Patagonia

The wind is the first thing and it stays the first thing. It has a sound in the guy lines of a tent that I will be hearing for years. On the second day it took a hat off my head and put it in a lake roughly two hundred metres away.

Torres del Paine does the thing where the mountains are visible from so far out that you spend a full day driving towards something that never appears to get closer. Then it does get closer, all at once, and the scale rearranges itself.

We walked the W over five days. The middle day, up the French valley, was the hardest and the one I would repeat tomorrow. Glacier calving somewhere above us all afternoon, a noise like distant demolition, and nobody talking much.

Getting around

Coming back down to the refugio in the evening, boots off, everything aching, eating whatever was put in front of us — that is the part I actually miss. Not the views. The tiredness.