Wild, rough…..touristic!
Quick Summary:
- An Overview:
- Costs: Park entrance fee $44 (for more than 3 days; $31 for 3 days); Park shuttle $5 per person; cost per night (camping with your own gear) ~$10-20 per person, cost for food (bring your own food) or up to $90 day
- 3 Types of Hike (O-Circuit, W-trak, single hike)
- complicated booking system
- O-Circuit: make friends on less crowed hiking path
- W-Trek: shorter hike but mass tourism
- Astonishing Bird life
Parque National Torres del Paine: An Overview
To be completely honest, I was disappointed. Only in retrospect, when I look at my pictures, do I understand the moments I missed out on enjoying. Too crowded even in the low season, sometimes more expensive than Switzerland and, above all, a dilapidated infrastructure meant that I personally could hardly enjoy the landscapes.
The Torres del Paine National Park can be explored on foot in 3 different ways: either the 120 km-long, 7-night circular hike, called the O Circuit, around the famous Torres del Paine, the approximately 4-day hike called the W trek, or day trips to explore sections of the W. There is a limited number of people per day who are allowed to start the hike on the O-Circuit, the camps are also limited and wild camping is strictly forbidden. Above all, this means that you have to book months in advance to be able to hike during the time slot you would like to hike during.
There are several travel agencies and providers who will plan and book the hike for you, including lodging before and after in Puerto Natales, bus rides, and park entrance fees, but these costs quickly add up, often costing upwards of $1,000 for the most basic packages! If you want to book yourself, you need a lot of prior knowledge about the park to make the whole thing work.
Bringing your own tent and food makes the whole thing cheaper, but you can still expect to pay between $20 and $60 per night for a campsite for two people. If you don’t want to bring your own food, you can reserve it in advance (~$30 per meal) or buy snacks in the kiosks at the camps. If you decide not to bring a tent, you also have the option of renting a tent, mat, and sleeping bag at the respective camp, which costs around $80 per night or in Puerto Natales, which is somewhat cheaper. In addition, there is the option of sleeping in fixed accommodation, which is available as dormitories or individual cabins, with prices ranging from $90-$230 per night depending on the camp. Not to forget you also have to buy a park entrance fee of $44 per person for a stay over 3 days and shuttles of $5 per trip to the trailhead. In addition, there are the travel costs from Puerto Natales like the 2 hour bus ride to park; with BusSur a trip costs $13 per person. A good tip is to buy this online in advance, as there is a lot of chaos at the bus terminal and there may be no seats available. ATTENTION: The Chilean websites of the individual bus providers often don’t seem to work from abroad. For just $3 you can get a cell phone subscription with 3GB for 20 days from CLARO, which makes it easy to make bookings in the country itself. If you speak Spanish well and want to save some money, you can try to book your accommodation yourself. I tried this again to be able to write a clear guide for this blog post. With the knowledge I have gained I thought I would be able to do this easily, but even now it is still a real pain.
But let’s start from the beginning! To understand how to make your booking, you first need to take a look at the park itself. Sorry for the bad photo, but this was the only and therefore the best map that was offered on the entire route! In blue you can see the W trek, in red the O-circuit trek. The blue route can be done in both directions, the red only from Welcome Center (Central) towards Glacier Grey. The orange route is the most famous hike in the park to the Mirador Las Torres and is also the end of the O-Circuit hike.
If we assume that you hike the O-Circuit, then you will pass the following camps in this order; 1) Seron 2) Dickson 3) Perros 4) Grey 5) Paine Grande 6) Italiano or Francés (two camps very close to each other) 7) Los Cuernos 8) Chileno and finally you are back at the starting point in Central. Most people arrive in Central and hike to Seron on the first day, but you could, theoretically, start in Central (hiking the Mirador Las Torres on day 1) and go on from there, but I found it nice to end with the most famous hike. You should write down exactly this order, because you have to book the individual camps through several providers, and the camps are not displayed in the correct order, or some camps are missing in the reservation because they are spread over three providers! I met some hikers who only realized this on site and had to skip a camp on one day. On the website of the Ministry of Agriculture of Chile (CONAF) you can make a reservation for Camp Italiano. However, if you have space at Camp Francés, a reservation via CONAF is not necessary, as the two camps are very close to each other and you can save yourself a provider. Camping Paso, which is also offered by CONAF, is closed. The camps Séron, Francés and Cuernos (as well as Chileno but not necessary to stay here!) must be booked through the provider Las Torres. The campsites for Dickson, Perros, Grey and Paine Grande must be booked via the Vertice Travel website.
More information would only confuse, so keep in mind which days you’ll be in which camp and then browse through the reservation pages and you’ll be fine! If all this is too stressful for you, you can simply buy ready-made solutions from many different providers.
Most visitors take a day trip with the boat to Sector Paine Grande and walk from there to Glacier Grey, or do the day hike to Mirador Las Torres. The most popular trek is probably the W-Trek, followed by the O-Circuit. The O-circuit is often described as rather boring in terms of the landscape and very strenuous, so I think it puts many tourists off. However, I found this part by far the most beautiful for the very simple reason that you can enjoy hiking! On the O-Circuit you meet similar crazy people who carry all their belongings with them and are not on a photo hunt but looking for an adventure. As there are limited places, you quickly get to know each other and grow into a bigger family who look after each other and spend sociable hours together in the camp. I met people from all over the world during this time and would definitely not want to miss it!
The W-Trek, on the other hand, was an absolute horror for me. Mass tourism like I’ve never experienced before, even in touristy Switzerland! If you don’t set off early in the morning, you quickly get in the way of the day tourists, which means queuing on the narrow paths, sometimes for 20 minutes. As I came there with the idea of being alone in the wild nature of Patagonia, this really overwhelmed me. If I had known this in advance, I would not have done the hike. Unfortunately, it is also not allowed to swim in the beautiful deep blue lakes. Something very important to bear in mind is the strict ban on fires and wild camping, which is punishable by large fines. It is also not allowed to use your gas stove in the wild, only in the designated indoor area in the camp.
Those who are a lot more patient than me manage to collect countless beautiful moments and encounter fascinating fauna. The wildlife has so much to offer, especially for bird lovers, from parrots to flamingos, nandus, condors and hummingbirds to the largest woodpecker on earth! If you’re very lucky, you might even spot a puma. I almost forgot about the guanacos at this point, simply because they are everywhere and simply belong here.
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