Torres del PAINe

First to clarify it was not painful and I Matthew loved it. Harriet also loved it in so far as she can say that she did it!

Torres del Paine is one of Chile's national parks and you can either walk the 4/5 day W Trek or an 8 day Circuit. We chose the W Trek and due to irregularity of buses we had 6 days to complete this. Turns out that however unfit I (Harriet) am we could have done it in 4 days easily. In total we walked just over 80 km, thanks to Matt's inability (or Harriets!!!) to read a map we went the wrong way for a good hour on the last day. I'm sure many of you can imagine my reaction to being told that we had to go back and then I was still expected to walk 20 km on top on this detour.

On the plus side I would say that I have never seen views as outstanding as those in the park and that despite finding it hard work it was definitely worth seeing. We were ridiculously lucky that we had 5 days of glorious sunshine and it only rained as we were leaving the park. In fact we had been so conditioned to expect rain and perhaps even sleet, despite it being summer, that we took only thermals, fleeces and waterproofs with us to the park. This meant that on some days we were more likely to get heat/sun stroke! Luckily the park is so clean and unpolluted that you can drink from all the streams so it meant that we could drink without carrying too much water or having to ration it!

 We (by this I mean Matthew) had to carry the tent, sleeping bags and food for 6 days. I took the roll mats and the few clothes I was allowed to bring. As we only had 2 showers on the last two nights of the 6 day and 80 km walk I'm sure none of you want to imagine how disgusting we were. In the 80km we saw the 'Torres' three tower looking mountains at sunrise, lakes, glaciers, guanco (llama things), condors and gauchos. It was pretty cool to be honest but we are now having a break from trekking for a bit owing to a promise made by Matthew that if I didn't cry we could see Penguins!  Penguins are next week, YAY!