Patagonia: So Much More Than a Clothing Brand You Can’t Afford

The Patagonia portion of our trip opened with a very wonderful, welcome change: friends!

Kristy and I enjoy each others’ company very much, but when you spend literally every moment of your day with one other person, occasionally the conversation wants for some additional voices. Kristy will often start a sentence with, “did you hear that they recently did a study…” and I have to cut her off because it was a mutual friend that posted that article on Facebook, and I just read it too.

You meet amazing people when you travel, but with language and cultural barriers and having to say goodbye to your new friends a few days after making their acquaintance, you miss getting an easy beer with someone who already knows and loves you. So you can imagine our excitement when old friends Leanna, Candace and Kim joined us at the end of the earth (old only in years of friendship, of course).

Upon leaving La Paz, we took a mere three flights, a quick pair of long-distance bus rides, and made two minor customs stops before meeting the girls in El Calafate, Argentina. (We’ve learned that getting annoyed by slow, inefficient travel is a waste of energy in Patagonia). From El Calafate we all hopped in a car to Los Glaciares National Park to check out the Perito Moreno glacier.

I’ll be honest: when you’re 30 and a Google image search takes the mystery out of everything, you don’t feel the sensation of awe very often. But Patagonia, starting with Perito Moreno, is a place where you feel dazzled all the time, which is pretty refreshing.

First, you know those plastic blocks of ice in the polar bear exhibit at the zoo that look super fake because they’re waterpark pool blue? The glacier is really that color! It’s also one of the few glaciers that’s still growing instead of receding (as much as 2 meters a day), and you can actually hear and see this thing changing. There are a series of walkways at the park that allow you to view the glacier from different angles and we spent a few hours literally staring at it, mouths agape, listening to it crackle and gasping whenever an enormous ice chunk fell.

After the glacier, we drove to El Chalten, a little town about three hours away that serves as a base camp for a lot of great hikes throughout the area. They’re working on building roads to connect the towns throughout Patagonia, and even though the path between El Calafate and El Chalten is now paved, there’s still an emptiness that gives you the sense that you’re the only people in the country, a rare and lovely feeling.

We pretended that we’re as fit now as we were during our rugby years, and kicked off our El Chalten trip with an ambitious 10 hour hike past Cerro Fitz Roy to Lago de los Tres. As a group, we shared our “highs” and “lows” at the end of each day, and parts of that hike included a few lows. Specifically, a very strenuous uphill hour during the hottest part of the afternoon, and what we now refer to as “the butter incident”, my fat kid mistake of stealing treats at breakfast and then hiking with them in the sun, subsequently ruining my backpack.

However, after Leanna mopped the backpack with a loaf of bread (waste not!) and we finished our seemingly endless mountain ascent, we were rewarded with lunch at a ridiculous glacial lake, definitely a “high”.

We kept it rolling with a second full day of hiking to Laguna Torres, another striking glacial lake. The glacial lake thing really never got old.

Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Kim after El Chalten, but the rest of us continued to the Chilean side of Patagonia to visit Torres del Paine national park. The most famous hike in the park, named the “W” for the shape of the trail, is usually a 5 day affair, but due to Leanna and Candace’s timeline, we decided to keep up the long hiking days and knock out the majority of it in 3 (doing more of a cursive “U”).

Multi-day trekking is very easy in Torres del Paine because campgrounds and “refugios” – basic dorm lodging – are spaced out along the most popular trails. Since it seemed like a pain to get together all the gear we’d need to camp, we decided to spring for refugio beds and dinners, which was an expensive affair during the high season. Still, after hiking for 8+ hours and arriving just as the Patagonian winds pick up, it’s pretty nice to grab a beer indoors and wait for your hot meal while the suckers outside pitch their tents and try to get their stoves to light for day three of powdered potatoes.

We started at the east end of the W and hiked our first day to “the towers” for which the park is named. You know, another day, another lunch at a stunning glacial lake.

On day two we had an easy 6ish hour hike from the Torres refugio to the Los Cuernos refugio – the scenery during this bit was some of my favorite, but I may have been influenced by the fact that it was really flat.

Our final day with the girls was beautiful but the toughest of the week, a ten hour hike through Valle Frances whilst getting pounded by our first rain of the entire trip (which actually means we’re lucky though it didn’t feel that way at the time).

Fortunately we ended a little earlier than expected, meaning we had time for coffee, beer and proper goodbyes at the Paine Grande refugio before Leanna and Candace had to hop on the catamaran and make the journey back to Puerto Natales. (They missed the first boat and returned to a packed Puerto Natales late at night with no hostel reservation in case you were getting annoyed that our trip was too perfect).

Sore, and sad to be back down to a team of two, Kristy and I hiked to Glacier Grey the next day to finish the W. We were pretty hiked out at that point, and we struggled against some of the ridiculous winds in that area of the park, but it was gratifying to finish out the trail.

Overall, it was a great start to our visit in this incredibly special place in the world. Kristy and I are back to entertaining each other with our identical newsfeeds and singalongs during dinner, but we have more friends and family visiting soon!