A guided trekking holiday in the wilds of Patagonia puts the adventure into holidays for Peter Clough.
"If you get separated or delayed, don't stop but keep moving towards the next shelter: in this remote area any search and rescue will take longer to find you than hungry pumas," said Camillo, our park guide, with no hint that he was joking. If searchers don't find someone in a few days, they pull out and wait a couple of weeks to see where the condors gather.
It's the unexpected that puts adventure into holidays, as my wife and I discovered on a November trip to Patagonia.
There, mountains and nothofagus beech trees may look familiar to New Zealand eyes, but differences lie in the details.
About 300km north of the Magellan Strait in Chile, the Torres del Paine National Park is centred on mountains of igneous granite and metamorphic rocks contorted by the tectonic forces that raised the Andes to the west. Paine (pronounced Pie-nay) comes from a native Patagonian word for blue, and varying shades of blue are evident in several lakes with different mixes of glacial and rain-fed waters.
The park has long hiking trails, including the so-called "W route", a four to five-day trek that goes up three valleys to mountain viewpoints, and the longer Grand Circuit (sometimes called the "O"), which adds another four days to circumnavigate the mountains. Staffed lodges ("refugia") and campsites provide accommodation and food along these routes, but because of demand they are best booked before entering the park.
It can be challenging to organise a hike from other countries. But chancing upon an Intrepid brochure offering a guided 10-day tour including hiking and camping in the park, we booked six months ahead.
Closer to departure, we began wondering what to expect. We found web-based weather forecasts indicated 2C overnight temperatures, warnings about bad weather and Patagonia's notoriously strong winds battering tents at night. We prepared with warm clothes for "layering up", and earplugs against night-time noises.
We flew to Santiago and met our tour companions for an evening briefing: 10 others from Australia, Britain and the US. Denis, our Argentine tour guide, said we would do most of the "W" in day trips from two camps, one by a refugio providing meals and the other with "camp catering".
We left before the hotel served breakfast, snatching a coffee and roll at Santiago Airport before flying to Punta Arenas. After a fleeting lunch in town, we travelled by bus through the Patagonian steppe to the fiordside town of Puerto Natales, where we first glimpsed our destination's distant snow-covered peaks.
Joined by Camillo, next morning we caught another bus north, towards peaks peeping above foothills against a cloudless sky. Approaching the park, herds of llama-like guanacos grazed the roadside, and black condors circled overhead. Crossing Lake Pehoe by ferry, more mountains were slowly revealed.
Landing near the Refugio Paine Grande, an encampment of tents awaited us, each with a mountain view. Our first hike wandered through beech forest, before emerging into open scrub with a rocky lookout over the Grey Glacier, which fills a 5km-wide valley and has a 30m ice cliff feeding its iceberg-flecked lake.
We tried what Denis called the "Patagonian bounce", a gentle switch-back from Lake Pehoe to the French Valley. There we lunched opposite its glacier, part hanging high up the mountainside, with audible ice cracks sending little avalanches on to another glacier below.
After clearing our tents we went by boat, bus and shuttle to our new camp, set among low trees with two large dome tents serving as kitchen and dining room. From there we walked in the direction of Paine Grande to Lake Nordenskjold, where Camillo explained the landscape and history of successive explorers commemorated on the map.
We saw gambolling hares, geese grazing and a pair of Magellanic woodpeckers — an all-black female and red-headed male — busy extracting grubs from tree-trunks just metres from the track. A tawny Andean fox sniffed around the edge of camp one morning, and a guanaco raced up the road, hotly pursued by another.
"They are like deer" said Camillo, "the males fight to build their harems." Though unlike deer they don't lock antlers, but kick and bite to inflict real harm on their rivals.
High cloud obscured the mountaintops as we headed towards the eponymous towers up the Ascencio Valley. Crossing a private estate that runs horse treks, we were followed part of the way by a gaucho leading four pack animals to a lodge.
Further into the park, tracks narrowed and showed signs of limited funding. Across side streams, bridges made of branches from the nearby trees had gaps wide enough to fall through.
Our last evening in camp we celebrated completing the trek, and our good fortune with the weather. Our chef played Andean folk songs on guitar and pipes, showed JRR Tolkien's elvish script tattooed on his arm and revealed himself keen to visit New Zealand's Hobbiton.
Leaving camp, we had one more walk, a couple of hours by the park entrance, over grassland dotted with diminutive coloured flowers and shrubs, to some caves with ancient rock paintings. We saw some guanaco nearby and also a couple of carcases, leftovers of meals eaten by the park's elusive pumas.
Travelling north by bus to El Calafate in Argentina, we spent a day visiting the Perito Moreno Glacier, which is like a larger Grey Glacier, and walked with crampons among blue ice and deep crevasses. Then we flew to Buenos Aires to experience that busy city and another celebratory meal before our party disbanded, thankful beyond expectations for having seven days in Patagonia with neither rain nor wind.
DETAILS
Intrepid's 15-day Patagonia Wilderness trip takes travellers into one of the most remote and beautiful environments in the world. Prices start from $6370pp, twin-share.
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