Day 1 - Entering the Park to Campamento Italiano

After a rewarding trek around Mount Fitzroy, the tale of our two adventurer's Kirk and Jeff continued at Torres del Paine. The route to Torres del Paine was certainly not a straight path. After we navigated back to Puerta Natels on a series of buses from Argentina, we hopped on yet another bus from Puerta Nateles to the park which did a fair bit of hopping on it's own. It hopped on and off paved highways onto cinder roads repeatedly. After hours of zig-zagging, the bus finally let us off at the catamaran where we officially started the trail by hiking towards Campamento Italiano. There are many possible starts to the trek; all are equally effective depending upon your timetable and budget. There are also many possible treks that you can walk. We had decided to do the entire circuit, even thou now-a-days only complete a portion of the circuit called the W.

The catamaran let us off at 6:30 PM, which was a bit late to start a trek, but worked out great for us because due to the late hour the trail was completely empty. While Kirk and I had a rough plan to complete the circuit in 10 days (including a hike on Glacier Grey), we were unsure of how realistic it was given the dramatic and fast changing weather conditions we had experienced at Mount Fitzroy.

We didn't pass a soul all the way to camp, which was nice. The weather was cloudy, but warm. The light was bad for photos, but we had a nice relaxing start. Upon arrival at Campamento Italiano, the campsite looked a bit somber, maybe because the light was fading, but we didn’t dwell upon it too long as we had a tent to pitch. Sadly, there were no signs that the water was safe, so we added iodine to our drinking water as we left the filter to save weight. As we prepared dinner, we realized one of our many mistakes. We both forgot bug spray and there were definitely a lot more bugs here than at Fitzroy.

After cooking, eating and cleaning up we got to bed late, at least for us(11:30 PM). This meant we had to sleep fast as we wanted to get up for sunrise.