Paine and Gain
Puerto Natales – the base camp for a Puma spotted wilderness.
The Torres del Paine National Park is beautiful. Really beautiful. It’s vast, mostly empty, and expensive to enter… well, while that may be true, its third adjective should really be ‘astounding’. It might be easy to ignore natural beauty these days; it seems the temptation to point the camera the other way is overpowering, even on the mountain. However, when you come to realise that the real majesty in your 6×4″ is not your overexposed sultry stare, but what’s behind it - a landscape that’s been carved over thousands and thousands of years, you will get an overwhelming sense of perspective.
There are plenty of things to fill your time in this part of Patagonia, though most opt for the treks around the national park. There is a good reason for that, and that reason is whichever walk you choose will be one of the best walks you’re likely to ever take. Between the Gauchos and their horses, the cascading fresh water that collects in bloody great lakes at the bottom of the mountains, and the Tolkienesque mountains themselves, there lies the tracks for the tourists to explore.
