Flavia & Gregory go LA

Here we are - have been off-line for a couple of days, courtesy of the National Park Torres del Paine. To date the best mountains I have seen, I think possibly better than the Dolomites, or competing pretty close!!
We spent 4 nights there, in a camping called Camping Pehoe, which is the best camping site in the Park, at the centre of the scene. Perhaps if we put some website addresses here this will make up for the missing pics? Well only 3 days to go and then we will be able to upload some on the relevant entries, how is that Mr greenegg?

http://www.campingpehoe.com/camping-es.html

Anyways. The park is fantastic, full of blue lakes everywhere and the Cuernos and Torres peaks which are really stunning. Bloody cold and windy as well. Half of the group decided to do the ´W´walk, which is basically a walk of about 4 days which follows a path in the shape of a W. We only had 3.5 days to do it so Gregory and I judged that perhaps it would have not been such a good idea to do it, given our inexperience with mountain trekking as well as my unfit state. However, I decided to join the group for the first day (which is by the way the HARDEST) going up to see the famous PAINE TOWERS. Gregory dissociated himself from the idea as he had a PAINFUL KNEE...right.

So there I went, 8 am ready to go up with another girl who turned from a W -walker into a \ -walker like me. The others left at 3 am - yes, that says THREE AM - because basically we got to the park late the day before and so the W walk had to be shrinked from the already tight 3.5 days to 3!!!! They wanted to be up to the towers for 7 to see them pink, except that it was not a very good day and they weren´t. But they still had 13 hours to cover in total for the day, so it possibly made some sense. I decided that I could miss out the pink and leave at 8 am instead (I did not have to do the 13 hours either, thank goodness) and it was great, as well as wise since there was no pink. Unbelievably, I walked for 9 hours that day (ok, most people do it in 7, I have already admitted that I am totally unfit, ok) and still managed to hop around the next day with only a minor blister on my foot. The towers were great and I will add the glorious pic of myself next to them as soon as feasable. Ironically, on the same day the rest of the group back at base were hitched onto an unplanned glacier trip and so Gregory also ended up walking some 9 hours - there is justice in this world!!! We both had a great day but in different parts of the park. On the way down from the valley I got stuck there another night away from the rest as we missed the last bus - but on day 2 in the late morning I was back at base and we spent it together doing the washing and short walks around base. On the last day the W walkers were coming back, so we prepared a feast and Gregory made his world-famous chicken curry. One of the other trucks broke down (lost a wheel while driving, apparently...) and a group of 8 was stranded with no cooker, so we kindly invited them to join us making the dinner party a grand total of 30 people!!! We had champagne bottles waiting for the grand walkers and had a great evening.

Next day we packed for El Calafate, which is the next town to the Perito Moreno Glacier. What a glacier!!! Will blog on that in a short while.

View from the campsite

View that cost me 9 hours

Gregory cooking curry for 30