Spoiler alert: this is going to be another long post 🙂
I’ve been travelling for the last two weeks with four friends who joined me in Ushuaia, and together we went to do the “W” trek in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine in Chile.

Doing a trek in the national park Torres del Paine has been a dream for me for a long time already. I had heard quite a lot of things about it, read a lot of articles, saw plenty of pictures and it looked amazing!
The W trek is really famous, it takes its name from the shape of of the path you take. It’s a 5 days walk throughout the park where you have amazing views on mountains, glaciers, lakes and nature overall. There are some refuges and campsites where you can spend the night, and it’s so famous and touristy that you have to book close to six months in advance to be sure to have a place! And to be honest it’s a pain to make all the bookings… But let’s not talk about the boring stuff and let’s jump to the intersting stuff 🙂

There are two ways to walk on the W trek, you can start from the East to the West, seeing the Torres on the first day, or from the West to the East, seeing the Torres on the last day. That’s what we did, starting from the West.
We started by taking a boat crossing the Lago Pehoé, whose color is of a bright blue emerald, seeing impressive mountains in the background: La Punta Bariloche and Los Cuernos.

We arrived at a first refuge, Paine Grande, where we started our walk to our first campsite: Camping Grey. On this day we were quite lucky with the weather, it was a bit cloudy, sunny from time to time, but always with a lot of wind! We walked around 11 km in 3 hours and arrived at the Camping Grey. At some point during the walk we reached some viewpoints where the wind was so strong that we thought we would get blown away! It was amazing! With the view on the glaciar Grey in the background, it was magical!

After reaching the camping, we went to another viewpoint closer to the glacier, really nice, the glacier appeared blue and we could see some chunks of ice floating in the lake.

The camping and refuges where amazing! We didn’t have to set up the tents, we had warm food for dinner, breakfast and a lunch box to take away! That’s luxury camping!
On the second day we went a bit further towards the Grey Glacier, on the path we had to cross two suspended bridges, the second one was quite impressive! But the view was totally worth it! 

Again this day we were lucky with the weather, we had a lot of sun! After seeing the glacier, we went down to Paine Grande camping, that we reached after around 20 km walk (including the walk to Glaciar Grey). The view on the lake Pehoé was crazy! The lake was so blue it looked fake!

On that evening we went to the lake to put our feet in the water to test how cold it was. Well, let’s say we didn’t stay long, with water half way up to the knees we managed to stay 30 seconds 🙂

The third day was planned to be a long day, we had around 24 km of walk so we decided to leave the camping around 8am. During the first 20 min of walk we had sun, then the clouds came out, it started to rain, the wind started to blow as well and we ended up totally soaked 🙂 That was actually a great experience! Seeing and feeling how the weather can change and how difficult the conditions can become! On that day we planned to go to a viewpoint to see Los Cuernos, so before going up the viewpoint we left ouf big backpacks at the bottom of the hill and started the ascent. It was cloudy, rainy, cold, foggy, and when we reached the first viewpoint we couldn’t see anything! We still decided to push a bit further, since we were already there and had nothing better to do 🙂 After about one more hour of quite steep walk, we reached the second viewpoint and just at that time, the sky cleared up and for 10 min we had an incredible view on Los Cuernos, with a bit of sun and blue sky 🙂 That was magical!

We walked a bit more to the last viewpoint but it started to snow and the wind came out as well so we couldn’t see anything from up there. We went down, picked up our backpacks and continued our walk to the third camping: Los Cuernos.

On the way there we walked around another blue lake, that was really nice!

During that night, the wind was so strong that we were afraid at some points that the tents would end up flying! Thankfully it didn’t happen 🙂 On the fourth day again we were lucky with the weather, it was sunny, althoug the wind was really strong! We could see the waves of wind moving on the lake!

After around 15 km we reached our last campsite, El Chileno, that is the closest camping to go see Las Torres. Since the weather was still kind of good, we decided to leave our backpacks at the camping and go see the Torres. We didn’t want to risk not being able to see them on the day after due to bad weather. We kind of rushed the way up and eventually arrived at the Torres! It was amazing! A bit cloudy, but we could still see the Torres and the lagoon in front of them 🙂 We stayed up there for some time, enjoying the view, although it got quite cold so we eventually went back to the campsite.

On the last day we decided to wake up early to watch the sunrise on the Torres, around 5:30 am, watched the sunrise from the camp and started our walk to see them from closer.

The weather was perfect! Blue sky, just a few small clouds! When we arrived at the viewpoint in front of the Torres it was magical! Since we went there early it was almost empty! The sun was shining on the Torres, we had a perfect blue sky in the background, with the emerald lagoon just in front of the towers 🙂

We stayed up there almost 2 hours, gazing in awe watching this amazing landscape! It’s difficult to describe what you feel seeing these mountains! That was for me a dream that came true 🙂
We eventually had to go down, the weather was still very good, we took our backpacks at the Chileno campsite and went down to the entrance of the park where we took a bus to go back to Puerto Natales.

After 5 days of trekking, 4 nights of camping (in luxury campings 🙂 ), around 80km of walk, we completed the “W” trek in Torres del Paine!