Torres del Paine and Actual Pain: Last Days in Chile
Torres del Paine and Actual Pain: Last Days in Chile
I knew Tomás actually hated me when he started addressing me as usted.
(Spanish has two different forms of “you”—one for familiar, friendly relationships (tú) and one for formal relationships (usted). Many other languages have this structure; it’s called a T-V distinction, from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. English used to have it, too, with our thou/thee vs. ye/you, but it’s mostly fallen out of use.)
I should’ve called him usted from the beginning, since he’s 35 years my senior and it’s the polite thing to do, but I didn’t, because my Spanish is still terrible and I couldn’t handle changing verb endings while trying to string together sentences. He started off calling me tú, but last week—right after the bedbug fiasco—he switched over to usted, putting distance between us grammatically, if not literally.
What was the turning point?
Was it that fight about should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-have-known-to-fumigate / will-it-or-won’t-it-work? (A little sneak peek of the remix: the bedbugs never left, even after two rounds of fumigation; I found one in my bed last night at 3 a.m. and fled the hostel for good. Let the record reflect that I was right).
Was it when he asked me and Karla, the German Workawayer, to make two dozen ham-and-cheese sandwiches at 10 p.m. the night before his trip to Torres del Paine (when Karla had to be up at 5:30 a.m. to help him prep and I had to be up at 6 a.m. to leave for my own trip) and then came out to our workstation an hour later and yelled at me for ten minutes for wasting money by using a whole 3/4 of a piece of ham on each sandwich since he only wanted to give away sandwiches to appear generous to his guests, but he didn’t actually want to feed them?
Was it when I passed on his invitation to take me to Torres del Paine with him and Karla, which was in fact, not an invitation, but a request for me to help ferry 14 aging Argentinas around lakeshores for a day, which he would still count as a day off and make me make up for, and instead made my own plans to see the park?
Was it when the nice Chilean video game developer who was staying with us asked if he could use one of the ovens in the kitchen to bake bread, and I said of course, because as Tomás’s told me 18 times, everything in the kitchen is for the guests, but then Tomás got mad because in actuality he never wants guests to use the oven because it uses too much gas and gas costs money and if there’s any guiding principle he follows in his life, it’s that money is more important than literally anything else?
Was it one of the many other moments where I didn’t do exactly what he wanted, exactly when he wanted, in the exact manner he wanted me to do it?
Who knows?
What I do know is this: I am a person who loves being in control, who knows the situations where I am entitled, by experience or ability, to be so, and who can happily follow someone else if they are better equipped to lead and largely incapable of following if they are not.
Tomás is a person who loves being in control, who can’t fathom a situation where he wouldn’t be, and who physically bristles when that control is even questioned, yet alone challenged.
We were not meant to be. I was not surprised when he told me yesterday, rather rudely, that today was my last day. I’m sure he wasn’t surprised that I left early this morning, sticking Karla with the morning chores and fleeing a life of bedbugs and kowtowing to inane demands.
But maybe I failed with Tomás. Maybe this was a test of my empathy and patience and I whiffed colossally. Maybe I was overconfident that I knew better—that I knew what good customer service looks like, or what an acceptable level of insect infestation in a place of business is, or what was reasonable to expect from a volunteer staff.
In any event, I stopped caring about work at some point last week, and I’m sure Tomás picked up on it. I decided that if I couldn’t get through to him or change things around the hostel, I’d just seize the things I could control and make the best of my time here.
I decided to plan my own trip to Torres del Paine, which I took this weekend.
It was a masterclass in dealing with things I could not control: the weather, the road conditions, the animals, my travel companion. Patience was my only available response, but mine, after a week and a half of grating interactions with Tomás, was at an all-time low going in.
How do you think I did?
Let’s go back before we go forwards: Torres del Paine. It’s the most popular national park in Chile, and largely synonymous with Patagonia—when you see pictures of snow-capped crags over ice-blue lakes, there’s a good chance that it’s the towers that give the park its name. Over 200,000 people go every year, many to do the W or the U (5- and 9-day treks, respectively, through the park).
If you don’t want to carry shelter and sustenance on your back for the better part of a week or more, you can do the trek in style, staying and eating at refugios (basically hostels) or hotels, but they’re pricey (even the most bare-bones accommodation will run you $100+/night) and they sell out months and months in advance.
I knew I wanted to see Torres del Paine, and I knew I couldn’t do the W because there were no refugio reservations (it should be clear to you all by now that even if there were camping reservations along the W trek, which there weren’t, I have neither the strength nor the verve for nature required to spend a week fully outside), and I didn’t want to just do an abbreviated one-day car tour, like the one Tomás offered. I went to a trip-planning information session at an equipment rental shop in town to see what my options were.
There I met Greta, a German woman in her late 30s who wanted to do a combo car/trekking trip and was looking for people to go with her.
We began sketching out the bare bones of a plan with the help of a kind guide named Cristobél, who talked to us about which campsites didn’t need reservations while twisting his long grey-white hair into a cap while also chewing a Snickers; his multitasking mesmerized me. We went on to follow every single piece of his advice, from which rental car company to use to what to pack for trek snacks.
He talked to us a lot about weather. First, what it was: destructive, all-powerful, four-seasons-in-an-hour type of unpredictability. Wind, rain, cold, hot; you’ll burn and you’ll chap and you’ll freeze. Then, how to prepare for it: don’t outrun or outspend it. Don’t buy covers for your packs; they’ll fly away. Don’t stay in your tent or in your car when it’s raining; you’ll miss the whole park if you do. Don’t bring heavy jackets—if you’re wet but you’re walking, you’ll get hot and have to strip in a hundred meters. Line your daypacks in garbage-bag cocoons and cradle your most valuable possessions at the bottom. Tie a string between your hat and your shirt so the wind can’t steal it away.
I didn’t think we actually needed the string, but Greta bought 50 meters of double-ply fishing line anyways, because that’s the kind of person that she is.
Greta and I did all of our trip prep on Friday. I secured us equipment (tent, sleeping mats and bags, camp stove and dish set, cooking gas, poles) from my hostel, she got us a reservation for a 2017 Renault Duster, and we met up to do our food shopping together.
I’ve never had such an unpleasant time in a supermarket (even including the time I was driven to tears in a Kroger’s checkout line because the cashier refused to sell me beer the day before my family’s big Christmas Eve party) (my sister Marta was with me and they don’t sell to people under 25 who are in the presence of someone under 18) (to be clear, I ended up getting the beer after crying in front of two different managers) (it was very unpleasant).
Greta had previously made me write out a list of everything we needed. Literally everything, down to the number of grams of cheese we should buy based on estimated daily consumption. I didn’t quite get it—we were driving so there was no need to worry about weight, and if we were a slice of cheese over or under, it didn’t really matter—but I humored her, and we walked into the Unimarc armed with my iPhone note detailing our diet for the long weekend, from apples (4, medium-sized) to water (1 liter, for backup).
Having the list wasn’t enough. We were a third of the way through the store when Greta asked me to take a look at what else we needed. I did what I think most normal people do—I scanned the list and mentally highlighted the items that I didn’t see in the cart and read them out: “Okay, so we still need salami, bread, and trash bags.”
“But how do you know that’s what we need? Have you been crossing off things as we’ve gotten them? Can you please start doing that?”
So there I was, pinching and scrolling my phone screen to cross out everything we’d gotten and then letting her read over it when I was done so she could be sure I hadn’t made a mistake. It was good that my hands were busy. I couldn’t reach out and strangle her.
That was my first exposure to Greta’s extreme fanaticism for organization. I might have been able to deal with it if it had produced good results. But the next morning, when we arrived at the park and were registering with the rangers, Greta realized that she’d forgotten all of our refrigerated food at her hostel (bye, carefully measured cheese). An hour later, as we were heading to our first trek of the day, she screamed from the passenger seat (nearly making me drive into a guanaco, the South American version of a llama) that she’d forgotten her jackets. Jackets! As in both of them! Rain and down! In Patagonia! When “jackets” was on not one but three separate lists (“things to pack in daypack,” “clothes to have,” and “weather gear”)!!!!
But weirdly enough, watching Greta lose it actually made me calmer. Deeply annoyed, yes, but patient, since I recognized that I had to calm her down if we were to actually get through any of our itinerary. I found two ways to treat my annoyance: 1) looking at the insane beauty of the natural world around me and breathing in so deeply that I could actually feel the clean air sear the inside of my lungs and burn away any anger, and 2) driving our rental car like I was doing a platinum course on Excite Truck and was 5 super-drifts away from getting a new high score. (Greta hated this and made clucking noises every time I downshifted into second and gunned it up a hill or threw the car into fifth and took a curving road at full speed—which only made it more fun.)
After our first day of relatively short treks (we did three two-hour hikes), we camped at Pehoé, where the vistas were literally the best I’ve ever seen and almost made up for the horrible few hours I spent inside a cramped tent with Greta’s heavy breathing rivaling the whipping rain cover for most irritating sound. I ended up crawling into the backseat of the car at 2 a.m. and catching a few hours’ rest there, which was enough to get me through the next day, where we climbed to the Torres that give the park its name.
Greta’s hiking style was as meticulous as the rest of her life: 45 minutes of walking at constant speed, a 4 minute rest for water and a granola bar, 2 minutes of reapplying sunscreen, and back on the trail. I didn’t need to eat as often and I wanted to hike faster, so we made a plan to meet at the top and I headed out on my own.
The trek was beautiful on the way up: sunny, warm, skipping from river to forest to rocky outcropping so quickly that it felt like I was walking through sets on a movie lot instead of a national park. The first three hours passed quickly, and the fourth was nearly interminable, a constant ascension up boulders while people are trying to come down at the same time. But I made it, and I was rewarded with the Torres in all their glory.
I met a lovely Englishwoman at the top, and we had a photoshoot and shared our lunches (my sandwiches were just dried sausage, because of the whole forgetting-the-cheese-and-deli-meat fiasco, but the view more than made up for the dry food). Greta joined us about half an hour later, and then I went off on my own for the trek back down.
Ten minutes in, it started to rain. I was soaked through in an hour, and by the halfway point, I was this horrible mix of sweaty and muddy and cold and was performing impromptu surgery on my clothes to attempt to remedy it. I unzipped the leg part of my hiking pants and bunched them around my ankles, as I’d seen others do, to let my lower body breathe; I more securely fastened my hood to my hat to prevent the rain from blinding me. I vented the sleeves in my rain jacket and pulled up my balaclava to cover my chin and ears. And then I just started running.
I can only imagine how stupid I looked, bounding from one muddy rock to the next, ignoring the view of fog and clouds and trying hard to not break an ankle, but I was so wet and tired and wanted to get down this damn mountain. At some point, I realized that the cuffs of my pants were getting stuck under my heel and gathering a disgusting coating of horse shit and mud, but instead of taking them off and tying them into a garbage bag, I just tucked them into my shoes and ran faster.
I finally got back to our campsite, where I immediately sought out a hot shower and then, once semi-warm, resigned myself to eating cold ravioli out of a can in the backseat of the car (also my bed for the night, because I’m done with tent camping forever, I think). Greta made it back and we shared a quiet meal of cold food accompanied by Hozier’s 2014 album, and then she packed her bed supplies—sleeping bag, sleeping bag liner, earplugs, waterproof phone case, waterproof journal, extra merino layer, bed slippers, glasses, nighttime water bottle (different from daytime of course)—into garbage bags, made a poncho for herself, and ran for the tent to sleep.
The next morning, we packed up camp—everything was damp but handleable—and attempted to leave the park.
We got to the exit and were informed that Laguna Amarga had flooded and that no one could get in or out of camp. The warmer-than-average weather had melted more glacial runoff than usual and the heavy rainfall had added to the glut, swelling the lake to 3 or 4 meters above its normal level and washing out the road through it.
I got out of the car to talk with the rangers. When did they think the road would open? Tomorrow at the earliest, probably in two days. Could we get across any other way? We could take a boat across. What about the rental car? We’d have to leave it behind. How often does this happen? Once every 4 to 5 years!
Greta was freaking out, as expected, muttering “fuck” under her breath and calculating how many hundreds of thousands of pesos we’d owe the car company if we didn’t get it back before 7 p.m. that evening.
I walked over to the friendliest-looking ranger and asked him what he’d do if he were me. He looked at me, then at our crossover car, then at the water. “I’d drive now. The water will rise as the day goes on, and it might be worse tomorrow. Drive now, with a pickup truck in front of you to give you some cover.” (He said this in Spanish, so it took another five sentences for me to understand what he was saying, but that’s the synthesized version.)
“Would you be willing to drive for us?” I asked. “My friend and I have never driven in conditions like this, and we’d feel a lot better if you were driving.”
The ranger—Rodrigo Our Savior, as I now think of him; he’s up there with Mother Theresa and Michelle Obama for me—thought about it for a second, then smiled and held out his hands for the keys. “As long as you promise I’m not responsible if anything bad happens, I’m in.”
Greta’s eyes bulged—we had signed something saying only the two of us would drive the car and if we let anyone else behind the wheel we would owe them our firstborn child!!—but she kept quiet and got in the backseat.
I’ve never been so nervous in a car in my life, and those nerves erupted as fanatical giggles. Rodrigo conscripted a friend with a truck to drive in front of us, and with a gleeful shout of “vamos,” we pulled into the lake.
The water lapped the car doors. I opened my window—I could’ve reached down and touched the lake if I’d’ve wanted to. Rodrigo kept the car in second gear and didn’t move his foot from the gas, even as the car began making guttural noises somewhere around halfway across.
As we pulled onto dry land on the other side, I let out a gleeful yip and squeezed Rodrigo’s arm. Greta’s face started to color again—she had gone even paler than usual and resembled nothing so much as a shiny peeled hardboiled egg—and she pressed a tip into Rodrigo’s hand.
And then we were off for our final day of Torres del Paine: the insanely blue water of Laguna Azul.
Since I had driven to the park, Greta drove back, giving me ample time to sit and look at scenery and reflect on my experience.
All I could do all weekend—whether I was confronting Greta’s preferences or a sudden rainstorm or roads plagued with so many potholes that I had to drive no more than 20km and to steer between them with the precision of a master seamstress—was be careful and keep going. Be careful, keep going. I didn’t even need to be calm the whole time—there were other responses than patience. There was humor. There was creativity. There was focus. And the unifying requirement for whatever response I chose was a constant focus on the end goal: get down this mountain. Get through this night. Sit on a lakeshore and appreciate the incredibly beauty of this world and the incredible fortune I have in getting to experience it. I didn’t need to be in control of anything other than myself and my response to the situations around me. I can’t orchestrate the world.
We returned the car and I walked back into my hostel with new focus on my new goal: I would get through my contract—work through the end of February 6—and do the bare minimum of work required, then move on to Argentina and start the next leg of my journey.
Karla, the German volunteer, was happy to see me, and we caught up over scrambled eggs and avocado and pita bread while I put all my park clothes through the laundry. Our reunion was cut short when Tomás entered the kitchen in a huff, complaining about all the laundry still drying from the hooks in the bathroom. Karla and I shared a glance, told him we’d deal with it tomorrow, and went to bed.
It could’ve ended there, you guys. I could’ve taken away some lovely lessons from a lovely weekend in the park. I could’ve finished off my Workaway commitment and felt good about sticking it out for the life experience, the story, and the strength of my word.
But then.
I was tossing around in bed at 2 a.m., unable to sleep through the snoring of the Brazilian man in the bed diagonal from mine, when I turned on my phone to browse Instagram (less effective but much more entertaining that counting sheep). The light from my phone illuminated A GIANT FUCKING BEDBUG ON MY SHEETS.
I lost it, but I lost it calmly. I climbed down from my bed, stripped off the t-shirt I was wearing and left it behind, and walked downstairs by the light of my iPhone flashlight to the bathroom, where I folded all my clean, dry clothes and got dressed. I texted Jorge2 and asked him to pick me up; he said he’d be there in fifteen. I went back upstairs for the stuff I hadn’t brought to the park, put it into a giant garbage bag, and composed some texts to Karla, explaining to her what happened and apologizing for bolting in the middle of the night.
Jorge2 picked me up in his rickety old van and took me to his for the night. This has cemented his spot in my heart as a lovely human being, even if I never see him again after tomorrow. The next morning, I made a reservation for myself at a nice hotel in town, not blinking twice at the USD95 price tag. He dropped me off and I spent the day laying across a double bed in a private room—my first in a month!—and taking hot showers and cleaning all my belongings and writing and finishing the second season of The Good Place and sleeeeeeping. It was everything I needed.
I leave tomorrow for Calafate, my first stop in Argentina. I’ll do a few more days of trekking in Argentinian Patagonia, then head up to their Lake District, and then go to Mendoza and Buenos Aires. And I’m sure I’ll have other shitty experiences (though hopefully I’m done with bedbugs for a while) and I’m sure I’ll have other wonderful experiences and I’m sure I’ll meet people who irk me and people who inspire me and a bunch of people in between. And that’s why I’m here—to have the experiences, to meet the people, to understand the places, and in so doing to understand myself and my place in the world a little better.