Now, today was going to be a really early morning. We got up before 5, it was still as dark as the night gets, brewed up some coffee and set out to the Mirador with out flash lights in hand. Walking through the dark forest was pretty exciting and it took a couple of minutes until I realized that I had forgotten my camera in the tent.
There was still time to run back and get it and make it up to the viewpoint before sunrise, but I would have to hurry.
So, I left my backpack, which we had brought up for sleeping bags and other stuff, on a rock and ran back to the tent, the other people who wanted to go to the top as well cam already up the path. I got my cam and ran back. I didn't take more then 10 minutes I think and wanted to continue right away and grabbed my bag. What I didn't see in the night was that Kai's camera was on top of the bag and when I slung it on my back it fell to the ground. That big Canon 6D with a big 1/1.2 lens on it. Luckily it was not solid rock but soil ground and the cam had a protective case around it (the lens obviously didn't).
From initial tests the Camera and Lens seem to have survived the hit ok.
We continued our ascent and soon the sky showed the first signs of sunrise but we got to the lake at Los Torres and it was still quite dark, with only a few sparkles of sun at the horizon.
We settled down at the lake and waited for the sun to come up. It was not as cold as we were led to believe, so we only needed our sleeping bags as pillows rather than to slip into them.
Unfortunately the sky seemed to be quite cloudy and there was not much of the promised red glow on the rocks.
But then , suddenly, there must have been a gap in the clouds, the rocks turned bright red for a minute, if at all. Then they were back to grey as they were before.
It was time to head back down again, we thought. But not before we found the Geocache that was supposedly up here somewhere.
While we looked at the designated location the sun made one more magnificent return and lit up the rocks in a bright yellow this time.
It looked really beautiful and again lasted only for a minute or so.
After this very nice interuption, we continued our search for the cache and found it. I picked up a travel bug, I planned to plant somewhere else, but have not done yet... I am really bad with these travel bugs - I guess it will travel to Ireland with me and be placed there.
Then we went down back to the camp, packed up our tent and set out - It was just 9 am now. The way down was very quick. We needed 45 minutes to Chileno and another hour to Hotel Las Torres.
The sun was burning down on us along the way and the nice cool Coke at the Hotel was very refreshing. Once there is some luxury around here you have to use it.
While we waited for our sandwiches, we charged all our devices (well I couldn't charge my phone because I didn't bring my micro USB cable) and tried to get back on the internet. But the Hotel some authentication issue with their system and it wouldn't let us in. We tried with multiple codes and spent two hours there but we wouldn't get online. I knew I had an important email in the inbox to which I had to reply, so it was very frustrating not being able to.
From here we were going to embark on the lonelier part of the trek. So far it was busy on the path. Especially up to the Torres, where Day trekkers went from the Hotel, there were people along the path every couple of meters.
The backside of the Torres massive was going to be much less busy, only about 10 % of the people who do the W-trek (the popular route) will also continue and do the full Circuit.
Instead of people there was sun now... lot of sun, very stong and not much shade...
It was really hard to walk for the first couple of kilometres until we got into a more forested area with a little creek to fill up our water bottles again.
This part of the trek felt very long. Much longer than the map would have suggested and it really was lonely...
We met two other groups of trekkers in the next 4 hours.
The route took us through a nice valley with lovely dry corn fields and beautiful, calm country side. No sign of civilisation aside from the odd sign post, a fence pole and the path itself. The valley felt very fast and quite empty. It was nice but quite exhausting.
We though we must be at the next camp already but it just wouldn't show up behind the next bend.
Finally we got there: Serón!
Along the way I had realized that I really needed to get the email out as the deadline was just on the day when we would return.
But where was going to be the next possibility to get internet access?
Not at Seron, that was sure. It was just a little hut with a sink and two toilets.
We have held out with our tasty fajita dish until now. We used the pot to fry up the chorizo and salami and wrapped them together into the fajitas and sprinkled them with some dried chilies. It was a real good dish and the smell of the fried sausages impressed all our fellow trekkers and very soon we had a lot of new friends. It's not like we shared any of our fajitas, they were just very impressed with the idea I think.
It also seems that the less people are trekking and are staying at a camp site the more these people are drawn together. In the other camps we didn't really talk to anyone but here out in "the wild" the atmoshere was very close and very nice.
Lindsey and Milan, especially were nice and we chatted long into the evening with them.
We had heard that this place was frequently visited by foxes that would go through the bags with food if they smelled it. So we moved all our food into a bag and strapped it up on one of the pillars that supported the wind and rain cover where we cooked our food for the night.
