Day 44

Wednesday 15^th December 2010

Another early start but this is the last one for while, coming up we’ve got a free day tomorrow ( = lie in), a flight to Buenos Aires at a very reasonable 15:30 on Friday, a flight to Sydney at very sociable 13:05 on Saturday followed by eight days in Sydney with no plans, so we weren’t too perturbed by today’s early start (06:00).

I’d managed about four hours kip once “Fatboy Slim” had finished DJing so I didn’t really have much of an appetite, but I managed to stuff some toast down me as I was aware that first stop for food would be 11:00, not good for me, all that time without a meal.

Our transport arrived half an hour late, so my obvious first thought was …..

YOU BASTARDS, I COULD HAVE HAD ANOTHER 30 MINUTES SLEEP!!

I politely greeted our guide and settled in aboard the truck. The travelling time today comes in at a massive 10 hours round trip to Chile, plus all the travelling in-between sites at the national park once we arrive. I turned to my left to discuss today’s activities with Suz but she was already asleep, something she would manage a further 6 times today!

I got stuck into my new book (Lee Child’s “Gone Tomorrow”) and watched our driver clock up the kilometres – mostly it seemed in the wrong gear!

We arrived at the Chilean border at about 09:30 and from there it was another hour and a half to two hours to the National Park of Torres del Paine.

It was formed in 1959 and has been voted as one of the top 10 national parks in the world by the National Geographic Society.

The Paine Massif is a small mountain (not a local gang) system that formed some 12 million years ago, completely independently from the Andes, when magma penetrated through a crack in Magellan’s basin. With the passing of time sedimentary rock was pushed upwards. Part of the mountains are granite that has been carved out of the glaciers melting over millions of years and eroded by the harsh Patagonian weather so you get some quite odd shapes.

We stopped at the first viewing point to discover that the winds from the first day were back, and back with a massive axe to grind (maybe the wind had been kept awake by “Pete Tong” last night too). We could barely stand up it was so strong and the guide, bless him, was doing his best to describe what we were seeing, but the words were being stolen from his mouth by the wind and flown off across the lake!

 

The park itself is named after the 3 Torres (towers). They are so called because the granite is a bluish grey colour (Paine). They make up the iconic picture postcard shots of the park. This first stop should have given us our first sight of them. However, we weren’t destined to take these picture postcard shots as the clouds wouldn’t budge from the mountains – déjà vu of Machu Picchu at the sungate all over again! We could however, see the snow capped mountains in front of them including ‘the horns’.

We barely saw the towers all day – at one point the cloud lifted slightly to see the lowest one and half of the second but that was a good a glimpse as we got. However, the lakes were incredible, all sorts of shades of blue, from quite a milky turquoise to an almost navy blue, the turquoise one was due to the glaciers near by constantly rubbing against the quite soft rock and creating a power which turns the water milky turquoise, the further down stream you follow it, the more the sediment settles and therefore the clearer and darker blue it becomes.

These lakes are pretty unique and they are closed systems meaning they have an inlet but no outflow which should make them salty, but there not. Hmmmm? They have these weird unicellular type organisms that use the carbon dioxide in the water and release oxygen making calcium carbonate type masses in the process. Apparently this is how the whole world evolved millions and millions of years ago and there are only a couple of places in the world where they still exist.

The first stop was the Sarmiento de Gamboa Lake and the scenery was stunning. There were Condor flying over head (remember them from the blog back in Peru?) which was amazing to see in the wild, they very, very rarely flap there wings so they just sore overhead searching for grub, awesome! They are scavengers and only eat dead flesh – apparently they can’t hunt because they have feet like a chicken although much bigger and lack the ‘thumb’ claw – well that’s how our guide explained it!!!!

We also came across a pack?, heard?, bunch??? a load of guancos, which are part of the camel family. There are 4 members of the camel family in South America and now we’ve seen the guancos we’ve got the full house (others are llama, alpaca, vicuna). We got out of the truck (the guide told us it was too windy for explanations and stayed inside) and the guancos ran off, then they appeared to have a discussion, turned around and started walking back towards us, which was a bit scary.

Anyway two of them must have disagreed on what action to take and started having a fight, this seemed to take the onus off us tourists and we continued to take some snaps.

We had been forewarned that guancos will spit at you if they feel threatened (as they are part of the camel family after all). So if you don’t want to get covered in ruminated grass mulch don’t piss them off. Before they spit they will put their ears flat back against their heads…. So when this guy showed up we decided it was probably better to jump back aboard the truck!

We stopped for lunch next to a waterfall and the guide said if you want to sit outside and eat your lunch you are welcome to.

In 100mph winds? Er, no thanks mate, I think I’ll stay in the truck where the risk of a tree trunk hitting me in the face is significantly decreased.

Unbelievably some people (I think they were German or Russian) got out and had a picnic in hurricane conditions! Some people eh? And then the woman’s glasses got blown off her head (shock) and we all had to get out of the truck and search for them in a big line like you see the police do when there looking for stuff in fields. Yeah thanks for that you insufferable fool, why didn’t you just eat inside like everyone else, now I’ve got to remove a branch from my eye socket!

We actually found her glasses in case you’re bothered, I wasn’t.

After lunch we entered the national park where we were scheduled to go on a trek to Sierra Masle.

We began the trek and the guide told us that it would be 40 minutes instead of two hours due to the conditions. But, if we weren’t enjoying it after 20 minutes we could go back to the bus. 20 seconds in I was already not enjoying myself. I had to pull my hood so tight to stop it blowing that all I could see was my feet, when I did look up rain hit my face like stones and for every two steps forward I did one to the side.

20 minutes in the guide asked if anyone wanted to go back, me and Suz clarified the directions and took off, almost literally.

We saw the waterfall on the way back and almost blew away on several occasions and then we waited on the truck, everyone else went for a walk….. what on earth are these people on????

We dropped some people off at a hotel inside the park (yep they were staying the night, good luck with that) and headed back to the boarder. Suz has managed 200 pages of her book today and 6 naps, that’s how long we spent on the sodding truck.

We got dropped at the hostel at just after 21:00 and headed out for a quick tea in town then we headed back to the hostel for bed and some more Inbetweeners.