My travel journal for this trip involved only pen and paper, so
I have no day-by-day “blog” this time. But as I look back over my musings from the trip, the word that
reappears is “blessed.” I was blessed with great weather, great experiences,
great people. But also blessed because traveling is a kind of nourishment for
me. It never ceases to amaze me that I get to live this life. Here are some
excerpts from my travel journal:
“Truly one of the greatest things about traveling is living in the moment. I can
at last erase from the chatter in my brain the useless, futile worrying and
ruminating…. I crave this type of experience and don’t feel alive without it.
Nothing forces one to feel more “in the moment” than hiking, than hiking in
another country, than hiking in another country with a strained knee while
being shepherded by a kind but essentially total stranger whose job it is to
make sure you get home safely and whose birthday you don’t want to ruin more
than you already have. In those moments, I was there. I was truly present and
alive to that moment, that experience, those thoughts, and no others….
“Part of me feels isolated and alone. After all, who goes
traveling to the ends of the earth alone? Well, I do. As isolated as I feel, I
also feel empowered, happy, content, full of anticipation…. I settled at this
table in the bar, and I expect others will soon make their way to the bar as
well. Who will they be? Will any become friends? Who will I meet? Who will I like?
Does it matter? I will try to stop that useless chatter (again), accept what
is, and not worry about what is not.”
OK, on to the fun part:
Part I of my Patagonia adventure was trekking the Chilean
National Park called Torres del Paine (pronounced, I’ve now learned,
Pah-ee-nay, which I’m told means “blue” in the indigenous language of local people
who thought the stones of the mountains looked blue). Door to door, from my
house to the entrance of my little dome at EcoCamp, took 48 hours. A full 48
hours, on planes and buses and with some stops at a hotel and restaurants. 48
hours to arrive at the place I had been imagining for months. And it was
exactly as I imagined.
My little “standard dome” had two twin beds, no heat, no
electricity, no bathroom. The first night was so cold I wished my mystery
roommate had arrived solely so that we could pool our body heat within that
tiny space. But the little window in the back looked right up at the towers
(see them in the distance?), and because the sky is plenty light until 10:00
pm, and begins to brighten again before 5:00, I had opportunity to enjoy the
view.
The 48 hours of travel made our whole tour group of hikers
ridiculously excited to take pictures of everything that first day, but the
amazing sights had barely begun. Despite my shamefully bad photography skills
and total lack of patience to do much photo editing, I have a few
photos I feel capture the wonders of Torres del Paine:
One of our first overlooks of the national park and Paine
Grande, the highest summit in the park at 2,884 m (~9,400 ft).
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Our group, ready for our first trek -- 10 of us (all American) plus our two wonderful guides (not pictured), Cata and Mono. |
After hiking 10 km through the French Valley, we got a view
of the horns from the other side.
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View of Gray Glacier from high upon a lookout. You can see
better its extent from this view, but we were going to get much, much closer.
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Much closer: by boat! After an 11-km hike to a crag of rock
by the edge of the lake, we were taken by very small boat out to a slightly
less small boat, that brought us right up to the glacier.
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I love this view. There is something about a babbling brook through a mountain pass that simply takes my breath away, every time.
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Did I mention the mango sours served up top?
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The part of Day 3 that I might like to forget, though, is
that by the time I had reached this summit, with 11 km left to get back down,
my right knee had begun to ache. Lifting it felt like gravity was pulling my
knee apart, and I finally decided I had strained some tendons from three days
of intense hiking (and I have done 3+ days of intense hiking before, with 40
pounds on my back, so I was not happy that my body was failing me this day). The
result was a very, very slow descent, during which Mono stuck by me (poor lad).
Once the ibuprofen kicked in enough, though, I forced him into the role of
Spanish teacher. We arrived back at EcoCamp in time for Pisco Sours and a
glorious full moon rise over the domes. None of my photos capture it, but it
was truly magnificent, and a perfect end to my stay at EcoCamp.
And thus concluded Part I of my journey. I parted ways with
both Americans and Chileans with sadness and many email addresses.
Part II began in Puerto Natales, where I checked into a
small hostel, preparing to meet my cruise ship the next day. My arrival in
Puerto Natales coincided with the first Wi-Fi of the trip as well as with Thanksgiving
Day back home, so I was happy to be able to text and email and find out about Alex’s
first trip home since leaving for college. After that, I promptly took a 2-hour
nap, woke up for dinner, showered, and then slept for another 10 hours. I didn’t
need to be at the ship until 4:00 in the afternoon, so I explored Puerto
Natales and did some souvenir shopping. And then, Part II truly began.
Ice. A lot of ice in the Southern Patagonia Icefield.
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I parted ways with my shipmates and returned to Punta Arenas
for the flights home. The return was about as grueling as the way there and
ended with a terrible head cold a few days later. But that has given me time to
play with maps and photos and videos. And the flight from Punta Arenas to
Santiago gave us an astounding view of glaciers and fjords similar to those I
had just been exploring.
And a short (and amateurish) video edited down to the only (and not very) passable segments, but it does include an avalanche, a dolphin, and glacial ice falling into the sea.