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Our guide Dave on what Patagonia is REALLY like
When our very own Dave Blower, experienced guide and BLC travel extraordinaire, took an excited group of Bucketlisters out to South America on our inaugural Patagonia Trekking Tour, he got so excited that he wrote a big fat article about the trip.
Dave had had this hidden gem at the top of his Bucket List for many years, so here’s his Patagonia story (prepare for some gushy talk from one very awestruck guide!).
Over to Dave - Getting there
…Well it’s a long way to Patagonia! Just getting to Santiago took a 13-hour flight, then it’s another 3.5-hour flight early doors, down to the south of Chile. Punto Arenas to be precise, the capital city of Chile’s southernmost region.
We got some touristy stuff out the way with a fantastic walking tour before we left Santiago – but when you finally arrive down south, and it starts to sink in that you’re eight and a half thousand miles away from home, in a completely different hemisphere, and on the edge of the Antarctic, well that’s something you sort of have to mentally process.
We enjoyed a guided bike ride to find out what kind of place Punto Arenas is and then on day 3, we headed off with dolphins in tow to Magdalena Island, a famous Magellanic penguin conservation area where we saw massive sea lions and seals.
Let’s just say, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d spotted David Attenborough too.
Horse riding or Patagonian ice sheets on day 4
After we’d got over the thrill later that evening, we drove to Puerto Natales to stay the night. Next day, there was a choice for everyone.
You could either go riding with a gaucho, and I mean you meet a guy who can’t speak any English and he introduces you to his horse by name – mine was Luna. Then you’re off, climbing up into the foothills. (I have to say, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed doing it.)
The other choice was to take a stunning boat ride up to where the Patagonian ice sheet tips into the fjords. I think both options settled everybody into the Patagonia groove!
Click here to check out the itinerary and find out more about those options
Into the wild
The following day you leave the hotel and now you’re really going out into the wild, heading straight into Torres del Paine National Park, about two and a half hours away. Just you, your fellow travellers, and your rucksack holding everything you need to trek for six days. [Aside from your tent and sleeping bag – your porters take care of that for you!]
We met the local guides who were absolutely bursting with information about Patagonia – botany, fauna, geology – they love it all so much, they’re never, ever going to leave.
We got to the campsite and found the refuge. [All the campsites on our Patagonia trek have “refugios”, like Swiss chalets with a bar and restaurant inside!] In there, everyone eats together – and that food is AMAZING, with delicious Chilean red wine to boot. I’ve never seen so many trekkers drinking red wine!
The place is humming with human activity, everyone talking and connecting with each other. It’s a really lovely atmosphere, the very thing that I love, and I know that our Bucketlisters loved it too. And then that’s it, you’re camping there for the night.
The trekking route through Torres del Paine
Now there are two treks in Torres del Paine. The O-trek, which goes right around the national park, and then there’s the W-trek that goes in and out of the key points. Our trek follows the W, and we do it in a reverse order.
On the first day of trekking, we go out to the three soaring namesake towers of the park, with a beautiful, massive glacial lake beneath. It’s quite a climb up, and actually it’s the hardest day you do, about 22km in total, up up up all the way.
It’s the most dramatic sight in the park, and you have the torres in view all the time you’re doing the W, and it really is just a feast for the eyes. On the days that follow you’re carrying on with the W-route, stopping in various camps, each one just as fun and fantastic as the last.
One particularly amazing area we trek through is the French Valley, where you’ve got all these hanging valleys with glaciers in, right in front of you. The sun’s strong out there, so you’ve got avalanches happening during the day, and this place is just so unspoilt.
Every stream you come across, you can pull up and drink it. Ice cold melted glacier water. No pollution, totally clean – we could drink the water right out of the streams. It was like going back to a simpler age, really.
The trekking really was just sublime – at times you’re walking right next to vivid blue glacial lakes, surrounding by bright white stones, you’d think it was the Caribbean!
Patagonia’s on a lot of Bucket Lists… So were there lots of people on the trail?
Not at all. In a day, you might have a couple of Europeans zoom past you, you might see a small group of Americans sitting in the tree eating their lunch. But you’re not walking with hoards, you’re walking as a small group; talking, laughing, pointing things out to one another, photographing as you go. Although the trail is narrow, because they don’t want you trampling on this virgin land, you’re not walking against the tide.
Where you do see people is at the refuges, but they’ve all come from different directions. Apart from that though, it’s mostly just wildlife that joins you – condors flying overhead, gaudy woodpeckers right next to you, we even saw a puma spray on the ground.
An optional add-on: kayaking to the Great Glacier
On the last day of the trail, about half of our group (me included) opted for the kayaking tour, where you paddle out to what’s called the Great Glacier. It’s a little tongue of the great Patagonian Ice Field you’ll have seen on nature programmes and to get to it, you paddle in nice, stable 2-man kayaks through the Hidden Lake.
It’s calving all the time [that’s when chunks of ice break off at the end of a glacier] so you can’t get too close – so we pulled up by a huge iceberg and it just felt like we were in a documentary of some kind. Ridiculous really.
And then you make your way back and get on a motorised catamaran, which takes you to a bus to head back to the hotel in Puerto Natales via some rather sketchy “roads”. It’s safe enough but you do quickly release how wild and lonely a place you’ve been in!
Dave’s top 3 highlights of our Patagonia Trekking Tour
For starters, those three torres. They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen before – totally beautiful, just standing there in all their glory with so much beauty beneath them too. The fact that they stay with you as a backdrop throughout the trek is something you don’t experience in many places!
Then you’ve got the wildlife in the campsites. South American woodpeckers with their long, bright red heads – so stark, so fearless. The wildlife all over the park is just out of this world actually.
And number three? Well that’s got to be when a guy behind the bar in one of the refuges asked how many of us were in the group. When I said seven, he replied, “Oh, well it’s six glasses in a bottle – do you mind if I give you two bottles of wine?!”
No, I didn’t mind! There’s nothing quite like sipping sumptuous Chilean wine in Chile.
Picturing yourself sipping Malbec in situ? Click here to find out how to make it happen.
Who’s the perfect candidate for Patagonia?
That’s a tough one, because you want to say that it’s for everyone! But the reality is that this trekking tour in Patagonia is a very long way away, and it costs a lot of money. Sure, we have an instalment plan that helps break up the adventure into affordable chunks, but this possibly wouldn’t be the ideal place for every first-time Bucketlister to go to.
I mean, it’d be amazing, but I suppose a bit of a baptism of fire: it’s SO different, it’s so untouched, it’s fairly challenging at times, and it really feels incredibly remote – more than anywhere else I’ve been.
That being said, it isn’t at all like some of the things you might have read either. If you can stand the long flights and the remoteness, then you can rest assured that you won’t find yourself in some god-forsaken place being blasted by the elements.
Sure, the weather can be erratic – there are high winds, super warm days and sometimes a spot of rain. But you’re not going to a place where you’ve got to be some sort of intrepid explorer who laughs in the face of danger. You’ve just got to be fit enough to trek for six days straight, and you’ve got to be okay with a lot of peace and quiet.
If you think you’re up to the challenge and you want to find out more about trekking in Patagonia with The Bucket List Company, click here and check out the itinerary – will you be one of the adventurers who dares brave the Patagonian wilderness?!
Don’t let life slip by.
