Extreme Roadtrip: Patagonia

We here at Seattlest are restless and easily bored, which is why we have to shake things up occasionally, by, oh, traveling to the ends of the Earth.

There is cool stuff at the ends of the Earth

Luckily, at the ends of the Earth – Patagonia, to be exact – there is plentiful coffee (although, we are happy to report, no Starbucks anywhere), red wine, and – especially in Argentinian Patagonia – steak. Delicious, hormone-free, free-range, everything-free steak. Even this Seattlest staffer, an avowed quasi-vegetarian, succumbed to the seduction of steak. In one frenzied moment, we indulged in a giant steak sandwich accompanied by a huge helping of fries topped with a fried egg – apparently a Chilean specialty (that we were not journalistically astute enough to get the name of).

Yet, if you can believe it, we actually lost weight on our voyage! This is because most of the time we were not eating delicious, juicy steak but Mountain House® dehydrated dinners to fuel our trek of the Paine Circuit in Torres del Paines National Park. Seattlest was informed by one of our mostly worldly and well-traveled (and might we add, handsome) friends that Torres del Paine was one of the “coolest places on Earth,” so we had high expectations. Since we are not nearly as well-traveled (or handsome) as aforementioned friend we can confirm only that it is definitely one of the coolest places that we have seen. It was there that we learned the true meaning of the word “awesome.” We saw giant glaciers! Giant lakes with icebergs in them! Condors! Mountains so pointy and snowy they made us feel like Frodo!

Ahead, to the Cracks of Doom!

Toiling up a hill in the wind. Oh, our lives were hard.

Despite it being “summer,’ we also got rained on, snowed on, and blown around so hard by the wind that Seattlest almost fell into one of those giant iceberg studded lakes never to be heard from again. Patagonia is a place one goes for the majestic scenery; one, however, does not go there for the benign weather.

The reward for the crappy weather were views like this.

If you are a less hearty sort than Seattlest, Torres del Paines offers a series of semi-cushy “refugios” along the trail, where you can park your tired booty in an actual bed and purchase a hot meal, while the campers outside labor to rehydrate their dessicated “food” in the vestibules of their tents as the rain pours down outside. We can highly recommend these refugios, as we succumbed to their airy spaces, hardwood floors, and big picture windows in our last two nights But we recommend roughing it more. Just because that’s the kind of people we are.

If you are a wimp, you can stay in the refugios.

After completing the 8-day Paine Circuit (which we stretched to ten; there is also a five-day version that hits all the highlights), we recuperated for a day in the booming metropolis of Puerto Natales, Chile (population 5), before heading to the next destination: Los Glaciares National Park – where, unbeknownst to us, the mountains would be even more spectacular, and the weather even worse.

Stay tuned for Part II of the Patagonia adventure, or how we found fresh doughnuts in the wilderness amid a torrential downpour.

We didn’t let the weather scare us away. ‘Cause we’re TOUGH like that.