Torres del Paine

After our Puerto Williams trip, we spent a few more days lounging around Ushuaia, mostly just relaxing and being really far south. We got a picture of this big wrecked boat in the Beagle Channel that I think might belong to The Smoggies.


We also used the last of our time in Argentina to try some Chandon champagne. It's made by the same company that makes Moet & Chandon, a fancy, expensive champagne that we have never tried due to it being in the over-$10 price bracket. Argentine-made Chandon is much more affordable. It was good, and I made a pretty sweet cork knight (with trusty wire steed!).


In retrospect, that may have been the moment we knew we had run out of stuff to do in Ushuaia.

We headed west to Chile, en route to the Torres del Paine national park. It's home to what just about every guidebook claims is "the best hiking in South America", and we had heard nothing but great things about it from Trevor and Kim (our Kilimanjaro trekking partners) and many other people we've met along the way. Most people trek across the park in 5 days, but our travel time is running out pretty quickly, and my knee is still protesting that whole Kilimanjaro thing, so we decided to just do a quick 2-day hike to see the Torres del Paine themselves.

Getting there made for a couple of long days of hiking, including a brutal 45 minute scramble to the top, but the scenery was worth it. They're three giant granite pillars that jut straight up into the sky behind a big green glacial lake. They were up there with the Perito Moreno glacier for some of the coolest natural scenery we've seen in the last 6 months.

Unfortunately, we hit some cloudy days on our hike, which means we didn't get a perfectly unobstructed view of the Torres. On the upside, the clouds make them look like the perfect place for an evil lair (plus, they're practically called the TOWERS OF PAIN).


The rest of the park was pretty great too. We'll probably come back again at some point to check it out properly. On our way out of the park, we saw a bunch of Guanacos, which are awesome Patagonian llama-type animals that seemed to have a habit of walking in front of our bus, then getting super freaked out and running all over the place. Here is one, pre-freak-out.


Now we're pretty much just killing time in Punta Arenas (where we have yet to take a picture... we'll get on that shortly), waiting for our flight to Santiago tomorrow evening. Then, we've got a day and a half in Santiago before THE END OF THE TRIP. Right now, we're pretty excited to get back to the comforts of home. Mal is super pumped about the prospect of high-quality sandwiches and cupcakes (both of which seem to have been mastered by North American eateries). I, on the other hand, have been looking forward to putting on a pair of jeans for like three weeks now. We might get one more quick post up before we leave. If not, we'll put up our Best/Worst summary of the last 6 months sometime this weekend!