The whole day in Torres del Paine

4th of December

On the 1st of December we arrived in the early afternoon in Puerto Natales. A city with about 21.000 inhabitants. Our hotel was painted in a very special green colour. Many houses here in Chile and also in Argentina are colourful and most of them are very simple. Here we see again how luxurious we live in our part of Europe. Regarding the hotel, nothing was missing and it was clean but not really luxurious.

After having lunch, only with the two of us,  we walked along the seashore of the bay of Ultima Esperanza. Here you really got the feeling of summer. Across the bay you looked into the National Park Torres del Paine. In the evening we had dinner with the whole group and Per and I enjoyed a ravioli with king crab. This was a nice surprise. So far we were not really impressed about the food, but we were now clearly in a different country. 

At 7.45 A.M on the 2nd of December the bus was waiting for us to bring us to the National Park “Torres del Paine”. Again we had a beautiful and sunny day. For a start we had to drive the way back to the border with Argentina, at Cerro Castillo, before we turned onto the road to the park.

We entered the park from the Cerro Castillo side. Here we saw our first guanacos. During the day we saw a lot more of them. Sometimes they were really close by.

Our first stop was at Lago Sarmiento with a beautiful view on the mountains, but the tops were still in the clouds. Again the landscape gave you the feeling of being at high altitudes, but the highest point we reached was only about 500 metres above sea level. We enjoyed one beautiful scenery after the other. The pictures will tell it all.

The bus made a big loop in the park and we made two walks. One to the waterfall in the Rio Paine were we saw a whole herd of guanaco's and even a grey fox. We then came to the back side of the mountain range and here you could clearly see Los Cuernos ( the horns) which are typical for this park. After a packed lunch at Pehoe camping, a wonderful spot by the lake, the bus took us to a parking lot from where we walked to the Grey Glacier. To get there we had to cross a suspension bridge and then a moreno which looked more like gravel. The end of the moreno looked like a sandy beach going over in the glacier lake. At the far end of the lake was the wall from Grey glacier. Some of us made it to the other side where there was a beautiful view on the Grey glacier and some icebergs.

Being back at the bus it was time to return to Puerto Natales, which we did via a different route. The road was recently build by the army, since they are the only ones who are allowed to use explosives. Along this road you had a beautiful view on the Bay of Ultima Esperanza. 
The tour lasted all day. At 7.45 PM we returned to our hotel.

Per, Eugenie and I had the best dinner ever on this trip at Afrigonias. It was a mixture of African and Chilean cuisine. A salmon ceviche with mango and cocos, lamb with port and apricot sauce an the famous calafate ice cream.  Some good wines in addition. A delicious end of a fantastic day.