Torres del Paine...

...is THE national park in Chile. It stretches out from the Patagonian wilderness, with 3000-meter-high peaks that are so sharp that even the snow can't hold onto them. Often, there is a glacier between the peaks, which, when a piece of its ice breaks off, can trigger an avalanche.

The high mountains frequently get covered in clouds, resulting in a lot of rain. In 3 out of 5 days, we couldn't even catch a glimpse of the mountains.

What do you do in such a national park? Hiking, of course, and that is not lacking in Torres del Paine. The two major hikes are the O Circuit and the W Circuit. While the O Circuit takes you around the mountains in 9-10 days, with the W Circuit, you can walk between the individual mountain valleys all the way to the glacier in 5 days. This involves a lot of back and forth, hence the name W.

Unfortunately, for these hikes, you always have to reserve the campsites in advance, which we, of course, didn't do, and therefore, we couldn't do these hikes (such a bummer).

However, the park is equipped with so many other hikes that even in 5 days, we couldn't even come close to doing most of them. But the Chileans also don't hold back, they sure let you climb 700 meters in altitude in just 2 kilometers. On the mountain peak, the wind speeds reach up to 120 km/h, so you have to be careful!

The most famous hike is the one to the Torres del Paine peaks, it takes about 8 hours to go up and down, and it's quite a workout. The last hour feels more like mountaineering than hiking. On top, it's foggy, cold, and snowy, but when the clouds clear a bit, you can see the three peaks above the green glacier lake. Wow!

In the lagoons of the national park, there are flamingos, and how they manage to stand on one leg in wind speeds of 80-120 km/h is a mystery to us.

After 5 days of hiking, we continue across the Argentine border to El Calafate, where the largest glaciers in South America are located, along the worst road we have encountered so far in South America...