Puerto Natales, Chile – 26. December 2017 – 2. January 2018
Similarly to Ushuaia, also Puerto Natales don’t has that much to offer as town itself. The weather has been slightly better than the one I found in Ushuaia, so I enjoyed more my walks along the coast, but the main course was not the town itself, but the National Park of Torres del Paine.
This Park in particular is one of them that you typically see in documentaries and travel books. It is world famous for the lot of different hiking tracks you can follow and for the three natural “towers” that are visible only from the top of one of these tracks. During my stay in Puerto Natales I also took the occasion to visit the Glacier Perito Moreno, in the argentinian Patagonia. It is a long trip by bus from Puerto Natales, but it is definitely worth of it.
There is not that much that I can say about the national parks: the pictures talks by theirselves (or at least I hope so).
I can say something about what meant to me doing these hiking alone. Hiking is maybe the less demanding activity you can do in the mountains: it is not skying, it is not climbing, for sure it is not opening new routes. But for someone that has known in his life only Lignano, Poti and some vulcans between Sicily and Lanzarote, hiking in Torres del Paine was a bit of a challenge. I don’t talk about the track to la Torres, that moreover I did with a guide. Neither the tracks from Paine Grande to Campo Italiano or to the Mirador Grey were that challenging.
But when you raise the bar again, and you decide to go a bit off-track to reach the top of a cliff to take a look to the Grey glacier while the wind whistle and the snow hit your face, or when you decide to reach the Mirador Britanico from Campo Italiano despite the muscle soreness and the fatigue of the last week, then yes, it becomes a challenge. And when on the way back from Britanico you feel like you are doing too much mistakes, when you fall down with your face in the mud because you are unfocused and put your feet on a slippery rock, and when you have still more that 7 km of walk in front of you, you ask yourself if this time you didn’t raised the bar too high. Of raising the bar, of never settle, I made a laical belief. But there is a limit to which one should, at some point, stop raising the bar? And how to recognize it? Is it failing to reach that last objective that set your limit? If so it is, every success is just another step on the road to the failure, and to the frustration. Then what to do? Just nothing? Renouncing to everything, because everything is just an illusion that will bring you up to the next failure? I am for sure not the first person in the earth having this questions in his mind. I think to Saint Francis, I think to the Tibetan Monks. I think to the hermits from yesterday and today. And I can’t stop thinking that maybe that bar should be lowered, much more than raised. Until we understand that maybe no success really matter. That nothing really matter.
Refugio Base – Torres del Paine
(manual recording)
Refugio Paine Grande – Glacier Grey
Refugio Paine Grande – Mirador Britannico
Click here to access the full photo gallery
Song of the post: Cristiano De André – Il cielo é vuoto (the sky is empty)
Ti accorgi che il cielo é vuoto
perché la nostra immaginazione
ha bisogno di spazio.
E’ vuoto
perché la nostra immaginazione
naviga nello spazio.
Si stacca l’anima, non fa più rumore;
puoi chiudere gli occhi, ma è vietato morire.
You realize that the sky is empty
because our imagination
require space.
It’s empty
because our imagination
fly to the space.
The soul split up, it makes no more noise;
you can close your eyes, but death is forbidden.
