Patagonia and the Blue Towers

We started our adventures with a long flight (three legs) to the southern tip of South America, flying first to JFK airport then from there to Santiago, Chile and finally to Punta Arenas, Chile. Our good friend and neighbor Kim Cox joined us for our visit to Patagonia.

Once in Punta Arenas, we collected our rental car from Avis and drove 200 miles north to Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. The only places to fill your tank are in Punta Arenas and then the town of Puerto Natales, which is about 150 miles north, so you need to plan your refueling stops carefully.

Torres del Paine translates to Blue Towers in the language of the local indigenous tribe. Our destination was the Rio Serrano Hotel located just outside the entrance to the park.

Our hotel room had a to-die-for view of the mountains in the national park. The scene varied from day-to-day depending on the cloud cover and the weather.

We had arranged for Erin Bates, a private guide, to take us around during our week in Patagonia. Erin is originally from Tennesse but has lived in Patagonia since 2007. She was great to work with and a lot of fun. We had five full days to explore the park, and Erin was able to adjust our activities according to the weather. We appreciated the flexibility as we saw many bus tours plugging away on their fixed itineraries regardless of the weather.

Even though it was the height of the Chilean summer, the weather was cool (in the high 40s during the day) and very windy (typically 30-50 mph). We had rain in the beginning of the week and sun toward the end.

The most famous features of the Torres del Paine are the mountain horns ("cuernos") and vertical towers ("torres") that stab the sky in an otherworldly fashion. Their granite formed far beneath the Earth's surface, were raised by plate tectonics, and were then exposed as softer sedimentary rocks around them eroded away about 12 million years ago. The Torres formation sits out by itself east of the Andes Mountains, and although the highest peak is just 10,000 feet, the mountains rise dramatically from flat countryside (the "pampa") that is just above sea level.

On our first full day in the park, we traveled to Lago (lake) Grey, hiking across a long sandbar to board the Grey III, a catamaran that took us to view the three tongues of the Grey Glacier at the far end of the lake.

The glacier originates in the third largest icefield (after Antarctica and Greenland) on Earth. It was cold and rainy when we started our cruise, but fortunately the rain abated as we cruised across the glacier faces.

On the way back down the lake we picked up some hikers who had completed the famous five-day-long "W" route through the national park.

Our second day, we drove to the center of the park and hiked to the shoreline of Lago Sarmiento, which is 14 miles long and a beatiful blue. The white cliffs surrounding the lake shoreline are the bleached remains of stromatolites (algae colonies) that were earth's first life form and today grow at only a few places on Earth, including Patagonia.

On Day 3 we drove first to the overlook above the Rio Serrano area, where we had great views of our hotel and the mountains in different directions

Driving into the national park...

...we parked our car and hiked to the Salto Grande waterfall...

...and continued on the trail beyond for about 3 kilometers to the shores of Lago Nordernskjöld, which is a brilliant blue and sits directly below the three horns that are the centerpiece of the park's iconic mountains on the southern side. It was exceptionally windy (40-50 mph), which seems to be a regular part of the Patagonia travel experience.

During our hike we passed some guanacos, which are similar to llamas and live throughout the park.

On Day 4, we drove around to the northern side of the park where we could view the three towers from which the park takes its name. They rise thousands of feet straight up.

We had many beautiful views of mountain lakes...

...a herd of guanacos...

...some unusual birds, including a flamingo and a rhea...

...and the beautiful Cascada Paine waterfall...

...before stopping for lunch at Laguna Azul, a long blue lake with the torres at its end. After eating, we hiked up a hillside for a view of the lake.

On the way back, we watched a young puma come down a hillside and get very close to the road - a magnificent animal!

On our fifth and final day Erin took us outside the park. We stopped by a salt-laden lake with an unusual green color and briny beaches...

...on our way to a sheep ranch where we had a delicious lunch at a beautiful restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Before eating, we poked in to have a look at the shearing shed.

We also drove up a canyon with very interesting cliffs and rock formations.

Saturday we drove back south. We stopped on the way at the Cueva del Miladon, an impressively deep and broad cave opening which formed at the end of the last ice age. A number of animal fossils had been unearthered in the cave, including the smilodon or sabre tooth tiger, and also the milidon which was a six-foot-long giant sloth. We learned that much of the cave floor still remains to be explored.

Our rental Renault, with a manual transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer, had grown pretty dirty during the week (the roads in the national park are only gravel). However, dirt turned out not to be the only issue!

When we headed out the park, we arrived in Puerto Natales (still 3+ hours away from Punta Arenas) to find the gas stations in town either closed or with no gasoline! While we were figuring out our options at the one open station, Doug spied a tanker truck delivering gas. He asked the attendant if we could get some of the gas being delivered - he told us it would be a 20 minute wait. We decided that waiting 20 minutes was a much better option than risking running out of gas! Our patience paid off and we got enough gas for the drive south.

Then the clutch started acting up during the remaining drive and the ability to access certain gears disappeared one-by-one during our journey. Fortunately we still had 4th and 5th gear available for the long highway stretches, and through judicious use of the clutch we managed to limp into the driveway of our Punta Arenas hotel. Whew! We called Avis and had them retrieve the car from the hotel.

After an overnight stay in Punta Arenas, we boarded our ship, the MS Fram, on Sunday afternoon. We departed port in the evening. More about our shipboard adventures in future blog posts!