Traveling to South America had been a dream of mine for many many years. A little bit over a year ago me and my trusted adventure friends Hannes, Eeva and Daniel got serious about this idea to go and hike the W-trek in Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia. It took quite a while to actually get things sorted out and decide a good time to go. We needed to get our busy schedules match and pick a good time so the fall colors would be in full action.
Getting there is not the easiest thing in the world and our last minute rental car cancellation due to no border crossing with this company gave us few extra bumps for the preparation. Me and Eeva flew from Finland and met up with Daniel in Madrid airport to catch the flight together to Santiago and then Punta Arenas. Flights went well and we arrived in Chile and took a bus to our first accommodation in Puerto Natales after about a 3 hour bus ride. Hannes was waiting us there as he had been traveling around the area for a week after his trip to the Antarctica.
We had few days to prepare before heading to the national park and we needed to gather all the food and other missing equipment, which turned out to be a quite challenging task as it was Easter. Luckily at the end we had all things collected and were able to head out for our 6 days adventure in the park.
The trek was super nice with amazing views that kept you going although the hike was quite hard from time to time. We were camping the whole trip in our tents so we were carrying all the camp gear needed and food for the whole time. We got were really lucky with the weather and it only rained a little bit twice or so. We actually ended up sleeping one night in a cabin on the way as the wind got over 40m/s for the night. I'm very sure our nice Fjällräven Dome tent could've taken the beating, but sleep quality would've suffered for sure and Daniel's tent couldn't take it as he had some competitor tent in use... HAHA! But yeah, this kind of hiking is not the best place to have lack of sleep, so we made a common decision to spend the night in a nice and warm cabin.
The hike went well until the last two days as my knee was kind of feeling it and it got really painful to make the last part of the hike. Eeva had also been having issues with her back. We made our way to the Dome Hotel where we had a nice relaxing night with hot showers before heading out from the park.
After hiking in Torres del Paine, it was time to pick up a rental car from Puerto Natales and drive up to El Chalten in Argentina for some hiking around Mt. Fitz Roy. We were still kind of feeling the hike from Chile and couldn't do all the hikes we had planned. We were happy to make it to the Cerro Torre for a night hike dispite the painful trekking.
Enjoy the photos below!
