Well world, my trip in Torres del Paine in Patagonia went off without a hitch! It was so amazing! I went with 2 other girls from my program, Jessica and Kelsey, and we flew from Santiago to Punta Arenas on Sunday, 22 Mar, camped for 3 nights and trekked for 4 full days, finishing the whole W from East to West, and then went back to Punta Arenas for a day and flew home to Vina (by way of Santiago) on Saturday, 28 Mar.
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Our first day (Monday, 23 Mar) started around 7am when we took a bus from Puerto Natales to the national park (Torres del Paine). Since we now have the equivalent of Chilean Social Security Numbers, we got to pay the Chilean price to get in, after the man assured us we were Chileans and not Americans! We set up campsite #1 at Hosteria Las Torres in the bottom right corner of the W, had lunch, and went up that prong the first day (About 7 hours) to Las Torres. It was about 3.5 or 4 hours up -- a suuuper steep hike at the end-- and 3ish hours down, without all of our gear (thank goodness). We encountered ALL sorts of weather on the way up, (rain, wind, rainbows, sun) and when we finally reached the top, it was snowy and kind of overcast, but still amazing! We got back after it started getting dark, made dinner (delicious risotto and corn), ate our chocolate bar (a little treat for the end of each trek) and went straight to bed.
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Our second day (Tuesday, 24 Mar) took us from la
Hosteria Las Torres west to campamiento Italiano with all of our gear. There wasn't a particular site to see on this leg of the journey, we just had to make sure to get all the way to Italiano. About 2 hours away from camp, it started raining super hard, and so once we finally arrived, all of our stuff (EVERYTHING) was drenched. What a bummer!! However, when we got to camp, we found some English friends we'd made in the Hostal in Puerto Natales on Sunday night, so that was fun to catch up with them
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Day 3 (Wednesday, 25 Mar) took us up the Valle Frances and then West again to Campamiento Pehoe in our gear that was still pretty wet from the night before. La Valle Frances was awesome because we walked along this snowy
mountain valley thing where there are frequent avalanches... so pretty! We then walked the only "easy" part of the trail to get to Pehoe where we had our last night of camping. It rained again this day, but stopped before we got to Pehoe, so we didn't have to set up camp in the rain again (thank goodness!) After eating our delicious spaghetti dinner, we settled into the tent, and it started to rain and be really windy again. This weather continued all night, and kept me up in my panic/fear/terror of what might happen to us/and the techo of our tent.
Of course, nothing actually happened, and we laughed about my paranoia in the morning.... but this was the most scared I've been in a long, long time. Needless to say, I was pretty glad this was our last night of camping. 
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Day 4 (Thursday, 26 Mar) took us up from Pehoe to Glaciar Grey! It was absolutely breath-taking to see a glacier that close (though I refused to go and touch it ... I have issues with touching the already rapidly melting glacier... weird, I know...) But it was sooo beautiful! There were a bunch of ice berg-y things in the lakes all around the glacier, too, which were incredibly bright blue! This day we had absolutely fantastic weather all day long, so it was a perfect end to our trekking adventure!
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I'm back in Vina now - resting, healing, eating, etc. It was a great week, and I'm not particularly looking forward to classes tomorrow, but it's nice to be back with my host family where there's plenty of food and options other than peanut butter and trail mix
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