Kayaking and Hiking Torres del Paine

I made it back to civilization yesterday safely and just got to upload all my pictures. My right arm is almost 100% again and I have avoided any further injuries during the 5 day hike.

The kayak trip was very demanding: non-stop zigzaging to cross stong currents, frigid glacier melt water, rain and strong wind. There were times I wondered what I was doing there. I only later found that this is not exactly a Kayaking destination for those very reasons, but instead, good kayaking is much further north. This is where "people come to test themselves against extreme conditions¨ I was told. I wish I knew before I signed up! We were an expedition of 6: a German couple of mounteneers, a Spanish climatology graduate student who just got back from 40 days in Antarctica, our 2 guides, and myself. Luckily, just as we neared our destination, the weather cleared and we got to see a magnificient view of Glacier Serrano, in the picture to the left. We spent the night near the mouth of the glacier and our guide made us mixed drinks (pisco sour) with ice shiseled from blocks of icebergs, which I thought was really really cool.


After a day of rest, I started the 5 day hike in the Chilean national park Torres Del Paine. There is no way to see this park but to hike about 80km so it´s a naturalists heaven, and I felt very much alive and thriving. I did about 65km, which was a decent amount. The hike is in the shape of W and goes up and down three valeys ending in various amazing lookouts. The most famous one is that of three granite towers that jot out of the ground vertically to reach about 9000 feet. The clouds rolled in just as I started to get close so I never saw the whole thing but go to a lot of the other sights in clear weather. The nature here is mostly untouched and feels incredibly raw. We filled our drinking bottled from the streams as they are all exceptionally clean. The hikes were very challenging. One particular segment seemed on the map like a nice walk by the lake, and instead turned into an 11km long rollercoaster with multiple crossing of rapidly flowing water. There were lots of people doing the same hike, so I always had one or more hiking buddies, which made the whole thing a lot more reassuring. For me, it went very well but I saw some poor souls learn hard lessons about trying to hike too long a distance in a single day, or not wearing the right clothes, or failing to properly waterproof their bags.

I stayed an extra day in the park and went hiking on one of the glaciers, which was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. We wore special crampons and ice axes and walked around the glacier for about two hours. The glacier looks like sand dunes but all ice instead. We saw streams and small waterfalls and a deep crevase filled with water that is large enough that some French scuba divers reportedly went diving inside them. Again we filled our water bottles from it and it was fantastically clean water. The ice field is about 300 miles long which is mind boggling.


For more pictures, go to my picasaweb http://picasaweb.google.com/chertar/KayakingAndHikingInTorresDelPaineSouthernChile

Next I will be going up the Austral highway in chile. It´s a highway that the Chilean government built in hopes to develop the south, but the development never happened, so it´s a highway to nowhere and happens to cross some of the most astouding and hard to reach areas. I´m trying to recruit people to share a car rental with me for a week to go up the highway. Otherwise, it will be busses.

I hope all is well back home and send you all my love.

Tarik