Patagonia: A Great and Terrible Beauty - Torres del Paine, Chile
Torres del Paine, Chile
Where I stayed
Campamento Italiano
My journey continues after a sleepless night when the communal tribe over slept. Exhausted from what I had thought would be the hardest day of physical pain in my life, I had attempted to get more sleep. This had only resulted in more pain for we now had to face the facts that we had very little time to get to our next destination. We were covering over twice the distance and at the rate we had moved yesterday we had estimated our arrival simply at: too late. But what choice did we have? Grudgingly we packed our things and headed off for Campamento Italiano at the base of the Valle Frances.
I should've known from the start it wasn't going to be my day. It was easily five or ten times windier than yesterday with ominous looking clouds rolling towards us. My pack felt no better on my back, in fact if anything it felt worse. And it was safe to say every part of my body hurt.
As we approached the same high winds cliffside crossing we had attempted yesterday I got a feel for what Nature was. Honestly it's a lie that humans tell themselves when they think they've overcome nature. A total lie. Nature just plays nice with them in most parts of the world. But nature, rightfully so, decided it liked Patagonia, and it was not going to give it up easily. Nature itself designed Patagonia as such a painful piece of pleasure. The landscape is so jarringly beautiful and unreal you get the feeling it's not a place humans will ever really conquer. Every tree bush and rock is bristling, literally, and you can't sit down or rest without discomfort. Patagonia is sharp. Everything in it is designed to survive, but it survives with such a dangerous beauty that you get roped into sitting on the prickly bush every time.
Not that I was voluntarily sitting on prickly bushes, because there was nothing about day 2 that was voluntary. I was natures play toy. The fact that I'm writing this now is nothing short of a miracle. Wind blew left and Torres del Paige went left. I was completely at the mercy of these hurricane force winds. It physically blew me up hills, into trees, rocks, and roots and almost off cliffs. One tiny valley pass I was knocked so clean off my feet that I face planted into.... you guessed it a spiny bush. With dust kicking into my eyes and the inescapable weight of the pack on top of me I thought it best to wait out the gust. False, this wasn't a gust, this was just life here. Realizing I had to get up but getting completely shoved down I waited for help. Help came in the form of my companion attempting to make it to my location, getting blown past me, tripping over me, then blowing off again. It was man vs. nature, not men vs nature here. You could only worry about yourself.
Completely miserable, we stopped for lunch having almost reached the halfway point. The thing about this hike is that you either do it east to west or west to east. So you're always with the same people essentially. We were slowly developing ties with our trail companions which consisted of a Brazilian couple, a Canadian couple, two Dutch Sisters, and an incredibly attractive Australian man (and his girlfriend of course). Side note: the Australian was really hot. They were all super friendly and there's nothing like camaraderie built by shared obstacles. And they were obstacles. We had a lunch break with the Dutch sisters, who were also newbies to backpacking, and then summoned forth the energy to venture on. The Dutch sisters apparently having considerably more fortitude had left ahead of us which left me even less motivation to move. There was the disembarkation point (as we had to double back on the trail since it's a W in shape we spent all morning backtracking) and I knew I could take a boat right back to the beginning if I wanted to.
But to be honest quitting was never an option. Moving from this point on mind power alone ignoring the slicing pain of the straps in my shoulders, the jarring feel in my knees with each step, the soreness of every muscle, and the gosh darn damnable freaking pointy piece on the bottom of the backpack that kept biting into my hip/butt region with every step. Going downhill hurt, going uphill hurt, and honestly level ground wasn't exactly a party either, but here I was soldiering on.
Funnily enough I became my own motivator. I would shout all the stupid old maxims my soccer coach used with us. My tribe members where quite tired of hearing "when faced with a challenge look for a way, not a way out." or "the only time success comes before work is in the dictionary." sometimes I would even tell myself "it's 80% mental" or "anything worth doing is hard" or anytime I turned an ankle shouting "pain is weakness leaving the body". That was the first two hours of the hike. and then the hail started. So if you're wondering why there aren't a lot of pictures on this leg of my journey, that's why, along with the fact that to get my camera out took more strength than I had in me. But really. Like I thought getting off the couch to get a remote control was difficult, shows how much backpacking I do. It's like never being able to reach that damn remote for like 11km. And it sucks. Because like I said it was hailing and still blowing wind like a freaking Tyra Banks photo shoot. Sometimes I would literally take one step forward and two back because of the wind. Which is such a literal interpretation of a depressing and endlessly frustrating process. I'm just trying to get you guys in my head here.
But at the same freaking time you've got the crystal clear blue lake you're walking along and these impressionably craggy mountains to your other side that look like the freaking Himalayas. And every time you try to look at this beautiful and constantly adjusting surroundings you get pelted in the eye with hail. We crossed over lush glacial streams and were thrown into a few more thorny bushes. The male member of our tribe got cranky, wet, and frustrated he went ahead never to be seen again and effectively leaving us with nothing more than a shadow of a hope to make it to camp before nightfall. But we trekked on against all windy odds. We reveled in the small things. Like that time we just stopped and refilled our water bottles in a stream, just because we could. Or that time we figured out how to hear the wind gusts before they came and planted our poles and turned our backs to avoid being thrown into more thorny bushes. So what I mean to say is that there were high points. But not quite as high of points as the wind.
I spent the last hour and a half assuring my companion that we were "almost there" every ten minutes, more for me than her. But as the sun sank lower and the hail subsided into a steady drizzle our hopes sank and melted away too. This was easily the lowest point of the trip. I was so uncomfortable, so discouraged, and so freaking tired. But there was no use dwelling on all of that, or that's what I told myself every step until we arrived at the bridge. Yes ,the bridge. There's a hanging bridge over a raging river with a lovely sign that says "only two at a time please" So that's encouraging. But at the end of this bridge was camp. From somewhere deep within I summoned the strength to run, and I ran. I ran it on home and I dropped my pack in whatever campsite and that was where the tent was going. We got our tent up just before the heavy rain started, though we had no ground tarp so we had to deal with a slightly wet floor for a night. This was a free campsite with no shelter from the elements so we cooked our meal in a small lean-to and then scurried unhappily and exhausted off to bed. According to the map, tomorrow would only be harder.