Squeezing the void

Hola. We´re just back from a week trekking in a national park in Patagonia. Unreal world down here. We walked 85km all in, and some days we hardly saw anyone else. 

The weather was bonkers. Blazing sun for five minutes, then a blizzard of huge snowflakes. Then freezing rain, then sun. As we walked, we`d see avalanches tumbling down the mountains on either side.

 

Nights were Baltic. We had to sleep in all our clothes. Our toes were saved only by ingenious sock-layering techniques. Supplies ran low. When the rice ran out we ate porridge. When the porridge ran out we ate a small Chilean child who had the misfortune to stumble across our path.

Jenny´s feet fell to pieces on the third day. She had bits of plastic bottle tied to her ancles with strips of bin bag in order to protect her blisters and swollen bits. She kept begging me to leave her and save myself. I think she thought she was Joe Simpson off Touching The Void. 

The walk ended up at a glacier that spilled down between two mountain ranges. We stayed above it in a deserted camp site, just us and a couple of mates. It was pretty special. Camera´s still broken, but here are some shots off t`internet. 

After having no contact with the outside world for a week it´s depressing to come back and read the news, which seems unbearably grim. After the peace of that park, surrounded by chunks of rock and ice that are bigger than anything man has ever built and older than our species, I feel ashamed when I read that 50 people were killed yesterday in Iraq, and I feel sick when I see that it warranted almost no coverage in the media.

Tonight we`re getting on that container ship that will take us into northern Chile via the Pacific Ocean. It´s already delayed because of storm warnings, so it may be a rough passage.  But if anything´s going to make me spew I´d rather it was a choppy ocean than what I read in the news.