Torres Del Paine

What a place! I have so many amazing photos from this place it was hard to pick only a few to post here. Our tour included the classic "W" hike over three days in the park. Although the link points to a 7 day trek, we cheated the second day by taking a bus and catamaran to our second camp.

Altogether we hiked over 55 kms in the three days and by the end of the second day both me and my sister were suffering from various blisters and sore knees. Over the three days we developed a complex form of what we called "blistology" in mostly futile attempts to remedy our feet for the rest of our trekking with combinations of "second skin", band aids, tensor bandage, and moleskin.

The first hike brought us to the base of Las Torres peaks (north, central, and south) shown in the first picture above. A 5 hour uphill battle and 3 hours back. The second picture illustrates what seemed to be a rarity in Patagonia, because it was so calm. We had almost three days of almost still air for at least part of the day. You could almost flip this photo upside down and have the same image.

An easier hike the second day brought us to the middle of the W with views of a few smaller glaciers and some spectacular mountains with two very distinct types of rock (photo above). Our third, last, and longest hike (22 km) took us to Lago Grey and Glacier Grey, the second largest glacier in South America. One of the many rogue ice bergs from the glacier drifted into a bay by the lookout point and looks strangely like the Opera House in Sydney.