Camp Patagonia

We are at camp.  It is a far cry, though from Camp Lake Forest Springs where I went in 4th grade and Peter Von Goren threw up all over the place.  Actually, if camp had been like this when I was a kid I would have moved permanently to live there.

This is the best camp I have ever been to.

our guide all day today,
a Belgian named Song

But first, where are we?  We landed yesterday afternoon on the Magellan Straight (discovered by the Spaniard in 1520 on his trip around the world) in a town called Punta Arenas and then hopped in a van that drove us to the hotel.  It was a four hour drive (our driver was awesome and flew over the roads).  As we drove out of town, we saw the Tierra del Fuego across the straight and then we hugged the border of Argentina most of the rest of the way until we arrived at the Torres Del Paine park in Patagonia (a broad description of the region that encompasses both the southern tips of Chile and Argentina).

The terrain and the feeling is completely different than what we've seen in the rest of Chile.  It feels almost like a Scandinavian/Swiss/Canadian place.  If you can combine those three.  The landscape was flat for the first two hours of the drive and was one sheep or cattle ranch after another (mostly by far sheep).  Then, as the outcroppings of rocks begin to show themselves, there were still sheep farms, but also with the added bonus of glimpses of the Torres Del Paine.  The gorgeous granite towers dominate this region that kept enchanting us as we drove further north.

We knew we were in for something special.

guanaco remains

Added to the visual beauty, we were lucky enough to see a puma (what??  yes, they are the major predator here) leap over the dirt road (the last two hours were by dirt road) in one hug fluid jump and pounce on something just to the side of the road.

I'm guessing by what we saw today that the puma was after the most common animal in this area, the guanaco, because we saw hundreds of them today and also saw hundreds, no thousands, of bones and half-eaten remains of this relative of the llama and camel.  (We also found all the flamingoes we were looking for in Atacama...maybe they decided to come to the most beautiful place on earth, too.)

live guanacos

Okay, so I've gotten off track--back to camp.  We are at a hotel in the Torres Del Paine park that has spectacular views, so much so that sometimes, I think I am looking out the window at a painting.  So, that's one thing that is awesome about this "camp."

Secondly, the hotel is an experiential hotel, which means that every evening we meet with one of the guides that work here and decide what we will do the next days choosing from nearly 40 options of hikes (with varying difficulty) and horseback rides.  (The hotel we stayed at in Atacama was similar.)

Last night when we arrived we chose to do a shorter (4 mile) hike in the morning across flat-ish terrain but through guanaco country...which meant we saw another puma this morning, again hunting. Very unusual, said our guide, no one sees two pumas in one week. Lucky us.

Gillian takes in the
view from Camp base
(our hotel Explora)

The best part about camp is meeting new kids, I mean people, and today we started out with a great family from Cincinnati. (last night at dinner, we met two women from Mountain Brook, AL, one of whom is friends with a darling friend of mine from Wake Forest...small world!!) But today, it was a mom and dad, their two kids (12 and 9) and their grandparents.

The grandfather reminded us so much of Jeff's dad, whom we call Lulu, because he was so into photography, a gentle guy, a cardiologist (close to Jeff's dad's profession), and so interested in what he was seeing.  He was awesome.  His son-in-law, another doc (an internist) was fun to talk to as well, our conversation ranged from the "old" houses both his family and ours live in (pluses and minuses, of course) to the privatization of health care.  So, we covered a lot.  His wife and kids were awesome, too, fun to talk to (as well as the grandmother, seriously we lucked out with this group!), and had traveled around he world together, a lot like our own family.

view from the saddle

After our hike this morning, we headed up to an Estancia (ranch) further into the park for a barbecue Gaucho style with more views of the towers.  We kept pinching ourselves.  This camp is awesome.

The afternoon brought structured activity #2, which for us and six others from all over the world, was an hour and a half horseback ride through some forested areas, across a grassland where the views made my heart hurt with the beauty.

I'm not kidding.

The barbecue, guacho style
two lamb, veggies, salmon,
beef...

We are never going home.  Jeff, get the girls and come to camp with us.  It has put us in the best mood and it sounds like the rest of our family could use this antidote to what ails them all up in Costa Rica.  

this is actually, in real life, the view from the window
in our room
Yeah.

Tomorrow, a 16 km hike...can't wait.

our hotel