A beautiful bus ride later (even though we slept through most of it), we arrived in Puerto Natales, the town closest to Torres del Paine. Hostels, gear rentals and shops and hearty food offerings are on every block of this comfortable, albeit a little rough around the edges, town. We had an afternoon and then another whole prep day which allowed us to attend the awesome and informative free talk at Erratic Rock and price shop our rental equipment.
While it would be much nicer to use Mark's tent, and our own sleeping bags, and thermarests (which is not possible due to our long trip), we decided to rent the gear. We ended up finding some puffy jackets that were not much more than double what I'd pay to rent for me, and Mark found a secondhand one for about the same price as the rental. The wind is really what can get cold here. Today was sunny and minimally windy so we explored town a bit.
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| Mark was happy to be able to cook again! |
However, for the trails, we are anticipating all sorts of weather including rain, snow and huge wind gusts that will knock us off our feet. Finally, our dehydrated food that we've been carrying since CO will be put to use, as well as our grocery store finds in Punta Arenas. We are prepping for 8 days and 7 nights, camping the whole way though maybe there will be refugio space to splurge on for dinner and lodging on my birthday. It was somewhat of a feat to prepare!
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| So much food! 8 days is a long time to pack food for! |
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| This cute street dog with his own sweater watched us put up our tent! |
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| The room's BEFORE picture! I'll try to post an AFTER if I have time in the morning! |
Either way, I don't think we will have wifi again until March 6 so lots of love to everyone until then!
The brown trout are huge down there. Check it out.
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