We spent all of Monday preparing for our 5 day, 76km camping and trekking of the 'W' route in Torres Del Paine National Park. We packed our backpacks with sleeping bags, tents, inflatable 'ultra-comfy' sleeping mats, stove, fuel, food, clothes and what came to be the most essential part of our kit.... waterproofs and bin liners! We were quite excited the night before but this was whole-heartedly dashed when we awoke at 6am the following morning to the sound of torrential rain. Not ever to be defeated, we gallantly boarded our bus for the 2 hour journey to the park entrance, hoping and praying the weather would let up. We took a 30 min boat trip to our start point along with several other travellers and began our trek in the gloomy weather to our first campsite, 11km away.
What can we say about the walk... well....it rained. It rained some more. It absolutely poured it down, and then it rained some more!!!Three hours later we arrived soggily and cheerily (not) at our little campsite on the edge of Lago Grey. Just to set the scene it was raining, there was some icy snow on the ground in places, it was very cold, grey, and there were icebergs slowly drifting past our campsite on the nearby lake
(see photo!). We pitched our little two man tent, crammed in and changed into the only dry clothes we had... long-johns, socks and flip-flops before joining others on the campsite under a little shelter to cook our dinner. We had an 'exciting' dinner of packet rice and packet soup which took about an hour to cook on our tiny stove, but we passed the time laughing with the others and all fantasising about roast dinners, pizzas, curry, sticky toffee pudding and warm custard and more! After dinner, and with little else to do in the pouring rain we dived back into our tent, awkwardly sorted our stuff out for some time because of limited space (Ash being 6ft obviously taking up most of it!), wrapped up in jumpers, woolly hats and gloves and climbed into our down sleeping bags....phew for that one!! We had a good old laugh at our soggy predicament before rapidly deciding that we hate camping and never want to do it again!
Somewhat familiarly we again awoke to the sound of rain. Ash went and made breakfast consisting of porridge with powdered skimmed milk and water from the lake (scrummy!). Actually, it is amazing how much you can enjoy something that would ordinarily be aweful when you're cold and hungry! Ash also gave Bi her first present for the day... a soggy birthday card and a sizeable toblerone bar and boy was she pleased to see that! (the other two presents were a tub of pringles and a bottle of wine presented during the day........a raincheck has been taken on the Louis Vuitton handbag!!!). We climbed back into our damp clothes and wet socks and shoes.... yuk! then packed away the camping kit and set off on the second leg of our trek which took us 11km back the way we had already come the day before.
The rain stopped briefly in the morning and we managed to get some nice views of the surrounding mountains and lakes before it started to drizzle again and the dark clouds returned. We arrived back at our start point from the previous day and were about to trudge along onto the next trail at about 2pm before we spotted a 5 day weather forecast pinned up on a wooden board. To our dismay, it was rain, 100% cloud cover and winds increasing to 50mph!! After some debate over a hot chocolate cooked in our little stove (this gave us at least 30mins thinking time it was so slow) we decided to cut our losses - we were obviously getting some kind of sign here! We don't like to be defeated but the thought of camping in the pouring rain with no views over the following 3 days seemed like a lot of effort for not much reward! For us, the highlight of the trek was to be the views and so without them it seemed little point to us to continue.So, we waited a few hours and caught the next boat and bus back to Puerto Natales late last night... just pipping two others to the last two beds in our lovely warm, cosy and comfortable guesthouse. On the bus transfer home we had some luck at least... the cloud broke momentarily and we got a full view of the 3 torres peaks that this national park is famous for and which for us was the main attraction on the trek. What a bonus!
We awoke this morning after a lovely warm, cosy sleep to a nice home-cooked breakfast. As we write this, Bi has just this second popped off to make us a cup of tea to have with some cake. We both feel we have learned something out of this little experience. That it's ok to give up. Usually we would not admit defeat and persevere, but in this case we would have both been miserable and that's not the point of the trip. On the plus side, we now have a blank canvas for the next week to go and do some other things.PS: Neither of us ever want to see a tent again!
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