Sports & Exploration
Go Beyond
By Sarayu Adeni
Over the crest of the next hill, a scene worthy of an artist's paintbrush emerges before Lindsay Jolley's eyes. The aches of sitting in a saddle for six hours are suddenly forgotten.
Trees border the horizon as craggy, snowcapped peaks tower over them. Lower down, rolling hills and lakes add a sharp contrast, and with every step their horses take, new kinds of plants are spotted.
This is Torres del Paine National Park, an ecotourism hotspot in the Chilean Patagonia. A protected UNESCO reserve since 1978, it made the perfect escape for Jolley and her four friends, who studied in Chile's capital city Santiago last semester.
"It's got so many levels," said Jolley, an international business and Spanish major at the University of Texas at Austin. "Like someone did a collage of ecosystems."
During her time abroad, Jolley and her friends took a self-arranged excursion to the park, 2500 kilometers away from Santiago. They read from Lonely Planet guidebooks and heard from word of mouth about the unusual beauty of the park and decided to tour by horseback.
The actual Torres del Paine are the names of three tower-like granite blocks, favorites for rock climbers. But disregarding the level of outdoor experience, visitors can find a myriad of ways to explore this protected sanctuary.
"If you love hiking, you can also do some hard-core backpacking," Jolley said, recommending visiting around Easter or earlier, before the Chilean winter sets in.
Jolley said animal life in the park is just as diverse as the landscape. In addition to seeing rabbits, alpacas and acunas, mountain lions, penguins and even flamingos can be seen.
Torres del Paine is also known for its fields of glaciers, which transition to a glacier national park across the Argentine border. Visitors can get close enough to see the pure blue colors within them.
"It literally looks like someone took a blue light and stuck it in the ice and just lit it somehow," Jolley said.
Since the closest city to the park is Puerto Natales, a three–hour bus ride away, most visitors to Torres del Paine opt to stay in hostels. Jolley said the hostel atmosphere forced them to use their Spanish and allowed them to meet other travelers.
"You can get a really nice hostel for 20, 30 dollars," she said. "And it's good to have a mix of both Chilean and English speakers."
The vastness of the park and its untouched beauty give first-time visitors and seasoned travelers alike a taste of nature, Chilean-style. Jolley and her friends loved their horseback riding tour so much they did it again the next day.
Jolley said the experience was not only a relaxing one in the middle of a busy semester, but was a humbling one as well.
"I didn’t know you could fit all this in one place," she said.