You might have noticed a gap in our postings, normally this is due to our indifference and laziness but this time around, it was because I was travelling. In my travels, I was like, why don’t I write about it? Maybe I can become a travel blogger and then G Adventures or Readers Digest can offer to send me places to review them and I can move on to my next life scam. So here it is.
Torres Del Paine, The W Circuit
So what exactly is Torres Del Paine, The W Circuit you ask?
It is a national park in the southern part of Chile in an area called Patagonia. You may recognize that name because a clothing company named themselves after this fantastic place. Seriously, what other national park has a clothing brand named after it? That alone should peak your interest. The national park is famous for it’s beauty and is at the very south tip of South America:
The W circuit is a hike around some magnificent mountains and lakes, it’s called a W because the route looks like this:
Between you and me, that also looks like an ass, but you can’t get away with calling it an ass trail
The W Circuit is more or less a 4 or 5 day hike – you get to see some amazing vistas and generally feel good about yourself because you are hiking around and not sitting on your ass at home eating cheetos and binging on TLC marathons.
How to Get There
It isn’t an exactly easy place to get to, but here is how I got there:
Plane ride to Santiago
Plane ride to Punta Arenas
Bus ride from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales (book your tickets online here: http://bussur.com/ )
Note: the buses are actually on time and quite comfortable.
Punta Arenas
Punta Arenas is going to be your first stop most likely, it is a cutesy kinda town where you can probably spend a day. They have a boat ride that can take you to an island called Magdalena. On that island, are a lot of penguins, you get to walk around for an hour and instagram the shit out of those penguins. It’s quite awesome. You can find information about that here. It’s not cheap but don’t be cheap, penguins man. I will note that the boat ride can be quite rough and from my experience around 10% of people will vomit. This area of Chile can get really windy, like 75-100 km/h wind windy. But Penguins!
Puerto Natales
The home base town for everyone doing the trek, it’s mostly hostels filled with Europeans who are ridiculously fit and aussies who have nothing better to do. Here you will prep for your trip. There’s a place called Erratic Rock that gives you a primer at 3pm every day as to what to expect. It’s informative and you get to meet some fellow hikers. Go there. Then go to the water side and take some pictures and look at those pretty mountains. Get a nice meal here before and after your trek.
Booking the Trip
In order to do a trek in Torres Del Paine, you absolutely need to book your reservations. They will not let you in the National Park unless you can prove you have reservations, no matter how many instagram followers you have.
The first thing you need to decide when booking is this: Are you camping or glamping? Here are the differences:
Camping – You bring your own camping gear (tent/sleeping bag/sleeping pad) and most likely food. Keeping in mind you will have to lug your shit for at least 20km during the hike. You can also rent camping gear at some of the grounds but that will obviously add to your cost at which point you might as well glamp.
Glamping – You are staying at the lodge each night. Typically with board. The beds are mostly bunk beds but they are comfortable.
We chose the latter variety, lugging around equipment and food was not very appealing to me. I wanted to be able to do a hike each day, go to the lodge, take a steaming hot shower, have a few drinks and enjoy the day. I didn’t want to do a hike, reach my site, set up camp, cook a meal, clean up and then whatever. Call me lazy, if you choose to do the camping route, then the rest of this section might be slightly irrelevant but read on anyways and congratulate yourselves for being so hard.
Either decision you make requires you to book your accommodations. Online booking only recently came online to Patagonia and it’s an awful system. Save yourself some grief and contact one of the three companies that owns all the lodges/camp sites in the park and have them do the dirty work. I used Fantastico Sur and they did everything for me, such as buy my ferry tickets, bus tickets and also booked all the sites for me. They are a local company so you are supporting the locals there, which is always key when travelling. You can also go through Vertice if you please.
When you are booking, you will need to decide if you want full board or not, which brings me to the next item.
Food
If you are camping, obviously you cook your food, so enjoy that dehydrated chicken alfredo.
If you choose to go full board, you will get breakfast+packed lunch+dinner+drinks. This is what you will get with this
Breakfast: yogurt, scrambled eggs, toast, corn flakes and shitty coffee
Packed Lunch: trail mix, a fruit, chocolate bar and a sad looking sandwich with protein in it. I didn’t like the sandwiches at all but it is what it is.
Dinner: Soup + Meat/veggie dish + desert. The dinners were surprisingly tasty at each lodge and for us was either some sort of beef dish or salmon. It was better then expected.
Drinks
Be prepared to pay for drinks in the National Parks. They are expensive but until Amazon introduces drone enabled alcohol delivery services, you are trapped. Note that wine is cheaper then beer in Patagonia, so go with that.
Don’t worry about water, you will be drinking from the rivers and streams. It’s the cleanest water you will drink in your life.
What to Pack
In Patagonia, the weather can turn from great to shit in a few seconds so you have to prepare for any and everything. There’s a bunch of packing lists out there but realistically it’s up to your own comfort. My body heats up rapidly so I actually didn’t need all those layers, but I also live in Canada so 5 degrees to me is almost summer. Here is what I packed:
6 x Underwear
1 x Base Layer leggings(not long johns, like the black kind that all the athletes wear)
2 x Convertible pant/shorts that dry quick (With wildly varying temperatures you want pants that can become shorts quickly. You want two in case one gets really wet or you shit yourself)
2 x Merino wool t-shirt (these dry quickly, don’t stink. You can wear two for the whole hike)
1 x Long sleeve shirt – I felt no need for this, but I don’t get cold easily
1 x Fleece hoodie – I did not need this at all but it was not cold when I was there
1 x Gloves
1 x Rain jacket – absolutely necessary, get a real one, not some shitty ten dollar one. This thing needs to breath and needs to be waterproof.
1 x Windbreaker – if you can spend $$$ and combine rain + windbreaker, then I would do that. I found a good one in the clearance section of an outdoorsy shop. Clearance section is the way to go for these things, I asked the guy at the cash register what the difference was for the windbreaker I got and the one on display and he was like..that’s last years model
1 x beanie
1 x hat
Headgear is essential to provide protection from the relentless sun and also to keep warm.
1 x Hiking shoes – make sure to break it in before you hike
1 x flip flops/comfy shoes – to wear when you are not hiking
6 x socks, bring one more then u have days in case one of them has a hole or something
Hiking poles – they look dorky but were essential. I’d be lost without them, like Oates without Hall.
Backpack – Enough to carry all your junk
Day pack – a lighter smaller bag for the tough hikes
Typical first aid + hygiene
Note: There is a gigantic ozone hole over the Andes in this section, bring plenty of sunscreen or you will be toast.
The Trek
Now that the logistics are done, the trek! What about the trek?
How difficult is it? – The trek itself is not easy. However, it is not difficult either, there are two tough bits but the rewards at the end of those parts is more then worth the difficulty. It is mainly just five days of long walks with a heavy backpack. You will walk roughly 15-20km a day. The trails are clearly marked and you will have really fucked up to get lost. There are ups and downs (we are in mountains), but that’s life. A reasonably fit person should have no problem and a lot of your time is actually just kicking back at the lodge downing overpriced Chilean wines and trying to find interesting people to talk to.
Animals? – You’ll see all sorts of birds and if you are lucky, condors (they are huge so you will definitely know when you see it). We also saw a bunch of rodents, some llamas and two foxes. If you are really lucky (or unlucky) you will see a puma.
Worth it? – Absolutely. The place is gorgeous, from the lakes to the valleys. The end of each part of the W is just spectacular, whether it is the Frances Valley, Lago Grey or the three peaks, it’s simply stunning. If you are thinking about doing this trek, I couldn’t recommend it more.
