Torres del Paine on Horseback

From Torres Del Paine

 After much debate, I bowed to Alison's better judgement and agreed to tackle the journey to the foot of the Torres del Paine peaks via a combination of horseback and trekking, as the nine hour round trip would have been too daunting on foot alone - and besides, I insisted that Alison pay for the horses!
  Our hotel had a selection of 50+ horses available to carry guests on a variety of trips around the national park, and we were assigned two reliable and experienced animals who, we were assured, would be more than able to carry us to the staging post on the mountain trail.  I tend to distrust modes of transport that do not have at least two wheels, a brake pedal, and a reasonable selection of forward and reverse gears.  However, our guides explained the basics of how to drive and steer our horses, and it all seemed straightforward enough, with the added benefit that the horses had four legs as against our paltry two, which could come in handy on the steeper bits of the trail.
It was not long before I started to feel reasonably at ease with my nag.  Her only bad habit was to try to stop and eat every bit of green vegetation along the trail, which could be inconvenient at times.  Anyway, it certainly beats walking.  After about an hour we reached the refuge where we had to park the horses to await our return later in the day.  The remainder of the trek was to be on foot.  In the end we reached our destination, a viewpoint overlooking the towering peaks of the Torres del Paine, without too much strenuous effort. It was certainly less tiring than our assault of he Mt Fitzroy peak a few days earlier.  The peaks were certainly impressive, standing out starkly from the surrounding darker mountain rock.  Unfortunately we were not able to see their summits, which were shrouded in cloud for the whole day. (It  turned out that we were very lucky with the weather for our outing, as it got considerably worse the next day).
The return journey retraced our outbound path, and we were eventually reunited with our horses where we had left them at the staging post.  Although we could have done the rest of the journey on foot without too much difficulty, we were glad of the fact that the horses were there to take the strain and give us an easy ride back to the hotel.  In retrospect, the decision to go for the horse/trek combination was a good one, and one that I would be happy to repeat on some future occasion.

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