The minibus going to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine was a little late coming to the hotel to pick us up. There was a lone Italian guy waiting in the lobby with us for the same tour. The owner was nice enough to switch to a English language channel for our benefit.
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It was a two-hour ride on gravel roads going to Torres del Paine. We could see the mountains getting closer and closer. There aren't many large animals in Patagonia. Aside from the sheep and cattle, one would typically be able to see some guanacos, some ostriches, and some condors. We passed a herd of sheep on the way to the park. We stopped. The city slickers like me got all excited, got out of the bus to snap pictures, and to watch the shepherd dogs chase after the sheep. One guy in the bus wasn't too interested, "I grew up on a sheep farm." Soon after we were inside the national park, we came upon a large group of guanacos. The guanaco is related to the domesticated llama so closely associated with the Andes. There must be some forty or fifty of them. Even though they would allow humans to get very close, I made use of my zoom lens and kept my distance. Soon after, we made yet another unexpected stop when we saw some ostriches - mother ostrich and baby ostriches. They are really flightless rheas, but to my untrained eyes, they looked just like ostriches. They were a lot more careful and wouldn't let people get close at all. On the way back from the park in the afternoon, we spotted some Andean condors, but they were too far to be photographed with my puny zoom lens.
I must say that the tour was fairly well designed though fast paced, hitting the best scenic spots in the national park. The true hikers and campers would come to Torres del Paine to hike the circuit trial for a week or at least stretches of it for a few days. The beautiful scenery certainly makes the hard work worthwhile. I am not much of a hiker, and I don't particularly enjoy hiking. The difficult trails in Torres del Paine are probably more than I can handle too. So I am perfectly fine with the minibus tour. I am the spoiled kind who wants to be on the peak to enjoy the view but not the tough hike up. It's the downhill skier philosophy. People should build complicated contraptions so that they can quickly get to the few minutes of thrills without the hours of hard climb. Nothing more than Jungfraujoch epitomizes this attitude. From the resort town of Interlaken, Switzerland, to the peak of Jungfraujoch is a rise of ten thousand feet. Imagine how only a selected few would be able to hike up to the top. However, the Swiss have built the world's highest railway there, tunneling through kilometers of solid rocks. The trains can now take you from Interlaken to Jungfraujoch in a matter of two to three hours all in the comfort of heated railway cars.
The less satisfying aspect of a guided tour without a guide was that I
was never too clear about exactly where we were and that I could never
hear the interesting stories or statistics behind the things we were
seeing. Most of the people on the bus were foreigners speaking little
Spanish, so communication was a little difficult too. The bus driver
simply stopped at various places, told us how much time we had, and
let us out to walk around by ourselves. On the other hand, the
beautiful scenery spoke for itself more than eloquently and needed no
explanation.
Looping around the park, the towers of Paine were visible from different angles, sometimes closer, sometimes farther. We stopped at Cascada del Paine, a small water fall at the foot of Torres del Paine. The national park is named after these granite peaks that shoot up 2800 meters into the sky. The water fall itself was not that big, but it was really pretty with a tiny rainbow. Not being able to communicate with the driver meant that I couldn't ask him why the water in the several lakes that we had just passed by were of different colors, from milky green to milky blue.
The most memorable thing at the water fall, however, was the incredibly strong wind. (It's much worse than the wind tunnels at the foot of the Green Building or around McGregor high-rise at MIT on a very windy day.) I don't know what the exact wind speed was. Let's just say that it's so strong the skins on your face flapped with the wind. Don't even think about putting down a jacket. It'd get blown away immediately. Loaded bags do slightly better. To walk or even to stand still, you'd have to lean into the wind. It wasn't just a gush that came once in a while, but a constant gale. It's a wonder that the land was covered in a lush coat of plants, clinging tightly to the ground.
Lunch was at a beautiful lake-side campsite. It's still very windy but not nearly as bad. We sat with the Italian guy whom we met earlier at the hotel, and a Tahitian woman whom I had thought was French at first. She had been to Ushuaia and was heading towards Moreno next. We traded travel information. Her assessment of Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego was that it's just trees. We gave her some information about how to get to El Calafate. The Irish couple on the bus told us, or rather Ed, that Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires had inexpensive Tango shows. I didn't socialize at all because I still couldn't speak without caughing violently. My cough was hard enough to keep down with lorzenges. So I pretty much shut up during the whole trip.
The last stop on our minibus tour was Lago Grey. I did not know what we were going to see at all. The driver pointed to a trail, marked El Mirado, and off we went. We walked a short distance and crossed a suspension bridge over a small river. The bridge looked pretty sturdy, but the posted sign said that the maximum capacity is two persons at a time. As we descended on the other side of the hill, the beach of a lake started to come into view - Lago Grey.
The lake rests in an elongated gorge, probably carved out by the
forces of the glaciers in another age. From the beach we could see
the glaciers coming down from the valleys in the distant end of the
gorge. The beach itself is covered in fine egg-sized rocks as if someone had
deliberately paved it. On the map the lake extends into a narrower
river over where the beach is, but at the moment, the riverbed on
the beach-side seems to be dry. From the gorge wall, the beach
didn't look all that big despite the understanding that each tiny dot
on the great expanse was a person walking across. It must be an example of
fractal illusion - things look the same at different scales.
Confused, the brain had mistaken its estimation of distance. It was a
long walk from one end of the beach to the other. There at the other
end stood a sculpted piece of iceberg, curiously beautiful, eerily
blue and transparent, glistening in the sun.
The wind from the glacier whipped water droplets onto my face so hard it hurt. I pulled up the hood on my parka and walked slightly sideways with my back to the wind. Between the punishing wind and the uneven stones under my feet, I needed the concentration to just walk. The surf crashed and the wind blowed with such violence, yet all seemed so quiet. People dotted the beach, walking along the shoreline, yet the open expanse made me feel so small and so alone. I walked in silence. I could not help but allow myself to be taken in, to be immersed, and to be overwhelmed by what's around me. It's a woman so beautiful, yet so harsh, so cold, so distant.
At a dinner with friends in Cambridge shortly after the trip, Ed asked me what I thought was the most impressive natural scenery on our trip. I said it was El Mirado at Lake Grey. He thought I was crazy to think that. I agree. If you want some practical and sensible recommendations, you should probably listen to him. What I have so clumsily tried to describe to you is not a lake, but a state of mind.
Ed and I hiked the trail on the other gorge wall to get a better view of more pieces of icebergs. By the time we got back, it started to rain. It was almost perfect timing. Weather turned bad just as we were finishing the trip.
I was all tired and still coughing at the end of the tour. I thought I'd go straight to the hotel and recuperate after the rough ride back to Puerto Natales. The odd thing was that by the time we got back in town, I felt all okay. No more fever. I was still having a runny nose but the cough was much less severe. I could speak half a sentence without coughing. My body seemed to be winning the battle. I was very pleased with the sudden improvement in my physical condition.
We went to Restaurant Crystal Ed went for dinner yesterday. We ordered salmon, figuring that seafood couldn't go wrong in this port city. The Irish couple came in. Several other people on our tour came in. Suddenly, it seemed like half of the people on our bus were in the same restaurant, and half of us were ordering salmon. Over dinner, Ed told me about his adventure around town yesterday, while I was lying in bed at the hotel sweating out my fever. There were a lot of young people on the streets in the bright summer evening, he told me, people who weren't there earlier when we walked around town. It seemed that Ed had turned a few heads, girls' in particular, who would look at him and say hola to him. He was rather flattered by all the attention. Too bad he didn't speak any Spanish, or very nice conversations would have ensured, which might be followed by various other nice things. I was a little incredulous of the report. I didn't doubt the facts, only the interpretation. I thought it was just his imagination, and that he might have been the one with the fever. Well, none of the things he told me could be independently verified, so I am only retelling the story here. In any case, we agreed that Puerto Natales should be worth a second visit on a summer Saturday evening.
