Torres del Paine

Friday, Mar 14 – Day 88

The bus picked us up at 7:20 am, and we got to the front gate of the park at about 10:30. Interestingly, you register going in, but you don’t check out when you leave. This means that they really don’t monitor the hikers. We registered for 8 days, but even if we’re not out on day 20, they won’t know that we’re late and won’t come looking for us. Anyway, after checking in, we get back on the bus and ride for another hour to get to a catamaran launch. Once on the boat, it’s a ½ hour to cross Lago Pehoe. At about 1:00 pm, we’re off the boat at Refugio Paine Grande and ready to begin the venture.

Our first day is scheduled to be light, only 3.5 km to Campamento Italiano. This should take about 3 hours, and will set us up to go into Valley Francais in the morning. There are two trail-heads that begin at Paine Grande, and we head off on the one that’s headed to Italiano. Most of the maps that I’ve seen in South America are pretty poor, and the maps that we have with us are no exception. Red lines define the hiking trails and a yellow dashed-line defines the horse trails. But they are not to scale and not very precise when measuring against other landmarks.

Within a few minutes, we begin to find horse shit on the trail and determine that we are on the wrong one, so we turn around. About an hour into the hike, we find a small lake on our left, which I know is wrong. It turns out that the horse trail and hiking trail to Italiano overlap at certain points, though that’s not the way they are shown on the map. We have been hiking for over an hour on the wrong trail and have to back-track. It took us six hours to cover a total of 10 miles today, and we eventually reached Campamento Italiano. This is not the way we wanted to start, but we finished at our intended destination.

Campamentos are unimproved campsites that have nothing more than a latrine, but the camping is free. The tent went up easily, and the sleeping bag and mat were pretty comfortable. Throughout the evening I kept hearing thunder, so I thought that we might be getting rain - just our luck. But it never did rain, and I slept pretty well.