The next morning we changed hostels and found ourselves in a lovely old style Chilean house with Alejandro the very helpful owner. Alejandro gave us a talk on Torres del Paine and gave us no end of options and it really helped us decide what to do for the best! Torres del Paine is famous for it’s W walk, a 5 day trek through an amazing national park. The plan was to visit the national park for the day, but after seeing what tours were available and the pretty costly price of them we decided (me a little more reluctantly than Rob!) that it would be better if we hired a tent and went for the full 5 days. 5 days of trekking whilst carrying all of our camping stuff - something I had never done before! The weather in this part of the world has a reputation for being extreme and harsh and the prospect of trekking for 5 days whilst carrying all our stuff gave me very mixed feelings! It was cold and windy enough in Puerto Natales never mind in the wilds of the national park, where people had literally been

blown over by the ferocious Patagonian wind!

Rob had wanted to spend his birthday at Torres del Paine but our colds were taking their time clearing up so we decided that we would spend an extra day or so in Puerto Natales as it was an Ok place and wait until we were feeling a bit better. It was still really cold but a little less windy and we were hoping that we would feel a bit better in the morning. We had a fairly chilled day, did some more photos and planned the next part of our travels. We had been chatting to Phil from Antarctica and were wanting to meet up with him, so we decided that after Torres del Paine we would head straight to Santiago to meet him. We were both getting to the point where we needed a change of scenery, Patagonia had been fantastic but the weather does kind of batter you and we had been there for a good couple of months, so we decided to fly to Santiago rather than