The "pain" of Torres del Paine

We had a mixed day at Punta Arenas today.

First, it was a really windy, wintery day today with wind speeds of up to 80kph. Plus horizontal rain 🌧 Better get used to it is what the locals say ;-)

Second, we went to the tourist info to check out the opportunities for trekking in Torres del Paine National Park and visiting the penguin islands. Both were somehow a disappointment. We learned (as a confirmation to previous fears generated in Santiago) that, yes, indeed, the National Park would be super crowded, had almost no capacity left, and, we needed to consult directly with the 3 different camp operators to secure spaces. When trying to find some spaces, we stopped after 15 min in frustration: obviously, the booking system was neither intelligent nor user-friendly - we had to check every single date (instead of a month-view or similar) and then again, some camps had capacity but subsequent camps for subsequent dates not - no alignment of camp capacity :-) Well, great. This all let to the decision to skip the “O” Circuit in Torres del Paine and do more fun and “auf eigene Faust“ stuff more up north.

The penguins tours were as well “all fully booked“ for the half-day morning tours - we are now going for a full-day tour to see the king penguin instead of the Magellan penguin. Minor details ;-)

However, we really enjoyed our time in town, walking around (17 kms in total!), playing with wrecked cars, finding a good supermarket to stock up before the trekking (and adding to Anna’s vegan foodstuffs already procured :-)), drinking tea at a tea house and coffee at a coffeehouse, really nice Italian food in the evening. And to top it off: We got really going with our newest game of dice (called “400”) which we learned to play in Ayampe, Ecuador, from two Swiss girls :-) simple but engaging and the score today says: Anna 12, Bertram 10 🎲🎲🎲Read more