Planner Part 2: What it takes?

This is my column. It is paired with my daughters column. She just wanted to write one blog, but we’ve morphed it into a series that we alternately write. Two people, two perspectives, narrated in acts, like a play’s script, describing an epic journey that we took as a family to the Torres.

By: Samya Ghosh.
February 21, 2020

So we’d decided on Chile and Torres for the December 2019. My wife had come around, largely because of my haranguing. We had 2 weeks of which a week was planned for Torres and the balance for Atacama and Santiago.

I was reading blogs, travelogues, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, was on TripAdvisor, Viator quite a bit at this time. The first thing I wanted to do was learn about how long to spend in each end of Chile and what we wanted to do. One of the best blogs I found about this was a blog called the Stingynomads about the Torres circuit. I learnt that there are 3 main trails

1. W: that takes about 3-5 days
2. O: that takes about 7-9 days. It includes the W
3. Q: this includes the O and has some additional offshoots. Takes about 9-10 days

If you’re wondering, the names are standard – not my simplification of more complicated trail names and are based on the shape that these trails form on a map. So the W looks like a W, O like an O etc.

The W is the most trafficked and can be done bi-directionally. The O after some forest fires a few years ago had been restricted to be a 1-way trail.

The park itself is named after 3 granite towers called the Towers of Paine (Paine means “blue” in the native Tehuelche (Aonikenk) language and is pronounced PIE-nay. Thanks Wikipedia!). These are the main features that tourists go to see, with most not even attempting the W, far less the O or Q. Most visitors to the park stay at Puerto Natales and take day trips into the park. One day for the Torres hike to the towers, 1 day for sights and sounds around the park and perhaps a 3rd for the boat ride up to a glacier called Glacier Grey that feeds into a lake called Lago Grey.

Anyhooo… planning the Torres circuits can be done two ways:

1. Call a travel company and get them to do all the planning for you. I have no experience with this, but in my research, Swoop-Patagonia seemed like a comprehensive provider for these guided hiking plans. They have 3/4/5 day versions of W and similar variations for O, so you can choose what you want based on your needs.
   • Advantages:
     • No backpack, they’ll carry your load between camps.
     • No food worries, they’ll have prepared meals for you at each camp.
     • No managing bookings.
     • The biggest advantage is finding bookings at each of the camp sites. The O is not attempted by everybody, so you still find these bookings even if you can plan a couple months in advance. The W camp reservations have to be made 6-8 months in advance for you to get consecutive dates.
     • No hassles around getting to the park early to make sure you get your backpacking and entry permits etc etc. Logistics are their hassle.
     • Also great advice (I shamelessly took a bunch of these online) on what to pack and how to be prepared
   • Disadvantage:
     • They are on a schedule, so start dates are dictated by them
     • Expensive: on an average they’ll be about 1200 dollars more expensive / person than if you managed everything yourself
2. Plan it yourself (not repeating the advantage, disadvantages except to add two points)
   • While it takes a lot of time and mental space and calling people and writing people and following up with 2 different companies to get all the bookings done, it does help if you’ve got your whole family invested in this. I did a lot of this, but the kids would follow up regularly and get excited every time some plan fell in place. It helped build a lot of the anticipation
   • If you want to stay in any of the camps more than 1 day, this gives you flexibility. For example: when we go back to Torres again, we are sure to book the campsite at Grey for two days, instead of 1. I supposed this itself requires some experience or expert advice.

I will tell you how we did it, planning the trip for ourselves.

I figured I would do the camp booking first, since availability for camps was critical. Airline, tickets, local hotel booking, car rentals could all follow, because none of these other elements had constraints on them

The booking requires you to book online with two different companies + if required the Chilean Govt camp:

• Vertice Patagonia: they run 4 camps

• Fantastico Sur: they run 5 camps

• CONAF: run two barebone camps. I hear one of them didn’t open for the 2019 season

What you see on the map above is the quickest way to do the O at Torres, but for a family with kids and not very proficient at backpacking this is what I would suggest

1. Day 1: Get to Las Torres and stay the night at Las Torres without backpacking (Stop 7 alternate on the map). Book Last Torres for night 1 of your stay
2. Day 2: hike to Seron and stay at Seron overnight. Book Serron for Night 2
3. Day 3: hike to Dickson and stay overnight at Dickson. Book Dickson for Night 3
4. Day 4: hike to Perros and stay overnight at Perros. Book Perros for Night 4
5. Day 5: hike to Grey (if you can make it) and stay for two nights at Grey. Book Night 5 and Night 6 at Grey
   • As a backup, you can book night 5 at Paso in addition to Grey. The CONAF bookings are free, so it won’t cost you and like us if you can’t quite make it to Grey, you have a reservation at Paso. Just be aware that Paso has no tent facility, so you might have to carry a tent all through the O for this contingency.
   • I would strongly urge though that unlike us you keep going Very likely you’re doing this hike at the peak of the Patagonian summer and the days are long. Also, much easier to carry a headlapm than a tent, even if you have to hike a mile or so in the dark.
   • This is also, why I suggest the two day booking at Grey for Night 5 and 6. It’ll give your body a chance to recover and you can book kayaking or the boat ride at Grey for Day 6. Both are not to be missed and will not require as much physical activity
6. Day 7: Grey to Paine Grande. Stay night 7 at Paine Grande
7. Day 8: Paine Grande to Camp Frances (preferred) or Cuernos (alternative). Stay night 8 at Frances. I didn’t get bookings at either of them to align to my dates, so can’t say if one is better. I suggest Frances because it is closer to the round trip to Mirador Britanico that you will haev to do as a morning hike, before heading out the same day
8. Day 9: back and forth to Mirador Britanico, then head to Chileno (preferred) or Los Torres (alternative). Book the night at Chileno. Once again, as you read Ishani’s posts you will see that we didn’t make it to Los Torres which we had booked. We could not even get bookings at Chileno, but Chileno is closer to Mirador Torres and everybody does say getting to the Mirador Torres before sunrise unites you with the Universe (or something like that!)
9. Day 10: hike to Mirador Torres and back to Los Torres (even if you start from Chileno) and exit the park the same afternoon/evening. Book a stay at at a hotel in Puerto Natales and spend day 11 on local sight-seeing.

It’s a long stay, but well worth it and I would ignore Chilean Atacama and just focus on Torres and Santiagao/Valpraiso if I had 14 days for a trip. The Chilean Atacama while magnificent in its own right, doesn’t hold a candle to what Torres offers. In point of fact, if you had more days, I would urge that you plan for the rest of the stay crossing into Argentina and visiting Perito Moreno or drive up the Carretera Austral (the Pacific highway) and take in other sights enroute.

A few notes:

• Pressed for time, plan on skipping Day 1 at Los Torres and start the O directly (Los Torres to Seron) on Day 1. It’ll save you a day
• I found it a little confusing, but the park entrance is at Laguna Amarga. The trail starts from Las Torres. There are taxi’s almost always available that will for $5 to $15 (per person) take you to Los Torres. Avoid trying to hike this portion (you’ll be sharing the road with vehicular traffic and its dusty, so spend the money to get to Los Torres)
• An additional area of confusion for me. The park entrance fee is to be paid in CASH ONLY at one of the entrances. You cannot buy this online and even if you buy tent/bed at a campsite, this does not automatically guarantee entry into the park. So plan on getting to the entrance early. Sometimes a queue forms and it can take a while. Like us, if you have an earlier day in the area, then get to one of the entrances and
• The booking for the camps:
  • Start with the W camps first and work backwards. So look for bookings for Day 9 and Day 8 first (Chileno/ Torres and Frances/Cuernos). If you get those locked in, then you can look for bookings for the previous days. In the very worst case those don’t fall into place, you can still do just these two portions of the W. It’ll be worth the while and you won’t lose money on the bookings.
  • Vertice Patagonia’s website is a little more seamless – they account for the fact that you are looking at booking these camps on consecutive days, so they try to give you blocks of booking accordingly. Fantastico requires some work on your side to work out the specific dates and then book them individually.
  • Neither website is a booking.com or expedia, so be prepared for some frustration and use of multiple browsers based on how the website is behaving
  • Be a little flexible with the dates. As I said earlier, if you’ve got 14 days in Chile, you might have to do this in the beginning or the middle or the end and work the rest of your itinerary around it. This will be the hardest to find blocks of bookings.
  • Visit the sites frequently. I had a routine to check the sites every night before hitting bed. In spite of this I never managed bookings at Cuernos/Frances and barely got Los Torres for our last day plan. Our itinerary to exit the park at Paine Grande and take boat and bus back to Los Torres was because we could not find bookings at Frances/Cuernos.
  • Book early: we started our planning in September/October and never got the satisfactory bookings. Our plan was convoluted from the get go because we were adjusting to what we got instead of what we wanted.
• Tent or Room? Food or full service?
  • Hard to say. The tents are comfortable. The bathrooms are shared in either case (mostly) and if you’re on the trail then you’ll be tired enough that your body will lull you into sleep on any comfortable flat surface. Tents will save you a bunch of money. If I am not mistaken then a non tent option is also not available at all locations. Tents are somehow more “authentic” for us amateurs. I know the mature through hiker who’s already done the ACT is laughing at my naivete.
  • Full service (food) or bring your own. We brought our own. My wife is vegetarian and this made a lot of sense for us, because we like our spices and while Chilean food is awesome for most palates, it wasn’t exactly Chilean food that is on offer everywhere. Sometimes it’s just a sandwich on offer and we prefer our Masala Maggi, thank you very much. Once again, this may not be an option at all camps in any case (like Seron / Perros had no food counter that we saw), so if you’re going to carry food (or cooking paraphernalia) for two nights… 3-4 more doesn’t make that much of a difference.
• Change in bookings / questions: both Vertice and Fantastico have offices in Puerto Natales (walking distance from each other). They have a phone number as well, but if you’re landing on a Sunday or are looking for outside of office hour calls and looking to do business on the phone, tough luck. The team in both places are exceedingly helpful, polite and patient, but count on getting to their offices for most additional requirements. If you’re still doing this while not in Puerto Natales, they are quite responsive over email.
• One last irritating aspect: I guess these companies like selling the package, so even if their website is not showing availability for a block of rooms on consecutive days, you might be able to buy the guided package from them for those same days. So if you’ve got the money to spend, ask them and buy yourselves a few more options. We would have but our dates did not align.

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