My Favorite Place: Torres del Paine Parque Nacional, Chile
If I had to choose my favorite place in the world, I would pick Torres del Paine Parque Nacional in Chile. I visited the national park in December 2018 with my family as a backpacking vacation, which meant that we began our hike on Christmas Day and ended the hike on New Year's Day. (It was so cool to see how the Chilean people celebrate those holidays!) Over the course of that week, we hiked about 100 miles total, and the landscape was absolutely gorgeous. I've included a couple images that I took on our hike below (as well as a good photo from the Internet) to show how pretty the mountains looked!
(Personal image of Torres del Paine)
(Personal image of Los Cuernos [The Horns] in Torres del Paine)
Each night, we ate and slept in a "refugio," which was basically a cabin with a central dining hall for the travelers. As a result, it wasn't a "traditional" backpacking trip that included camping. But walking for so long really allowed me to slow down and appreciate the park in a way that pictures or a bus ride could never. For example, there were several points during the hike where our Chilean tour guide stopped so we could fill up our water bottles in a nearby stream. He knew which ones were clean after being a tour guide on those trails for so many years--I'm not sure we even needed our filtered water bottles! I've included a picture of what a typical stream like that looked like. It was incredible how the landscape was so untouched by people!
(Personal image of a stream in Torres del Paine)
The best day of the trip was definitely the first day of hiking, because we spent all day climbing up a mountain to see the Three Towers, then going back down again. The uphill walk was very challenging at times, especially near the end, where the trail petered out into large boulders we had to walk over. As we rounded the corner, a person in the group in front of us said, "All of our suffering was worth it," upon seeing the view. Even our guide commented on how the cloudless day was one of the best ones he had ever seen for that view.
It's true--every mile had been worth it.
Oh wow, Kenzie, what beautiful pictures! How great that you have been to Chile. Maybe you will want to use this class as a chance to learn about the storytelling traditions of Chile: folktales and/or mythology. Someone did a project about Venezuela last year, and I learned so much from the stories she found and retold; if you are curious, here is her Venezuela project: Venezuelan Myths. (She was from Venezuela, and so she was able to use Spanish-language sources for the project, very exciting!)
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