Christmas in Patagonia

Last Christmas Day we were camping in Botswana. In that case, "camping" meant a 15-ft by 40-ft raised tent with electricity, a bathroom with running water, and an air conditioner.

This Christmas Day we are camping in Patagonia. In this case, "camping" means a 20-ft domed tent with electricity, a bathroom with running water, and a wood-stove heater.

We are getting quite good at "roughing it".

Back in October, the original company that we had booked for getting us to Antarctica went out of business and we had to scramble to find another that could fit around our existing arrangements. While everything worked out, the leg of the trip that suffered most was our visit to Torres del Paine: we only got to spend two days here instead of three. This meant that we weren't here for the full cycle of activities that our camp offered (they have rotating three-day or seven-day programs) and we weren't able to do the iconic hike to the base of the towers.

In hindsight, this was probably for the best. One of the other guests was a 30-ish thin and fit guy who had done the 8-9 hour hike the previous day and described it as "gruelling and somehow it seemed to be uphill both ways". Given that we're out-of-shape and still sore from hiking in Antarctica for a week, it sounds like it would have been a bit much for us. Furthermore, he said it was very busy with constant two-way traffic and every bridge had a queue of 15-20 people waiting on each side; our guide described that hike as "like being at the mall". This really takes the romance out of the journey, so the Torres del Paine "W" hike will join the Inca Trail on our list of famous hikes that we've decided to skip.

The other oddity with our rescheduled visit here is that we are out-of-sync with the other ingoing and outgoing groups, so we had different co-travellers each day. The group on the first day was mostly Americans with a couple of Brits. There were two other Andrews (so a total of three of five of the males in our group being called Andrew, and with one of the women called Annie). We dubbed ourselves "The Andy's in the Andies" and our first  album drops in the spring.

We really enjoyed this group: cynical and raunchy sense of humour that matched our own, and dedicated booze hounds. They had the good sense to bring along some champagne for Christmas lunch (which we drank out of coffee mugs at picnic tables), at dinner several of them had flasks of whiskey from home, and before leaving they exercised the rich oral tradition of letting the new people know the best tips and tricks for getting as much free wine at dinner as possible. These were "our people" and were very sad to see them go.

On our second day they were replaced with dour Europeans and an Aussie family that mostly kept to themselves, so had our first alone time of the entire trip.

(Written on Dec 25.)