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This was our last day in Chile. We finished hiking the famous "W" route in Torres del Paine, and headed back to Argentina. It was great introduction to Chile, and I hope we return some day (I hear their Lake District is wonderfully beautiful.) We started this day with a nice breakfast at Refugio Grey, grabbed our boxed lunches, and got out on the trail by 8:00 A.M. It was 11 KM back to Refugio Paine Grande, where the catamaran would pick us up at 12:30. So we had all morning to return, there wasn't any reason to hurry. Nevertheless, we didn't linger as long at the viewpoints this time and we reached Paine Grande by 11:15. The sky was dark with clouds that promised rain, though it turned out that the rain didn't arrive until we were already on board the catamaran, and even then it didn't last long. A shuttle bus took us to Laguna Amarga ranger station, and there we had a three hour wait for the bus that would take us all the way back to El Calafate. We walked down to Rio Paine on the road where we began our trek a few days earlier. But this time there weren't any guanacos on the river bank. We did see some geese and ducks. Clouds obscured the tops of the Torres del Paine, so view wasn't quite as magnificent as the day we arrived. El Calafate was absolutely jammed when we arrived late at night.Cars were parked everywhere, the shuttle bus couldn't even fit down some roads to drop off tourists at their lodging. Lots of horns honking and people gesturing. It was the 138th anniversary of the discovery of Lago Argentino, and so the city was hosting a massive annual Lake Festival. The president of Argentina is from El Calafate, and she had returned home to speak in the open air stadium, which probably accounted for at least some of the crowds. We returned to Posada Karut Josh, this time we were assigned room 4. At about midnight we were awakened by the sound of fireworks going off outside. Panorama Photos
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