My friend Helen and I are studying abroad in Santiago, Chile. During Easter, we decided to visit the Torres del Paine national park, which includes the longest vertical drop in the world. The park is extremely remote, requiring a plane trip and four buses to arrive. This is the journal I kept while I was there.
Day One?Helen and I get on a flight to Punta Arenas, the starting point for trips to the south of Chile. As we board, the flight attendant hands us copies of the morning paper. One of the headlines reads that an American woman and her son had died in Torres del Paine from a gas leak from their camping stove. As a reminder of our idiocy, I keep the paper.
Later, we learn that we can take a side trip to a penguin sanctuary. On the way to see the penguins, we approach a small bridge. Our van driver gets out and tests the bridge with his foot. His foot falls through. We continue to drive over the bridge. I do not understand the point of the test.
That night in Punto Natales, we go to the grocery store to buy some food for the trip, but run into difficulty because we don’t have a camping stove and therefore can’t buy any food that requires preparation. We really have no idea what we are doing.
Day Two?We wake up to take the 7 a.m. bus to Torres del Paine. After about three hours we are taken to the park administration where we pay our entrance fee and take another bus to one of the camping areas. We stay in a refugio?a building with bunk beds without sheets, a bathroom and a kitchen. Dinner at the refugio is $12?pricey in comparison to the food I have been buying in Santiago, but more reasonable when you think how difficult it is to get food up there.
We decide to stay there for the night, then hike to Los Torres?”the towers.” We think the hike will be fairly easy because we don’t have our packs. We are wrong. About an hour into our hike, I fall down and feel a pain in my right hip. I keep going and it hurts every time I take a step uphill. When we finally reach the base of the Torres we are confronted with a 45-minute hike up a bolder field. I tell them they should go on without me because my hip hurts too much. About 10 minutes after they leave I decide that I have to try anyway?it is the centerpiece of the park, I won’t be able to walk tomorrow anyway, and I am stupid and stubborn. As I near the top, the group is coming back down. Helen waits while the other two girls go back down to the base. When I finally reach the top, it is breathtaking. I am there by myself, dwarfed by the size of the Torres. I only stay a couple of minutes, knowing that I am slow and it will be dark soon.
Light fades as Helen and I make it down to the base of the boulder field. Two Australians tell us that it is too dangerous to try and hike back in the dark?the closest refugio is an hour and a half away. They suggest asking someone who is staying in the guardaparque (park guard) shack if we can stay there for the night. We debate returning, but realize we can’t manage the slippery mud slopes of the hike with only one flashlight between the four of us.
At the A-shaped park guard shack, a sleepy Chilean in his 20s opens the door and agrees to let us stay there. He generously gives us a foam mat to sleep on and a blanket to put over the four of us as we squish together to share body warmth. I am wearing two long underwear tops, a sweater, a fleece, a windbreaker, three pairs of pants, a scarf, gloves and a hat?but I don’t have the critical component of a sleeping bag.
Day Three?I am afraid I have frostbite. We all are, because we cannot move our toes, let alone feel them. I think that maybe once I move a bit and warm up that I will be able to walk. I am angry with my body?angry that my leg is spasming and angry that I can’t keep up. The previous plans of hiking today for eight hours with our packs are nothing but laughable. Helen (who has started to feel like she also pulled a muscle) and I are both in so much pain that we are not sure it is possible to make it to the next refugio an hour and half away. We tell the other two girls to go on as we slowly creep to the refugio.
On the hike back, I feel that Helen is losing her grip on sanity. I’m sure that I am too, but being that fact that I am me, my lack of sanity is less apparent to myself. Helen starts saying things like, “Before, I thought that toes were for decoration. People paint toes! But when we couldn’t feel them this morning and keep our balance, I realize that they are functional. We need toes.” I later match the intelligence of that statement when we finally reach the refugio and are taking off our boots. I notice that my leg hair has gotten out of control. I point this out to Helen and say, “Look at all this leg hair. Of all the things I needed my body to do last night?like keep itself warm and regenerate itself?I did not need it to grow leg hair.”
As we walk into the refugio, we are euphoric. We become about ten fold less euphoric when we learn that there is no longer space in the refugio for us and we will have to camp. We grumpily rent the tent and set it up, truly feeling that God is smiting us.
Day Four?Camping isn’t bad. I am able to feel my feet when I wake up. Helen and I decide to take a horse ride to see Los Cuernos, horned-shaped mountains. The cost of the ride is a steep $69, but the chance to see something without having to walk is priceless.
I had no idea that horses could climb mountains. I keep seeing our group in slow motion, horses romantically galloping over the terrain of Chilean Patagonia, our hair blowing behind us in the wind. The real image was closer to terrified faces and bodies clinging on for dear life to horses that were huffing and puffing. So much for the movie image.
We get back in time to catch the bus back to the park entrance. But when the bus to Puerto Natales arrives, there isn’t room for all that want to return. We beg the bus driver and he allows some people to sit on the luggage. On the three-hour trip back, I count four cars, one road crew and five instances of roadkill?by far the highest roadkill-to-automobile ratio I have ever seen.
Day Five?One of my goals had been to see a glacier, but Saturday morning, my body simply won’t comply. Helen and I decide to go to the airport and see if we can get a flight back to Santiago. We feel somewhat guilty about wimping out and coming back a day early but decide that we will reply with an abrupt “Hey, have you ever gone to the Chilean Patagonia?” to anyone who questions our outdoor mettle. On the ride home, we discuss once again how stupid we had been. We should have never put ourselves in the position where we could have been stuck on a trail in the dark. We could have frozen to death. But even though we may seem ridiculously wimpy to the other granola-eating Nalgene-carrying campers, I’m proud of us.
Gina Pace is a junior in the School of Foreign Service and an associate editor of the Georgetown Voice. She has selected her fork; now she must eat with it.
