Patagonia — Torres del Paine and El Calafate
Puerto Natales is one of those small, wind-battered towns that exists primarily as a launching pad for Torres del Paine. We arrived and Louise had been feeling poorly, so the first day was spent doing very little — watching movies, resting up, and generally being horizontal. Not every day on the road needs to be an adventure, and sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing at all.
But the next day more than made up for it. We did a day tour into Torres del Paine National Park, and it absolutely delivered. The scenery is the kind that makes you feel like you’ve walked into a nature documentary. Jagged granite towers, impossibly blue lakes, glaciers hanging off mountainsides. I took about a thousand photos and maybe three of them do it any justice. We stopped at a cave along the way which was, honestly, a bit underwhelming compared to everything else. Hard to compete with those views. That evening we had pizza and pasta for dinner, and the food was brilliant. Someone ordered a dessert pizza and I’m still not entirely sure how I’d never encountered one before. Life-changing might be a stretch, but it was close.
From Puerto Natales we caught the bus across to El Calafate on the Argentine side. Nice little town, touristy but in a pleasant way. Louise managed to get properly drunk after just two wines, which provided excellent entertainment for the rest of us and cost almost nothing. Efficient.
The next day we went horse riding at what I can only describe as a dodgy ranch. The horses seemed to know the route better than the guides, the lunch was questionable at best, and we got absolutely drenched on the ride back. I did manage to canter for a bit though, which felt like a proper accomplishment for someone whose horse experience up until that point was basically zero. You take your wins where you can.
But the real highlight — and one of the best experiences of the entire trip so far — was trekking Perito Moreno Glacier. We strapped on crampons and spent about five hours walking on the ice itself. Actual ice. Beneath your feet. The glacier is massive, something like 250 square kilometres, and the colour of the ice is this deep, almost electric blue that doesn’t look real. Every now and then you’d hear this enormous crack as a chunk of ice calved off the front and crashed into the lake below. We even had lunch sitting on the glacier, which felt absurd and brilliant at the same time. It’s one of those experiences where you just stop and think, “Right, this is why I’m doing this.”
We rounded out our time in El Calafate with a chilled day. Found a flash hotel that let us use their gym, which was a nice change from the hostel scene. Sometimes you just need a treadmill and a hot shower that actually works.
Patagonia had been one of the places I was most looking forward to on this trip, and it didn’t disappoint. Torres del Paine for the views, Perito Moreno for the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Two very different highlights, both absolutely worth the long bus rides to get there.
