9 Perfect Days in Patagonia: Day 9, Patagonia to Punta Arenas

Our last morning in Patagonia started with a huge rainbow.

Staying in a cabin is cozy and kewt, but it's also a little smoky and that was the situation we were dealing with when we woke up on Day 9. The silver lining to sleeping with a fire all night is that our gear was dry and we were ready for our hike out of the park.

Here is some realistic information about the park. There IS bus service, there IS a ferry and there is also private transportation that you can arrange for $$$$$$$$. So, you can pretty much do anything if you are willing to pay for it. 

As a reminder, here is what we planned for day 3:

So, we intended to hike from our cabin in Los Cuernos to Paine Grande. From there, you can catch the Pehoe ferry that takes you to Pudeto. From Pudeto, we would wait for the TDP bus to take us to Laguna Amarga, and from Laguna Amarga we would wait for another bus to take us to Hotel Las Torres where our car was parked.

Torres del Paine is HUGE and waiting for the buses, plus driving from all these little points takes a long time. So, all of the above options were going to eat into a lot of our day, and especially when we factored in the 4 1/2 hour drive we had to Punta Arenas and our next hotel, we realized we were being a little too ambitious.

So like the best laid plans of mice and men.

We decided to simply backtrack our route of the previous day, that way we were only relying on ourselves to get us back to our car. I'm glad we did this, because we had such a long drive to our next hotel and I would have been stressed out, counting down the hours as we sat and waited for public transportation. If you want to do what I had originally planned, I would just book that night to sleep back in Rio Serrano. That way, you have a little more flexibility with the timing.

The good news is that since it was so rainy most of our hike in the previous day, our hike out actually felt different.

So for our last day in Torres Del Paine, and our last day in Patagonia, here are my thoughts:

1. Torres del Paine is breathtakingly beautiful. Even the pictures can't do it justice. I am too lazy to touch up any of my photos, so just imagine how it would look in real life, when you can feel the sun and the wind, smell the dirt and crushed greenery and hear the sounds of birds twittering in the trees as you walk by.

2. It is very easy to navigate within the park - IF you do what everyone does. Perhaps the most common thing to do in TDP is the entire W trek, over the course of maybe 4 - 5 days. If this is what you want to do, they have it pretty much nailed down. You can book everything in advance, including tents and sleeping bags if you don't want to carry your own gear. You can buy all your meals along the way, you can arrange for guides, riding tours, etc. If, however, you want to do something a little different (like us), it becomes a little more tricky and if you don't want to pay for a private tour, you have to be both creative and flexible in your timing to make it work. If I had this to do all over again, I would have traveled a bit later in the year and I would have spent a couple more days in the park and just did the entire W trek.

3. There is a huge sense of community within TDP. Perhaps because it IS so easy to hike within the park, and therefore so many people do it, a sense of comradery exists between all the hikers.  You will begin to recognize familiar faces as you all slog along together, and it is very easy to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger or share dinner with a group you just met. I think this would be totally suitable for someone traveling on their own - the entire experience felt safe, coordinated and almost like summer camp for adults.

4. There is something to see, everywhere you go. Once we arrived back to our car, we had at least an hour's drive just to get out of the park. While I don't think that any view can really compare with one you get to using your own feet, we saw guanacos and emu's for the first time and got some final shots of the mountains on our way out. If you are NOT a hiker (but whyyyy), then I would suggest basing yourself outside of the park, in Rio Serrano and driving in each day and exploring all the different routes. You will still get an amazing overview of TDP.

Once we left the national park, we headed towards Punta Arenas, or the "end of the world" because we had an early flight the next morning. I remember the drive feeling surreal - almost like Iceland with how quickly the landscape changed. The weather was a lot colder with strong winds and as a result there was very little plant life on the side of the road, other than these very short, bent, blackened trees.

The road to the end of the world.

Huge difference from the landscape about 3 hours North.

So our first and definitely not last trip to South America ended with us in nearly the most Southern tip of the world, not really ready to leave Patagonia but with our flight already booked, what else could we do?

Need to catch up on Day 8?