Hiking the W: Tales from the Torres

"If we make it by five," T mused, Los Cuernos now finally just behind us on the trail rather than looming ahead as for most of the day, "I think we´re justified in a treat." "Extra chocolate," I agreed. "Well, I was thinking more like a beer." I blinked. Just three days into the W trek in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, I had entirely forgotten that treats other than an extra square of Milka existed. Forgotten my first love. Beer. What a thought. 

The top of Valle Frances, Day 3

We´d already been camping in Patagonian for a fortnight on the Argentinean side, passing through sites progressively colder, wetter and windier, even as the scenery became more heart-stopping. And by mid-December - a time I´d normally just be starting to make panicked Christmas present lists while juggling competing work deadlines and an already sozzled ´festive´ liver - we packed up from El Chalten and a number of great preparatory hikes, headed for our first experience of Chile. The journey wasn´t a promising start to a fantastic week, with me stupidly losing my camera transferring from the Cal Tur bus at El Calafate to one bound for Puerto Natales in Chile. Entirely my own fault - a dozy omission - I was still singularly unimpressed by the lackadaisical responses of Cal Tur to my two stressed phone calls that night, follow-up visit on our return to Argentina the following week and two (unanswered) emails. Unfortunately, and despite our positive experience of the company up until then, I´m not unconvinced it was pocketed by the driver or someone cleaning the bus, as it felt like it should easily have been recoverable before the bus left the terminal a few hours later for the return trip. So the loss of the 500 or so pictures taken across the preceding 5 weeks - Mysore to El Chalten essentially - cast a mournful shadow over the start of the trip for me (I almost think it was better in the days when you could barely remember what was on lost camera films, rather than now where you remember exactly what images you´ve lost). 

The Patagonian Chilean border was small and efficient, with a surreally rigorous agricultural regime whereby almost any biological matter from avocado to dried pepper poses an apparently nefarious risk to the Chilean ecosystem. Held up by extravagant scenes of indignation and mutual reprobation and dramatics between some Israeli girls, a SAG (Servicio Agricola y Ganadero) offical and an incriminatingly large bag of fruit, T and I felt the frisson of criminality thinking of the garlic, olive oil and dried chilli flakes buried deep in our rucksacks. Eat your heart out Howard Marks - middle-class gangsters, y`all.

Puerto Natales feels like the end of the earth, despite the vast tracts of the Tierra del Fuego stretching out to the south. Ragged and windswept, grey skies ominously greeting us, the town might have had appeared to have little recommending it bar its position as springboard to the world famous Torres del Paine national park. But we immediately took a shine to it, unsure if we were responding to the town itself or to our first glimpse of Chile in general. It felt less reserved somehow than Argentinean Patagonia, much as we`d enjoyed the latter; more organic, with bustling friendly streets and the feel of a busy tourist-traffic town that nevertheless retains a distinct and genuine life of its own.

And Hostel and Camping Josmar in the middle of town was the perfect place to spend our few days of preparation before hitting the park for five days. I´d been surprised to find almost no trace of camping options in the town, given its location and the concentration of trekkers, but had finally found a couple of mentions of Josmar on blogs and a few dismissive lines on the Lonely Planet site. However it turned out to be a real gem and we´d recommend it to anyone on a budget who`s more interested in heart and atmosphere than genteel facilities. A small hostel and restaurant, run by a warm and welcoming family with plenty of patience for the rubbish broken Spanish of their backpacker clientele, it has a few small dorms and private rooms plus a garden of tent pitches with a small kitchenette where campers can save on their stove gas and unexpectedly good water pressure. 

We arrived to find the cosy front room full of young Israelis celebrating Hanukkah and, highly improbably - after setting up our now well-practiced camp in the wind-swept garden - Fabian in the kitchenette. We had travelled from Manali to Leh in the same jeep as the German trekker back in September and then stayed at the same guest house (the super-lovely Gomang in Changspa) occasionally crossing paths as we headed off on various sub-trips. Almost no one combines India and South America in these kind of trips, it makes no geographical or financial sense and was led much more by my travel-delirium than by any sensible considerations. Running into Fabian randomly in a tiny campsite in southern Patagonia on the opposite side of the world from our encounter 3 months before was therefore a timely reminder of the strange, fantastical patterns of the universe. 

Countdown to W

By this time I was getting increasingly apprehensive about the W. It was once again - or, indeed, still - cold and stormy and the park itself is famed for being Patagonia par excellence: all horizontal hailstorms, gale-force winds and blinding sun in the course of a single afternoon. 

Our intrepid talisman, may we follow in his footsteps...

Now I like to think I´m reasonably alright with roughing it. I´m altogether too comfortable with going shower-free over four-day music festivals and have never once had to face what I understand to be the quintessential female problem of whether there is space in my holiday luggage for a hair-dryer. (There´s not. And even if there was I would probably put extra jewellery or Pimms in it). But - and despite my Scottish roots - when it comes to the cold I am a bit of a wuss to be honest. I get cold very easily and generally feel myself to be of a much more, let`s say, Mediterranean disposition (red wine, aubergine dishes, massive tomatoes, sparkling azure seas, mega sunshine, you get the picture). So while I can put up with it all, as I love to hike and camp, I don´t think it makes me a better or tougher person; nor do I see it as a test of my pastoral, uncorrupted spirit - there´s never been much of the 18th century Romantic in me in that respect and I´ve never had much truck with Rousseau even without the rampant misogyny.

T, on the other hand, positively thrives on miserably cold climes. At the first hint of a storm cloud battering the tent door, his eyes start to gleam. "Real camping," he exclaims with satisfaction and I realise with alarm that I am a hair´s breadth away from a dawn hike, building our own raft from scavenged deadwood and singing Kumbaya by the fireside. All in the rain.  My own worry was not that I wouldn´t cope with the W trek but rather that the coping would come to surpass the enjoyment. We nevertheless ploughed on, hiring trekking poles, buying waterproof trousers (my particularly grim experience on one of the El Chalten hikes fresh in my mind). 

We also went to the brilliant daily information talk held at 3pm every day by Erratic Rock, together with free tea and coffee. I can´t recommend this enough as, while we had a decent if vague idea of what we wanted to do and what we´d need, you could turn up there completely clueless and these guys would have you ready to hit the trails within a day or two. While it`s more common to go East-West on the core W route, largely to get the money-shot of the Torres themselves on Day 1, we decided on the ER suggestion you start with the shorter days to get used to the backpack weight before hitting the tougher days towards the end. And as we´d be carrying all our gear throughout, including camping stuff (refugio prices within the park are positively eye-watering), the matter of kit was key. Here - for those interested or with a high tolerance for OCD list-compilation - is the breakdown:

• Camping gear: tent, stove, gas
• Sleeping bags and mats
• First aid kit, basic toiletries and travel towels
• Waterproofs, hats and bin bags to wrap up everything inside rucksacks
• Cameras, batteries, cash etc.

• Clothes. Now the lovely lass from ER made the ascetic suggestion here that you limit yourself to two outfits - one warm, including trainers, for night, and one single lightweight trek outfit. Into whose wet, stinking, cold embraces you will climb back day after day on the premise that it will dry as you walk and would only end up dirty again anyway - while you safeguard your cleaner, warm dry gear for the night freeze. I get this. I do. But I also have self-knowledge and am aware that if I have to clamber into cold wet rags on a freezing campsite morning, there´s little fricking way I am leaving my sleeping bag. Even on a summer´s day in a comfortable metropolitan bed it´s a daily battle, to which T will testify. So I compromised and went for the following, which worked well:

• Nights: leggings, jeans, vest top, light long-sleeved top, jumper and trainers. Of which I would wear as many to sleep in as were necessary for my crappy circulation.
• Days; two vest tops, one lightweight trousers, one long-sleeved top, one fleece, two pairs socks, hiking boots. 

Now food I was particularly proud of, like the geek I am. Some folk take everything - from olive oil to bags of potatoes - but, without crippling yourself carrying it, you do need to plan well as food inside the park, like everything, is really expensive. And it´s not like Nepal where there`s a lady selling noodle soup and chocolate with every hundred metre ascent. So we got fairly OCD-anal on this and calculated exactly for our five days (water, luckily, is fresh and potable everywhere which is a great cash/space saving):

• Breakfasts: porridge oats, 3-4 apples, raisins, sugar sachets, teabags
• Lunches: one loaf of seeded, uncrushably hard brown bread, pack of cheese slices
• Dinners: two packs noodles, two packs mash potato mix, four packets of sauce, plus dried chilli and pepper
• Snacks: three bags mixed nuts and fruit, one dried apricots, three packs choc chip cookies, one big bar of Milka

All worked out down to slices and squares per day, with some leeway for crappy weather/extra chocolate etc. And despite sounding pretty lean for days spent trekking in cold weather, it worked really well - we never went hungry but had definitely both dropped some pounds by the end. The above resulted in one big backpack of gear, which T carried, and one smaller daypack with all the food and water for me. More than some carry but definitely less than others. T actually saw a guy in one bathroom with a half-litre bottle of Listerine. You know, for those urgent halitosis moments mid eight-hour hike.

The W trek through Torres del Paine

The park itself is incredible. In many ways. It´s a finely-oiled machine and I can imagine that for experienced trekkers, it may feel way too chaperoned at first brush. Bus tickets are available all over town within seconds of your arrival and you go on the am or pm bus, then dropped - via park registration where you pay your $18,000 Chilean pesos (about £24) and receive your map complete with estimated hiking times - at one of three main starting points: Laguna Amarga, the Pudeto catamaran dock for Refugio Paine Grande or the main Administration. You see some bitching in guidebooks/sites about the crowded, you know, ghastly tourism of the trails. And while it is true that it´s likely the only place we´ve been thus far where international tourists outnumbered South American visitors, crowding was really not a problem. Ultimately it really depends whether you have a Discoverer complex about your trips and need to feel like the only conquistador on the block. At least this early in the season, it felt to us like everyone found their own pace and by day, we often had the trails mostly to ourselves, save sporadic passers-by.

The view across to Glacier Grey

Perhaps the most wonderful thing after the genuinely spectacular setting - the park´s microclimates go from desolate peakscape to pretty domestic meadow, on to windswept moor or azure turquoise lagoon within an hour or two - is that you sense everyone finds their own way to experience it and at their own speed. Intrepid retirees, serious trekkers, groups, couples and even some families with children, you can take ten days and do the full circuit or just do in for a day or two so long as you have a decent general level of fitness. We opted for the traditional W route, walking West to East over five days, four nights. And for all my trepidation, the weather turned out to be as glorious and stable as we could have asked for and the trip one of the biggest highlights of our South American voyage.

Day one took us from the catamaran drop-off point across Lago Pehoe at Refugio Paine Grande up the far west of the ´W´ to Refugio Grey, just shy of the startling Glacier Grey which dominates the upper reaches of the lake. The day emerged from damp clouds into a glorious clear sunshine, with a cold sharp breeze from the glaciers and the Hielo Sur whenever we stepped out exposed onto a lakeside mirador from the shelter of a woodland trail; sweat from our exertions rapidly cooling the body despite the strong light. Like the three days that followed, we thanked the Patagonian weather deities for our luck, assuming it would turn that very night. 

This hike emerges periodically onto stunning views of the lakes and then, an hour or so in, the huge glacier facing you to the north – creeping closer with every mirador. The walk took exactly the 3.5 hours advised by the map, including breaks, a useful pacing discovery by which we could estimate our times each day. The Refugio campsite at Grey was clean and cheerful with hot showers and a sheltered space for campers to cook. Before dinner we climbed another half-hour up the hill for even closer views of the glacier and sat there gazing at it until the sky began to darken. A great first day, with a mid-to-moderate hike and fantastically clear views to break us in, we turned in early to escape the cold which advanced rapidly with the last of the light.

Glacier Grey as the sky darkens

Day two After some night rain, we awoke to another clear sky. T, by an unfortunate dynamic, is the breakfast king since in freezing campsites as in warm urban bedrooms I am Not A Morning Person. It can take a good 30 mins for me even on a good day to reconcile to the reality that, on balance, I must probably abandon my bed for the day awaits; I am therefore unaccountably lucky that my boy thrives on mornings and is reconciled with little complaint to the morning shift in these matters, cooking up the porridge and tea outside our tent door in exchange for my mere complicity in getting up to dissemble our camp.

We set off from Grey at 10.30am for the return hike back to the point. Fortunately, since the W retreads its steps on 3 trails during the trek, you rarely feel the impatience of repetition: the views feel brand new with the novel direction and, in any case, the changing light from hour to hour makes each vista an entirely new experience. The return to Paine Grande had more strenuous uphill sections early on, upping the ante on the previous day, and we then followed the 3.5 Grey hike with another 2.5 hours along to Campo Italiano at the foot of Valle Frances.

Los Cuernos, rockin´it

This latter stretch winds through pretty and meandering meadowland, interspersed with shockingly beautiful stretches of burnt-out forest. Like on the Grey side - both a reminder of 2011´s terrible fire - the bare scorched branches are flecked through with white and silver, giving way suddenly to live sections. The effect only highlights the terrible beauty of the place, lending it an unearthly petrified quality and reminding you how fragile this sometimes inhospitable environment is. We kept time well, getting into our stride and arrived at Italiano, beneath the shadow of Glacier Frances, by early evening. A free campsite without facilities, Italiano is set in pretty, if chilly, woodland set up a slope with semi-flattened out pitch spaces between trees. It wasn´t our favourite camp of the trek, to be honest, between the clouds of flies and the rainy night which worked to churn up the earth of the site considerably, making for a muddy and messy camp deconstruction come morning. 

Moi, on the home stretch to Camp Italiano, Day 2

I also had a bugbear about the toilets. Odd perhaps, after three months of Indian travel, but they were thoroughly grim - pretty unusable in fact - for a park otherwise so beautifully kept, protected and regulated. Italiano is an obvious site for good long-drop eco-toilets (Ladakh, interestingly, was great on these and on trying to cultivate a sustainable development in its nascent tourist industry in general) but has instead opted for a bog-standard (unfortunate choice of words..) four-cubicle unit. Half of which were overflowing on our night, and the other half locked shut to contain and conceal the unimaginable horrors within. Making for hazardous trips into the paper-strewn slopes above, fearful of each footstep…

Day three was perfect, perhaps our most perfect. Packing up at Italiano with difficulty, we left our backpacks at the ranger´s office and set off unencumbered apart from our lunch supplies up Valle Frances. We scrambled up through the boulder-strewn forest, making surprisingly quick progress but with plenty of time to enjoy superlative views emerging of the Glacier Frances and beyond. 

*jaw drops*

As this was to be a round trip which we would follow with another few hours along to the next Refugio site, we kept up a good pace without too much effort and propelled along by the beautiful landscape of the valley. I was surprised but delighted to discover that my legs clearly remembered the groundwork laid down in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh and Nepal in the autumn, however long ago it had felt. Without the extra weight on our backs, we saved an hour on the expected 2.5 up to Camp Britanico and the extra half an hour hike up to the mirador. Where we were greeted by these views:

These are the sights. On a another clear and gorgeous day – frosty in the shade and when the wind whirls through the valley to catch you off balance on an exposed bluff, scorching sun bleaching down regardless – these are the sights you all but have to stop yourself leaping into. That you almost can´t see enough of and strive to take in more, better, clearer, with more certainty of remembering every detail. We swivelled our necks around ceaselessly, agog, surrounded on all sides by these majestic, jagged and threatening peaks looming up into bright blue skies. It was only, in fact, with difficulty that we tore ourselves away after 50 minutes or so, lunch eaten and with the reluctant knowledge that we still had the return trip down and another few hours to Refugio Cuernos.

After a speedy descent to Italiano, passed with more frenzied debate regarding our lives and what to do with them (such conversations escalating now as we hit the half-way point of our trip…), we polished off some cookies and rested our jarred knees before strapping on the packs and hitting the next trail. The walk to Cuernos was pleasantly moderate and took us down through woodland to the turquoise lakeside itself, along a rocky beach that wouldn´t have looked out of place in northern Greece. 

Contemplative, like, en route to Refugio Cuernos, Day 4

It had been a long day but we made it in great time, starting to feel the benefits of the milder start and build up. The sun was bleaching as we arrived at Cuernos, an expensive but very picturesque Refugio with raised wooden platforms for tents – a happy find after the muddy mornings past. Able to set up camp quickly and easily – and even to strip off the long-sleeves for an hour or two in the sun – we adjourned to the deck where other camping trekkers were arriving and stretching out in the sun like weary cats. The promised beers felt well-earned and I wouldn´t have swapped with the Refugio’s hostel guests for anything.

Day four was to be where Shit got Real. It was slated as an 8.5 hour day minimum over an exposed hillside, via a shortcut up the next valley to Refugio Torres – and then another hour and a half uphill to the free Campamento Torres (launchpad for the Mirador to which we´d scramble up the following day at dawn). We got going earlier than usual and were tough with ourselves for the first few hours to make a good start while the weather still looked good. It was blustery but, again, held up and by the time we had broken the worst of the hike - rejuvenated and rewarded by the fantastic first glimpses of the Valle Ascensio after four or five hours - we realised it wasn´t going to be quite the arduous trial we´d expected, despite a tough final push.

We made camp in about 7 hours overall, thanks not least to the relative clemency of the weather which could have made every step an odyssey in the right (wrong?) conditions. But another strange idea popped into my head. Could it be, I started to wonder in awe, that I am actually, a little bit, relatively-speaking, sort of, fit now?? Always the type to duck out of PE or walk a cross-country route when I could – and always the type to cut the Sunday walk just a little bit short in favour of the pub lunch - the notion was quite heady. But I guess you walk up enough hills because you´re a junkie for mountain views and anything is possible. And after four days on the trails, I could feel the shift that night, that rather than collapsing with the fresh air and effort, I was much more awake and energised. Hey, I even made the dinner…

Day five Dawn. And – finally – karma (or perhaps just the law of averages) caught up with us. Rain. Lots of rain. Mud and rain together. It was 4.30am, it was dark, it was wet and we were now getting up to lug our sorry, water-logged arses up and over the hill to catch the Torres del Paine themselves at dawn. Prising ourselves up and out, layered and as (inadequately) waterproofed as possible, we set off on an alleged 40 min walk in the pitch black with one headtorch. Proving that our smug hike times of the last few days would have been totally scuppered with the slightest blow from the mighty Patagonian cloud system, the hike was well over an hour and a pretty intensive, wind battered affair up out of the trees and onto the mountainside. There seemed to be no one else on the hill (smart folks…) and with every gust of the ever-strengthening wind in the half-light, stumbling on the boulders beneath our feet, a tumble down the rock face felt all too close at hand.

“Oh fuck off,” we exhaled, deadpan, after a solid 40 minutes emerging from dark woodland to see the trail winding vertiginously up the rock-strewn mountain - into the distant clouds, it seemed as the rain pummelled harder. We made it up soaked to the skin to find our fellow-drowned cats just over the peak huddling behind rock formations expectantly. Then – there they were - the Torres.

The mighty Torres.. somewhere

And that´s how that tune went. Dawn came and went, the only clue a gradual lightening out of the heavy clouds which held resolutely on to the face of the famous spires. No sun, no colours and after more than 45 shivering minutes, still no Torres. We made characteristically British banter with another couple before finally cutting our losses and starting the descent down towards warm clothes and breakfast. And you know what? It really didn´t matter. We pretty much knew, in the manner of Sod´s Law that we were unlikely to get the Torres, not after days of clear skies. The peaks are one of modern travel´s ´Money shots´, the views you pursue to seize, pin down and wave aloft in the scrapbook of life as proof you went somewhere, saw something - that yes, you actually exist. But it really didn´t matter in the end; I realised that even had I known, I would still have got up that morning and clambered up drenched to the skin.

And as a final reminder of how perilous these hills could be on the wrong morning, even despite our great fortune over the trek, we stopped on the descent to wait for a trekker who had scrambled a few hundred feet down the rock spill to help a figure in the distance who had stumbled off the path. As they worked their way carefully back up, we could see the Frenchman in his sixties, disoriented and bleeding from his head and hands where he had fallen partway. He was alright, of course, in the general sense but shaken and freezing as we walked back down with him to the camp and, soberingly, it was all too clear that his solitary morning climb while his friends slept in could have taken a much more tragic turn.

After the wet and grim packing up process in rain that had hit the valley to stay, the descent back down to Hostel Torres at the base – and the shuttle which would drop us back at Laguna Amarga – was quick and painless. And in the way of the park´s microclimates, we had lost the rain after we were midway. Passing fresh blood on their first day travelling East-West and headed for the rain-logged site we had left behind, we almost ran on down feeling light of step after our five days. The Carmenere red at the lodge (deciding to forsake the coffee for something a bit more celebratory – and more of this grape to come in future posts!) was untold luxury when coupled with the change into warm clothes and socks.

As were the vegetarian burritos and walnut burgers we ate that night, as we had promised ourselves for days, at the gorgeously cosy and welcoming café bar El Living. We pored over the previous week´s international Guardian round-up and drank a well-earned bottle of Patagonian red until ready to scuttle home to Josmar and bed – a real live bed! Elevated from the ground! With pillows! For the first time in over a fortnight! And after slow, steady progress on foot over the last five days, we looked ahead to a long trip north the very next morning – to the relative warmth, we supposed, of Bariloche in northern Patagonia, and to Christmas.