Day 3 Torres del Paine W-Circuit

Day 3 was the longest trek of the whole W-circuit: From the Refugio Paine Grande to Camping Francés with a ‘quick’ detour to the Mirador Britànico, a walk of 21.6 km in total. It was raining when we packed up our tent - a first for us! We still managed to leave the Refugio Paine Grande in time and made our way to the deserted Campamento Italiano, which is currently closed. After depositing our big backpacks there we decided to go up to the Britanico viewpoint despite the snow and despite the advice of the ranger not to go ‘because we will see nothing’ - good we did not listen! 😉 The way up goes through Valle Frances along the Rio de Francés and was by itself one of our favorite parts of the W-circuit 😍 Even though it was snowing (or maybe just because of it?) the views were gorgeous all around - we were even lucky enough to see a big ass avalanche coming from the Glaciar Francés (see Video)! The sky cleared up and the sun peaked out just in time when we arrived at the Mirador Britànico, allowing gorgeous views on the Pehoe lake, los Cuernos and Mount Paine Grande. What a place!!
After getting down again (in better weather) and retrieving our backpacks, the last bit of the trail to our campsite led on mostly (mas o menos) along the superblue Lago Nordenskjöld, again with lovely views. We were warned by a girl we met at the Paine Grande that the Francés campsite is built on a hillside, but we were not prepared for how it actually was: Well spread out with quite a bit of distance to cover (after already having walked the 21.6 km 😅) to get from tents to minimarket, to the toilets, to the kitchen area and to the restaurant - everything in completely different directions 🥵 We had a pre-pitched ‘luxury tent’ at Camping Francés as the campsites were fully booked out when we planned our trip in Xx, and upon checkin in we had to follow the guy 10 minutes downhill, just to discover that he was wrong and that our tent was actually right behind the reception, so we had to carry our 13 and 15 kg backpacks all the way up again 🙄😂 Nothing beats an unexpected extra-workout 😂
As we did not have to pitch our tent this time we had plenty of time to spare, and because we were sure that our food stock was not enough for at least one of us (*pointing to Gilles*) we decided to splurge on one of the meal options most campsites have: Salmon Pizza. It was delicious, but we are pretty sure that the hunger has biased this opinion 😉
After a hot shower for Alina (which wasn’t that nice because the floor was made of freezing stone tiles - who does that in a camping with temperatures being more often below 10 degrees than not?!) and a second dinner of freeze-dried meals we crawled into our - indeed very luxurious, but also freaking cold because it was not throughoutly closed 🥶 - prepitched tent and had a cold but pretty good sleep on a mattress and pillows (!!).Читать далее