John Wayne eat your heart out - Torres del Paine by horse

So here’s the problem.  We want to take the trail to the base of the Torres del Paine, but after our earlier torres trek in El Chalten, I know my limit and after 9.5 hours walking,  I definitely reached it there.  My guidebook classed that trek as moderate to difficult.  This one is classed plain difficult.  I’m worried.  Will my knee hold out?  Will my spirits hold up?    I know that I could do this trek, but I want to enjoy it, so when we are offered the chance to go part of the way on horses it seems the perfect solution.  It’s easy to persuade Robin that this is the best course of action, I just have to pay for both horses! 

Our hotel has a coral full of sure-footed horses just waiting to ferry us up the first section of the mountain. At this point I should mention that neither Robin nor I can ride a horse.  But with basic instructions – hold the reins in one hand, keep the other free, preferably resting on your leg (no idea why), pull left to go left, right to go right, back to stop – we are off.  My horse is called Gato and obeys my every command – particularly when our guide makes encouraging noises to him..  Robin’s is called Forsilla and is very greedy, so ignores most of his commands and stops to eat whenever she can. But they have obviously done this trek before and cross fast flowing rivers, climb steep hills, cross narrow passes with sheer edges falling straight down to the rushing river below (I can’t look down at this stage), without putting a foot wrong.  Bueno, Gato, bueno!

After an hour and a half, at the top of the first hill, we have to leave the horses and carry on by foot.  After our very hot walk in El Chalten, we are relieved to have some cloud cover today. The first section of our walk takes us through lenga forests, keeping us cool despite the uphill climb.  The forest is quite beautiful and very old.  Lenga trees are very slow growing -only a centimetre a year – and many are covered in a long hairy lichen that grows at just a millimetre a year, and only in unpolluted air.  After a week walking in the mountains, my lungs feel soooo clean in this clean air, I swear their capacity has doubled.  Coming out of the forest, we cross the stony scree – but this walk is nowhere near as hard as the one at El Chalten.  Either I am immensely fitter or the horses have done their job, and I’m still in good shape for the toughest section of the trail.

We are also blessed that the day isn’t too windy – we are told that some days you have to crouch on the ground if the wind gets too much.  The downside is that the summit of the torres is obscured by cloud.  But it still makes for a beautiful and dramatic sight and we enjoy our picnic here before heading back down, knowing it’s just 2 hours walking to get backto our horses and enjoy wonderful views over rivers, gorges and lakes. I am at one with my horse.  I feel like John Wayne.  We may be walking down the mountain, but I know I could swish the reins from side to side and Gato would gallop into the sunset.  

Across the border to Chile and Torres del Paine

We head for Chile again, and this time we do cross the border for a 3 day stay.  We are staying in Chile’s most famous, and beautiful, national park – Torres del Paine, across the Andes from Los Glaciares.

In Patagonia, once you stray from Route 40 – the national road that extends the length of Argentina – tarmac is soon replaced by roads of hard packed grit covered with loose stones.  We travel in a roughty-toughty explorer bus which has no problems covering the ground – unlike the poor touring cyclists we pass at regular intervals, their bikes laden with panniers front and back.  I’m oh so glad to be in that bus! 

But we still have to negotiate the border controls. Chile and Argentina may share a 6000km border, but the European concept of open borders has not taken root here.  The border control process is either a job creation scheme or represents national paranoia of the highest extreme. Luckily it doesn’t take 6 hours (as it does in Mendoza region) as most people crossing at this point are tourists, but we still have to

1)      get off the bus to have our passports exit stamped in Argentina

2)      fill in entry forms and customs forms for Chile

3)      drive through no-man’s land to the Chilean border control

4)      take all our luggage off the bus and have it x-rayed – making sure to first eat any apples lurking at the bottom of my backpack - never shall an argentine fruit make it over the border, or vice versa

5)      get our passports entry stamped for Chile

6)      get ripped off changing Argentine pesos for Chilean pesos at the coffee shop 

In fairness, no. 6 is our own fault as, for once, we failed to do any research either on exchange rates or to find out that our hotel in Chile does, in fact, accept credit cards – note to self, don’t believe everything you read on Trip Adviser.

At first glance Chilean Patagonia looks a lot like Argentinean Patagonia.  A few kilometres from the mountains everything is flat.  The Patagonian steppe is dry, arid and peppered with low-lying vegetation, mainly small round bushes and clumps of grass, which are enjoyed by a few fat sheep, guanacos (llamas without woolly coats), enormous rabbits – or hares – foxes, and ostrich-like rheas.  But, as with the whole of the Andes, most of the rain falls on the Chilean side, so gradually the steppe turns greener and more lush.  Chilean sheep require fewer square kilometres of steppe to graze on and fatten.   

Despite the green, it is still dry.  And Torres del Paine suffered major forest fires around Christmas that closed the entire park (nearly 600,000 acres) for 10 days and the area around the Grey Glacier is still closed. A helicopter bearing a water scoop lands next to us when we stop to pay our entrance fee and we see smoke rising in the distance during our stay there.  We also see the effect of the fires as we take the scenic route to our hotel. The lakes and mountains here are stunning, with black and grey crags towering above forested slopes – many now burned and blacked - in turn rising out of vast lakes of glacial blue waters.  The fires flashed over roads, rivers and lakes pushed on by the high winds which are normal at this time of year.  Only a change in wind direction saved the area from greater devastation.

Fortunately, the area around our hotel, which nestles below the Torres has not been affected by the fire.  We have not been backpacking our way round Argentina, but even so our previous hotels have been modest by the standards of Hotel Las Torres, our home for our 2 nights in the park.  There aren’t many options here, and given a choice between a smart hotel and camping, there’s only one thing to do. We know it’s going to be expensive – but we’re going to enjoy it.