Covering 17 Jan 2019 - 18 Jan 2019
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| Lago Sarmiento |
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| Cascada Paine |
The Torres del Paine National Park covers 1,810
square kilometres, it’s a huge area of wilderness and we had to drive through
an empty landscape for an hour or so before we even reached the entrance and
paid our fee. Beginning on tarmac we
were pretty soon back on dusty dirt tracks and we were fortunate to have a good
comfortable vehicle to travel in. Fortunately,
Heather and I have a world wide driving insurance so that we can avoid the
extra insurance rental companies always try to press upon renters to pay for. Bonnie and Newt don’t have it and so we,
usually me, drives. It’s good, it means
if I see something I like, I can stop while everybody else has to let me know
if they’ve seen anything of interest. To
be honest you could walk through here and not see all the views.
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| Bonnie and Heather - for scale in front of the Torres |
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| and the Torres themselves |
The whole area is incredibly beautiful especially
bathed in sunshine with puffy white clouds breaking up the blue sky which is
just what we had. It’s an area of
mountains, lakes, and on the tops retreating glaciers and snow caps. We are after all, a long way south. The lakes come in different
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| seriously windy at lake level |
colours, not the
reds that we saw in Bolivia but many shades of green and blue. The ones I like most are the milky pale azure
blue of glacial meltwater coloured with what’s called rock flour. This is the finest powder of ground up stone
and is formed by the action of hundreds of tons of glacier grinding along on
the rock at the bottom of the glaciers.
It’s so fine that it’s held in suspension in the water and in itself
isn’t blue but it, the water and light conspire to make it appear so.
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| yes, it seems you really do see them from everywhere |
This is a wonderful and photogenic landscape but I
do have some difficulties with superlatives and try not to use the same one too
often. I do wonder though what passes
for a superlative with for instance the person in Seattle who when I ordered a
coffee, described it as “awesome”. The
Torres are awesome, a cup of brown flavoured water, ain’t.
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| and even worse up a hill - a real bad hair day |
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| Lago Nordenskjold |
The various lakes are at different levels, often
with a narrow and treacherous looking set of fast rapids between them. Apart from the odd ferry, and I mean one or
possibly three of them, there are no boats to be seen. No sailing at all. The centrepiece attractions though are The
Torres themselves, granite pillars rising more than 2000 metres above the land
around them. They’re strangely striped
horizontally with two or three bands of dark and light stone and we hear,
regularly swathed in cloud for days on end.
Our luck held as usual. We had
two days in the park, the first sunny and clear all day and the second, not so
sunny but still clear. The Torres are
so very distinctive and are visible from many different places so naturally I
have a photograph or two of them.
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| The Torres again - note the banding |
I had written in earlier blogs about seeing Llamas,
Alpacas and Vicunas. The one animal in
the same family grouping found in South America which we hadn’t seen were
Guanacos and here they were a’plenty.
They look a bit like a less elegant vicuna, three to four feet high at
the shoulders with a long neck perched upon them and a rather more shaggy coat.
Vicuna are not usually seen below about
10,000 feet so there was no misidentification here. We were driving through this yes, awesome
landscape with the only life apart from plants being the other vehicle
inhabitants and suddenly a guanaco, then another and then a lot. One always seems to stand on high ground
watching, presumably for Puma, their natural predator while the others graze
but we were able to
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| Guanaco standing guard |
get quite close in a vehicle. They have the same somewhat supercilious
raised nose as llamas but also look considerably more intelligent than sheep. Many creatures don’t recognise a vehicle
with people inside as a potential danger and will often stand their ground but
then a vehicle comes along, everyone jumps out to take a photo and the animals
make themselves scarce. The guanaco here
were in great danger of extinction from hunting relatively recently but
conservation efforts have been very successful and we saw some herds of thirty
to forty animals.
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| feeding and keeping a close eye on us |
The one thing that is very rare in the park is anywhere
to find refreshments. We managed only
once in two days to find somewhere for a hot drink but we had taken in supplies
so guanaco barbeque didn’t have to be a consideration. I realised while we were here that in the
various trips we’ve had through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile
we’ve travelled the entire length of the Andes.
To the side of the Andes anyway, not much has been over the tops.
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| rock flour water out of direct sun |
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| Upland Goose and gosling |
On the dry dirt tracks that pass for roads, any
approaching vehicle is visible some way off because of the billowing dust cloud
and car windows have to be shut tight. At the end of the day our car was sprinkled in a fine golden/brown/tan
cover, blown into every crevice.
Among all the driving and looking we did try a walk
to a viewpoint on our second day. It was
only three hundred or so feet high on perhaps a two mile track and as we
climbed through the charred skeleton of a burnt out wood the wind got stronger
and stronger. Down at lake-side level it
was just a breeze but by the time we’d cleared the trees it was quite a
blast. Higher up the walk went between
two smaller hills forming a small pass through which the wind was funnelled and
intensified. By now the flapping of the
hood on my waterproof coat was deafening and it was difficult to stand. Bonnie and I stopped at this point deeming it
too dangerous to continue. Heather and
Newt carried on up where it turned out the wind dropped considerably. While they were gone Bonnie and I discussed
life insurance.
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| The Torres from Porteria Serrano |
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