Happy Anniversary of Madeline & Abby going to Chile!!!!!! We know you all have been on the edge of your seats since Saturday, December 4, 2010, wondering what happened after barbecues and bowling balls.
Well, the first thing you should know is that we made it back to the States. Alive. And that’s how we’re writing this right now. Sorry if some of you out there were unsure about that. And yes, maybe we’ve been together in Nashville for five months, arguably giving us plenty of time to blog. But no. The time is now. We’re snuggling in Atlanta (the Birthplace of Snuggles), going to hear Bon Iver sing us to sleep, and having a Summit. Abby thinks there’s no such thing as a Blog Summit. But that’s what this is. So there.
Backtrack – between bowling and returning to the States, we had exactly ten days to explore every last nook and cranny of Chile. So of course we headed wayyy down south. To the Patagones. (The place, not the STD, clarifies Abby.). Your Chilecheesebloggers were joined by two girls named Al(l)ison. So how do you feel about taking a day-by-day look at what we did? We feel great about it. Here we go.
DAY ONE
After an interesting journey on a surprise (and free) magical bus trip with a Santiago bicycle team of hunky men, we found our way to Puerto Natales, our last stop to rent super-duty hiking and camping gear for our 5-day wilderness immersion. And off we went like a pack of hobos (do girl hobos exist?) into the Great Unknown, armed with peanut butter and high expectations.
Bus … catamaran … boom. At campsite #1. Freezing cold. Raining. Dinner: Peanut butter sandwich #1 of 20, with chocolate chips for nutrition. Tent-pitching for the Helpless, provided by Burly Barcelonans. Learning the hard way that it actually is better to sleep naked.
DAY TWO
We woke up at the crack of 6am to begin our quest to conquer the W. First stop: Glacier Grey. We hiked for hours through sun and rain and mist and snow, and stopped alongside the colossal hunk of ice that is Glacier Grey to munch on peanut butter sandwich #2 of 20, approximately 1/10 of our week’s ration. We finally arrived back to our tent, frozen and all kinds of hurting. After illegally huddling in the heated dining room of the fancy lodge (we were nothing but lowly backpacking peasants), we shivered our soggy bodies back outside to eat peanut butter sandwich #3 of 20.
DAY THREE
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| The one-L Alison, with the peanut butter. |
The sun rose, as it does every day, but due to excessive foggage in the air, we can neither confirm nor deny that fact. Nevertheless, we arose and re-stuffed our backpacks to move on to the next campamento. It was another day filled with breathtaking scenery, peanut butter sandwiches, and tired bodies. After hours and hours and hours of hiking, we made it to our night’s resting ground, if you can even call it that. We felt like the ugly stepsisters, shooed away to the rocky riverbank with howling trees to pitch our tents. Also, to compound our ostracism, everyone there seemed to have known something we didn’t before The Patagones hit – stoves are a common camping accoutrement. We thought we were being economical and hard-core for eating peanut butter and only peanut butter for every meal, but we were just being dumb. Do you picture people wearing Patagonia sportswear eating peanut butter? WHY DID WE THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?
So we went to bed, cold, hungry, and alone.
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| Shafted. |
DAY FOUR
After brushing our teeth outside to this beautiful view …
… we hiked through a guanaco-infested territory in pursuit of the final prize: Las Torres del Paine. But some mean easterly winds were threatening our arrival, so after some harrowing dances across bridges and cliffs, we made it to the base (the way base, says Madeline) of these iconic towers of rock. But we were told by our little hobbit man in a treehouse that the mist might permit us to see them in the morning, it might not. Who knows?
We know. We’ll tell you right now.
But wait: That night, we bonded with people from Australia and New Zealand and England and Germany and Israel and other countries and they were actually really impressed with our mono-food diet. But they also felt really bad for us and gave us some of their hot food – Mac & Cheese, and Onions. For the record, it’s gross. We were so famous that the New Zealander blogged about us.
We woke up at the crack of 6am again, our favorite time to wake up in The Patagones, to climb (more like crawl) to HERE:
And then we had to get back down, pack up, and RUN, really fast, to the bus stop to take a bus to a bus, to a plane, to a metro, to a bus, to our beds in Santiago, shoveling down peanut butter sandwiches on the fly.
And then we had to get back down, pack up, and RUN, really fast, to the bus stop to take a bus to a bus, to a plane, to a metro, to a bus, to our beds in Santiago, shoveling down peanut butter sandwiches on the fly.
Throughout our journey, and even still today, we are thanking our lucky stars that we survived, unprepared and ignorant as we were. We hiked 45 miles (mostly up steep hills, along perilous cliffs) in 5 days, subsisting on peanut butter alone. But so many hours in la naturaleza was a beautiful time to reflect on our five months in the longest country in the world, and we can’t imagine a better ending to a perfect semester.
Signing off for forever (until we go somewhere else together),
Your favorite cheesers
