The Next Little While...

Hello blog readers! We wanted to give you a heads up and let you know that we will be missing in action for the next 3 weeks traveling about Chile and Argentina through mid February. So that means there will be no new posts until the 3rd week of the Leap Month of 2008. We will take copious notes and plenty of photos, so hold onto your hats for the next little while...we will be back.

Our Grand Adventure - 1 of 10

**A note to our readers. "Our Grand Adventure" entails 10 blog posts. Due to the web page limitations of Blogspot, only 7 of the posts appear on this screen. (And as we post more posts this month and next more posts of our adventure will be pushed into the back pages of this blog.) So in order to see the higher numbered posts you have two options: scroll to the bottom of this screen and click the "Older Posts" link or pick and click on whichever post you want to read from the menu on the right hand side of the screen. It is as easy and smooth as a Kuntsmann beer on a hot day in Chile. Enjoy!


We are back to the doldrums of life in Temuco. Afternoon cafes, jostling for tomatoes at the corner vegetable market, walks to Jumbo for cream cheese, Pisco, and wine, and succulent desserts from the local German bakery. Yes, it is tough duty to be back in Temcuo. We have one week left before we move on over to Argentina. Sarah is conducting more interviews, and I am busy contemplating the big questions of life in Spanish, i.e. “I have already ordered a hot chocolate with coffee, thank you.”, “When will you have more of the chocolate cake with fresh whipped cream, tomorrow?”, and “Do you all have any bacon?”

These questions and other important ones like: “Do I have time for a siesta this afternoon?” need some time and attention, and I know that I am just the person to provide such answers. But if truth be told, while Sarah has been off working each day, I have been recovering from another bout of post adventure blues. Only this recovery has taken longer because our recent adventure was grand. In fact, it wasn’t just grand, it was fabulous.

The days were filled with activities from sun up to sun down. We had wine and/or Pisco Sours at every dinner, oftentimes enjoying a cold beer at lunch. We went hiking and backpacking in Torres del Paine. We saw condors high in the alpine sky and boated out onto Ocean islands to see Humboldt Penguins, Red legged Cormorants and Flightless Steamer Ducks. We braved wind storms and rain bursts, endured the heat and chilling cold, and enjoyed vistas of mountains and panoramas of the Pacific. We met couples and families from Germany, Holland, Belgium, England, the U.S. and Chile. We watched the sun set after midnight on the Straights of Magellan and dined like kings on steak tartar, pork shoulders, Congrio, oysters, Salmon, steak tenderloins, fresh pastas and even Beaver. We took more pictures than a National Geographic expedition and probably wish we had taken more, given the multifarious tones of the Austral light. We played cards and slept on airplanes and made our way through some of the most desolate wind-swept areas of the earth. We were awestruck by the size and immensity of the glaciers we saw and we most certainly fell into bed each night exhausted from the activities of the day. We did all of this in less than 2 weeks and as our travels came to a close last Friday, we all wished that we had booked 2 more weeks of travel in Patagonia.

Because we have so many photos from our whirlwind adventure, we have decided that it would be fun not only to post a number of them on the blog entries that follow but also to give our readers a link or two for compilation albums on Snapfish. This way you can see more snapshots of the trip, lingering your day away with views of mountains, vistas and wildlife of Chile. Look for these links on the last blog post for this trip. (Post #10)

Instead of one long and rambling blog post that details the day to day, we have decided to combine posts with different parts of the trip. We hope that you enjoy the musings and the photos. To give you all an idea of the overall structure of the trip, here is the itinerary we followed:

Day 1: Bruce and Jane arrived, lunch and dinner in Temuco.
Day 2: Drove to Villarrica for fresh juice, lunch in Pucón, continued drive south to Puerto Octay.
Day 3: Hiked to waterfall near Puerto Octay. Once in Frutillar. Dinner at Hotel.
Day 4: Flight to Punta Arenas, lunch in Puerto Natales, drove to Torres del Paine.
Day 5: Boat ride across Lago Pehoé to start on the W Trail, quick hike up to Lago Grey, then hiked over to Cuernos, passing the Glaciar Francés.
Day 6: Continued on W Trail from Cuernos to Chilenos, including hike to the Torres.
Day 7: Hiked out from Chilenos, caught a bus back to the car, short 5 km hike to scenic spot on Lago Grey, drove, drove, drove, and drove to Hostería del Payne (amazing views).
Day 8: Drove out of the Torres area with lunch in Puerto Natales. Dinner in Punta Arenas including a drink in the Shackleton Bar.
Day 9: Bummed around Punta Arenas, flight to Puerto Montt, night in Puerto Varas. New Year’s Eve dinner in a fun, family owned Italian restaurant. Fireworks on the lake front.
Day 10: Drove to Chiloé, visited Penguin colony, stayed on the bay in Dalcahue with a wood fired hot tub.
Day 11: Drove around Chiloé visiting the old churches and a late afternoon pizza and beer with one of the most outgoing waiters in all of Chile.
Day 12: Drove back to the mainland with lunch in Puerto Varas. Drove up to Valdivia for the night with dinner at the famous Café Haussmann. Crudos and Tártaro!
Day 13: Drove back to Temcuo, lunch at our favorite restaurant, and Bruce and Jane departed for Santiago and the U.S.
Day 14: Slept.

Arrival and Puerto Octay - Adventure 2 of 10

The LAN plane arrives in Temuco, left. Bruce and Jane, with Sarah, on arrival, right.

Our adventure started in Temuco at an Argentine Parrilla (think grilled meats) down the street from our house. The steak was excellent but they did not have any Argentine wine. So we had beers and Chilean wine along with cuts of meat that were top shelf. Beef ribs, rump steak, pork tenderloin and a filet mignon. We then dropped Bruce and Jane off at their hotel for their inaugural siesta.

That night we had a small Christmas celebration meal with a Spinach salad, roasted asparagus and sautéed shrimp. We had a Rose Malbec wine from Argentina (leftover from our Bariloche trip) and a Palo Alto blend of Cabernet, Carmenere and Syrah. After dinner we played some bridge and then called it a night.

On our drive to Puerto Octay, we went through Villarrica, Pucón, Lican Ray, and Panguipulli. We took some back roads and the national highway. The sun was out in its full glory, the windows were down as we drove through towns and we saw pasture after pasture of rolling hills, tall eucalyptus trees and roaming cattle. We delighted in the fact that it was Christmas Eve and we were in shorts.

Bruce had organized for us to stay just outside Puerto Octay for Christmas Eve and Christmas before heading down to Tierra del Fuego and Torres del Paine. His decision was a smart one as the Hotel Centinela had an old world feel to it. Originally built as a summer home for 3 families from Santiago, it sits on a peninsula in Lago Llanquihue. Back in the day, the families had to take a lake steamer to get to the house. Nowadays there is a gravel road a little over 3 kilometers long that takes you from the main road to the hotel’s doorstep. The old house has been completely refurbished maintaining all the wood floors and ceilings, and the owners have added on clusters of cabanas.

The manager in charge on Christmas Eve was a fellow from Belgium who was our host, chef and story teller for the night. If you asked him a question in Spanish, he replied in Spanish. If you asked him a question in English, he replied in perfect English. There was a family of Germans whose stay coincided with ours, and we noticed that he spoke perfect German with them. At the end of dinner, he asked all of us to join him for a drink in the main room replete with old, soft leather sofas and a timber framed ceiling. Most all of us had Cognac while we welcomed in Christmas. During our conversation we asked the manager how many languages he spoke. He replied that he spoke 6: French, Dutch, Spanish, English, German and Catalan. (This last one, for those of you who may be asking, is the language of the people of Barcelona. The fact that this Belgian man could speak it fluently would make our Barcelonian friend Oriol proud!) At 12 midnight, the manager’s wife came out of the back room carrying baby Jesus. She placed him in the crèche scene’s manger and we all wished one another a Merry Christmas, finished our cognacs and went to our beds.

The meals at the hotel were nothing short of wonderful as the dining room looked out over Lago Llanquihue. Each time we took a forkful of meat, potatoes, or salad, we could look out and see the morning or evening light embrace the volcanoes and mountains on the Eastern shore. While we didn’t have the time to swim in the lake or the hotel’s pool, we did take time on Christmas day to explore the local area. Driving the back roads along the lake we came across tucked away bed and breakfasts, old ranches and wood framed churches.

We took a short hike to see some waterfalls and passed a few families. The waterfall was maybe 6 stories high and created its own micro climate. On the way back down to the car, Bruce told each family that we passed to “Beware the crocodiles near the waterfall!” Upon hearing this, the faces of a few of the kids and a couple of the moms grew long with worry until Bruce laughed and wished them a Merry Christmas. Later that day we had Christmas Pisco Sours in Frutillar as we sat gazing at Volcán Osorno.





Two views of Volcán Osorno.








Christmas Eve dinner.












3 views from the Hotel Centinela dining room of the Volcáns that surround Lago Llanquihue and 1 view of the green fields outside of Puerto Octay.

The Flight - 3 of 10

On the morning of December 26th, we rose early and headed down to Puerto Montt. The flight to Punta Arenas, a town on the southern tip of the continent and on the Straights of Magellan, lasts a little over two hours. If you ever get the chance to fly to Punta Arenas, make sure you reserve a seat on the left side of the plane as you fly south (and a seat on the right side of the plane as you fly north). This is important because if there is a break in the clouds, you will experience views of the Andes that are otherworldly.

We were very lucky on our flight down to have clear weather. Every time we looked out the window, we were blown away by the mountains, the volcanoes, and the Gulf of Ancud which is immense. We saw the grand island of Chiloé. We saw ships pulling into the port town of Aisén. And then we saw what the Chileans refer to as the Campo de Hielo – Field of Ice. (There are actually 2 of them – a Northern branch and a Southern branch.) Glaciers and white and mountain peaks and fjords and more glaciers. Your eye starts to follow a glacier and the thought comes to you “Wow, that is big!” and then a minute passes and you realize what you were just looking at was in fact just one arm of the main glacier and then the thought comes to you “Holy Smokes! Jiminy Crickets! This glacier is enormous!”

Check out the pictures below and let me know what exclamations come to you.
The first picture in the upper left is of a volcano
and the other five are of glaciers in the Campos de Hielo.

The Drive to Puerto Natales - 4 of 10

We arrived in Punta Arenas to grey skies. After the stunning views from the plane as we flew over the Campo del Hielo, it was a bit of a let down to have such overcast skies. As we were checking out the rental car in the parking lot of the airport, it began to rain. Not a hard rain but sprinkles and wind and everything started to get wet. We huddled in the car as our rental car worker went through some of the details of the contract, and he told us to be careful opening our doors in Torres del Paine because the wind can pull the door off the car! We shook hands, and he wished us a fond journey.

As we became familiar with the funny French design of the Renault (you have to lift up on the stick in order to put it into reverse), the rain came down slightly harder. And as we began to back out from the parking spot, our rental car worker friend came running back and asked if he could have the payment up front – in cash. Our welcome to the south went from sunny glacier views to overcast skies and rain to the sinking feeling that we were being scammed. Who had ever heard of being charged up front for a rental car?

We paid the cost of the car and quickly got onto the highway headed to Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine. Within minutes we were out of town and onto the beginning of the steppes of Patagonia. Wide open landscape, wide open skies, fast moving clouds, mile after mile of fences in perfect condition, wind, wind and more wind, hardly any cars, straight roads, sheep, Darwin Rheas (cousin to the emu and ostrich), and rolling hills.

The drive took 2 plus hours to Puerto Natales, and at one point we were stopped at a police check point. As we pulled up and rolled down our windows, the policeman asked where we were from. We said the United States and he smiled and said, “Down here in Patagonia, the winds are so strong that they are a danger. Drive carefully.” And with that he waived us on. As we pulled away we laughed at how none of us had experienced such a police stop in all the countries we have been in.

But the officer wasn’t kidding. The winds down south are like none other. Trees grow in one direction only because of the wind. Oftentimes you even see trees with branches on only one side of the trunk to the effect that even when there is no wind, the tree looks as though it was battling a powerful gale. Later in the day on our way into Torres del Paine we stopped at a scenic lookout point and the wind almost knocked us off our feet. Not to mention that the wind almost pulled the doors off the car! Thanks rental car guy for the warning; buying a car door in Southern Patagonia can't be cheap!

A few pics.

The road on the way to Puerto Natales (left).
Two shots from Natales (above and lower left).
The road into Torres del Paine (below right).
Jane and the wind! (bottom right and left)

The Drive into Torres del Paine - 5 of 10

The drive into Parque Nacional Torres del Paine is grand. Let me just say now that I will probably be boring you with all the superlatives used to describe this park. I know that it is cliché to say that there is nothing else quite like it, but maybe this cliché started with travel writers trying to give a sense of what this park is like. Everyday a different beauty of the park was revealed to us and everyday we looked up at the mountains and were taken away by their beauty. The Torres del Paine and the surrounding peaks are exceptional.

The landscape moves from flat and rolling, wide open steppes near Punta Arenas to more dramatic mountains just north of Puerto Natales. As you drive into the park (along the new road) the valleys and mesas of the mountains are numerous. Then you spot a corner of a rich, sky blue lake. Then you round a bend and are blasted with wind and then you top a small ridge and you see the entire lake and then you drive another two minutes, round a couple of turns and you see these spires of multi-colored rock shoot straight up into the sky. Your mouth drops and you continue on until you reach a scenic pull off. The wind nearly pulls the door off its hinges as you get out to take a photo. When you finally get out of the car you are almost blown off your feet by the wind and you snap a few photos of the spires and the peaks and then you turn and see the rest of the blue lake. It is immense just like everything else around you. And as you drive closer to the park, you want to take photo after photo.

Torres del Paine is the name for the entire park but in many of the pictures what you see are a couple of mountain peaks, called the Cerros, next to the multi-colored, horned peaks, called the Cuernos, and then hidden behind the Cuernos are the actual Torres (Towers). Many times when people speak of the Torres, they may be referring to both the entire park and/or the Torres themselves. Many of the photos on the post only capture the Cerros and the Cuernos as the Torres themselves were almost always hidden behind the clouds while we were there. The constant cloud cover around the Torres made the park all the more mysterious and enticing as you never knew when you would be able to look up and see something obscured the minute before by the constant cloud cover.

With or without the clouds the austere beauty of the Cerros, Cuernos and Torres along with the surrounding mountains, valleys, lakes and glaciers is what makes this park so incredible. The area around the park, the intense colors of the lakes, the wind, the fast changing weather, the clouds on the peaks and the general other worldly feel reminded me a lot of the landscape of Tibet. North of Lhasa, Tibet, there is a lake called Sky Lake (Nam Tso) where I was lucky enough to spend one night. Over the course of that 24 hour period in July of 2000 Sky Lake seemed to offer a new panorama every hour because of the weather that moved through. The lake was enormous and reputedly required 21 days to walk around its perimeter. Torres del Paine was like that area around Sky Lake in Tibet: nonstop changing of the weather from wind to rain to sun to heat to wind to clouds to blue skies. And the resulting fleeting beauties of nature made me want to sit down and smoke. (Of course, I don’t smoke. Nonetheless, the urge was present. Instead, I usually took multiple photos.)

That first night we were lucky enough to stay on a small island on Lago Pehoé, a lake whose turquoise blue color was so vibrant that in some photos it looks like the sky. The location of the hotel was prime with unobstructed views of the Cuernos and on a clear day we speculated that you could see the Torres from the hotel as well. We ate dinner and the next morning’s breakfast in the dining room which was on the edge of the lake overlooking the lake and the mountains.

The pictures.

Above left, Bruce taking a fine photo from the scenic overlook where the wind almost blew our doors off.
Above right, the view of the Cerros, Cuernos and Torres (behind the clouds) from the Río Serrano Valley.
Below right, another view from the Río Serrano Valley of mountains outside of the Park.
Below left, Paul in the wide windy valley.

Above left, Jane and Sarah on the bridge to Hotel Pehoé.
Above right, Hotel Pehoé with the Cuernos in the background.

Below left, Lago Pehoé's entrancing turquoise waters.
Below right, another evening shot of the Cuernos.

Hiking the 'W' - 6 of 10

After our night’s stay on Lago Pehoé we embarked on our 2 day hike of the W Trail starting with a boat ride across Pehoé. There are two main hiking/trekking routes in the Torres del Paine Park. One is called the circuit and takes 7 to 10 days to hike around the Torres, Cuernos and Cerros. The other is called the W and can be done in 3 to 5 days. We only had 2 and a half days for hiking, so we opted to do a lower cased U or a J depending on how you like to write your letters.

If you think of the Cuernos as center point (they are the peaks and spires that are purple and white in the picture to the left), then Lago and Glacier Grey along with the Cerros are on the far and middle left and the Torres are on the right, and up in the middle (the middle point of a W) is the Frances Glacier. Many people start their hiking on either end of the W and follow the trail – either beginning with a hike up to the Torres or beginning with a boat ride on Lago Grey and hiking back down towards Lago Pehoé. We opted to start right in between Lago Grey and Frances Glacier (or to use the W one last time, at the left bottom tip) at the Paine Grande Lodge on Lago Pehoé.
















As good an up close panorama of the Torres as I could get.
On the left is Glaciar Grey and the Cerros and Cuernos (The Cerros are in the left foreground).
On the right are the Cuernos and behind them are the Torres with Glaciar Frances just visible on the left.


After disembarking from the boat, which was jam packed full of day hikers, we decided to leave our packs at the Paine Grande Lodge and take a short hike up to a look out over Lago Grey. The hike up to the lake was our first taste in the Torres wind. We would be walking along, the sun shining, the rufous collared sparrows singing and wham! We would be hit with a blast of wind. The wind was so strong that we at times had to steady ourselves on the trail – keep in mind that we didn’t even have our backpacks on.

We made it up to the lake but were still such a distance from the glacier that we couldn’t see it. However, we were able to see the chucks of ice that were floating in the lake that had fallen off the glacier some time before. And as you may have guessed, the lake itself is a murky shade of grey. We headed back down the trail, back to the Paine Grande Lodge to pick up our bags and have some lunch.

After lunch, we started our trek to the Cuernos Refugio, the place where we would be staying the night. The W trail in Torres has a series of buildings called refugios, where you can buy a space to bunk or camp for the night. They had places where you can cook your own food or order dinner from the kitchen. The refugios have showers and have rooms with 8 bunks. They sell wine and even offer Pisco Sours. Of course everything has its price, but the network offers you the choice of packing in all your own food or making your experience more akin to Nepal where you trek from guesthouse to guesthouse only needing to worry about day snacks, water and enough money to buy your next meal. In Torres del Paine, because of the price mark-ups, our nightly concern hinged more on whether we had enough money to buy that next bottle of wine. (Good thing we brought our cash reserves!)

14 kilometers and 5 hours after lunch we arrived at the Los Cuernos Refugio. But along the way we were buffeted by the winds, treated to two beautiful alpine lakes of Lago Skottberg and Lago Nordenskjold, and frozen in awe by the immense size and beauty of the Glaciar Frances. The hike was long, blisters were forming on all of our feet, and our lunch had been too small, such that by the time we reached the Cuernos Refugio all we wanted to do was have something, anything to revive the spirit. As it turned out, we needed showers, Piscos, wine and dinner before feeling completely restored. Our roommates for the night were a Japanese couple and their Chilean guide, and the view of the Cuernos from the Refugio dining room was incredible. We played a few hands of bridge before turning in for the night.











































Starting top left and moving clockwise: Lago Pehoé, Sarah on the trail, Lago Nordenskjold, Glaciar Frances (bottom two as well), view of the Cuernos from the refugio, and an alpine lake.











The next morning, we set out early for the Chilenos Refugio. We were warned that there would be 2 big inclines on the morning hike. We quickly met them and pressed on. Later in the morning we had to ford a wide mountain stream jumping from boulder to boulder with our packs. All in all it was not too hard other than the following two facts: there was no marking as to where to cross and had Bruce not pushed on ahead and come back to lend a hand at the widest jump, we could have had at least one soaking foot. (Thanks Bruce!)

The late morning and early afternoon brought a hike across a southern facing slope which offered little shade from the hot sun. The trail continued to gain in elevation until we reached the Ascencio Valley where the Chilenos Refugio is located. Once we turned into this valley, the wind was fierce. As we hiked closer to our destination for the night we could hear the rush of the Río Ascensio below the trail and the trail began to slope quickly down.

We arrived around 1:45 in the afternoon. We claimed our bunks and had a brief respite before attempting the hike up to see the famed Torres. This day’s hike had also been around 14 kilometers during which Sarah had slightly twisted her knee. The weather in the valley was colder than on the south facing mountain side. Sarah deciding to stay behind at the Refugio, so Bruce, Jane and I packed some water, donned on our cold weather gear and began the 2 hour hike to the Torres.

Chilenos Refugio and the Río Ascencio.

As we made our way up the trail, we passed streams of day hikers heading back to their buses to hotels in other parts of the park. The weather was at times windy and cold and spitting rain. The trail followed the river up the valley through meadows and forests. Roughly halfway there, we met a couple from the Netherlands whom I had met in Villarrica the month before. They were coming back from the Torres with their two small children. We spoke with them for a few minutes, said our hellos and expressed our delight in seeing each other on the trail. Bruce and I pushed on as Jane, nursing a bruised tailbone from a Christmas day fall, decided to return to Chilenos Refugio with this couple. (We later learned they had hot chocolate and cookies! If only I would have known…)

After another 10 or 15 minutes, the trail spilt in two, with the left fork leading up a boulder field and the right fork continuing up the valley. To get to the lookout for the Torres, you have to scramble up the boulder field, so we headed left. After 35 or 40 minutes of hustling up through the boulders we came to the lookout. It continued to be windy, cold and spitting rain. There were a couple dozen people huddling around each other, snapping photos and otherwise wishing they had packed another jacket.

The tips of the Torres were shrouded in clouds, but their height and vertical walls made them a sight worth savoring. Below them is a small glacial lake with what looked to be a retreating glacier. The mirador (scenic lookout) where we were standing seemed to be a Glacial moraine from long ago, and Bruce and I had our pictures taken by fellow, friendly tourist. We took in one last look before turning around and hurrying our way back to the Refugio in order to get to dinner on time. (These refugios can be strict!)

Pictures from the trail on the way to the Torres and at the Torres.

That night we ate dinner with a family from the U.S. who has been living in Santiago for the past 3 years. The mom and one of the three children were birders so we talked about Flightless Steamer Ducks and Torrent Ducks among many others. And by the end of the meal, I was being taught by the kids how to play Egyptian Rat Screw, a card game of speedy card slapping. After playing this fun game, Sarah and I taught the whole family how to play “Oh Shaw!”, the Warren family classic.

The next morning we headed back down the trail and back to hosteria living. The weather was rainy and slightly cold. We slowly hiked the 2 hours down and caught a bus and negotiated a van ride back to our car where we promptly ate lunch. Afterwards we drove over to Lago Grey in hopes of seeing the Glacier.

Pictures from the Trail.