Thought I’d give a quick recap of an excellent trip. I’ll get the wine and food out of the way first - this was decidely NOT a wine & food trip! We had a bunch of cheap and mostly decent Chilean wines chosen mostly by the hotel restaurants we were at. Several local beers. A few mildly interesting local spirits. Nothing of note TBH. The culinary highlights of the trip were discovering merken, which is an aji ahumado seasoning that is really fantastic - a nice amount of heat but lots of flavor and smokiness. I’d put it above Spanish pimenton ahumado as far as my preferences - more robust, typically a flakier/chunkier level of grind. Supposedly it is sometimes mixed with oregano and salt, but the versions we had were (I think) pure aji. The other fun one was on the somewhat remote island of Chiloe, where the local specialty is called curanto - a hot-stone-in-the-ground pit covered with the massive local nalca (Chilean rhubarb) leaves to steam piles of mussels, clams, chicken, sausage, potatoes, etc. We had the real thing at our hotel and also a pot steamed version at a local restaurant. Simple and good.
First five nights: Torres del Paine
This is the real attraction - the staggering towers and horns of Torres del Paine, surrounded by deep blue lakes, studded with glaciers, pumas prowling the landscape, guanaco all around grazing (and hoping to avoid the puma). We stayed one night in the nothing-to-see entry town of Puerto Natales, then headed into the park, working with Cascada Expediciones (who owns Ecocamp Patagonia ,where we stayed) to do a kayaking trip on the Grey River, then hikes to the French Valley, the base of the towers (which is a serious hike, especially in gusty winds, but truly amazing), and nearby Cuernos and Condors lookouts over consecutive days. Ecocamp was a great option for us as we wanted to have a base and weren’t interested in doing the full W trek (staying in tents/refugios along the way). We stayed in a four person family dome which is basically “glamping,” and the communal meals were actually fun and very good, using some vegetables grown on the property (truly excellent salad greens included). The weather forecast was consistently abysmal, but we got lucky, enduring heavy gusts but mostly under sunny skies that allowed good views of the mountains. This area is kinda crazy expensive - you pay to be in the park, and for guide expertise - but we felt it was worth it. We had done El Chalten / Calafete in Argentina a few years back, and the two areas are quite similar (equally awe inspiring), about 3-4 hours drive apart if you wanted to combine the two.
