around 7. And the drive back on the morning of day 3 fortunately just 4.

I’d covered 1900 kilometers in 48 hours, torn the wheel trims to pieces and eaten a lot of crisps.

But most importantly, I was fortunate enough to spend a short while in one of the most stunning places in the whole of South America.

When people ask me which places I’d like to go back to, Torres Del Paine will definitely be on the list. But next time for a week and ready to wear holes in my hiking boots.