Top of the World

I've made friends in this hostel. There's this American girl who's a teacher traveling for a year and she is so great. We spent the day together, along with a German guy we met on the bus, and an outgoing Israeli guy and girl who just finished their military service.

Israelis do 2-3 years of mandatory military service, and then they are all in the best shape of their life and head down to Patagonia to climb mountains. Literally, the whole country is here. They are very welcoming and they all speak English, but they are a lot. They get up early and drink all night, and they move around in this big loud amorphous group.

They showed me all their pictures of the park on top of some huge mountain and I was like, wait a minute, you guys didn't do the lake district?? They were like no, you got to do Cerro Guanaco, fuck that lake district.

So today, I climbed a mountain. It's no wonder I missed it the first time, the employees of the park obviously hate this hike. When the bus driver dropped me off, he said, "don't do the mountain, you'll miss the bus back, do the lake district again." the woman collecting entrance fees had k similar advice. I didn't care one bit.

This is the type of hike I came to Patagonia to do. It went straight up, and every 10 minutes the landscape changed. It was totally gorgeous.

I liked going in a big group as well. When we passed the snow line the boys through snowballs at us. We laughed at the German guy, who was wearing designer tennis shoes instead of hiking boots and fell in the mud. When we got to the top, the Israelis were making coffee and passing it out, so I had some Israeli coffee on top of a mountain. We saw another fox, but it didn't come near that many people. Today was my favorite day so far.

When I got back to the hostel, I was again tempted to travel with this group for the rest of my trip and discard my original plan. The Israelis were going on this 3 day camping trip in Ushuaia that sounded incredible, I could easily have hung out in Ushuaia until the 16th, done torres del Paine, then just headed straight for Brazil. But in the end I didn't. I had a great time in Ushuaia, and I'm ready to move on.Read more