4/2 A moment or two of luxury

Saturday 4 February  Torres del Paine

The next batch of day hikers went off by truck this morning. As Bob departed, I realised that my hiking shoes were aboard – oooh we’ll just have to travel by Crocs today. Peter was the only other non-starter and we kept ourselves busy building up a good fire in the huge raised fireplace in the kitchen. As the day wore on, it was consistently cold and windy with occasional light showers and I was amazed that the other groups of campers did not invade our luxurious sanctuary.

Late morning, we added a large log and headed off down the road in the hope of finding a pub. Peter has a finely tuned instinct for these places and thought he might have noticed a large building on the way in. Sure enough, barely 500m down the track, we found a very swish place. The presence of the chrome luggage trolley at the entrance somehow intimidated us but we were not challenged and found ourselves in plush cushioned lounges, with sweeping mountain views. Beers arrived and Peter ordered a large and rather expensive beef sandwich. I took his photo, looking pleased as Punch. We had cappuccino and hot chocolate and, to cap it off, they loaned us a laptop to use free wifi!

We amused ourselves all afternoon discussing how we would break the news to the exhausted weather beaten travellers – we wondered whether they might fall on us in jealous rage. We speculated as to which members of the original team would have dropped out, but when Bob returned at 6.30, there were just the daytrippers coming back, stiff and tired but happy with their day. They had caught up with the original party, whom they reported to be coping well and in good spirits. The mountains had been intermittently clouded throughout the day but they were clear for a while as Bob returned, accompanied by an amazing cloud formation that looked for all the world like a couple of spaceships.

C was on cook duty (for only 15 diners). Leslie had chosen French Onion Soup and crepes, which took a lot of cooking because we tried to cook over coals instead of bringing the gas burner in, which we did later. It took forever to brown the onions and the vegetable stock was weak and tasteless, as before when I did risotto. Fortunately, the veggoes were up the mountain somewhere so we were able to add some chicken stock. The flavour seemed to firm up towards the end and by the time we served up, it was quite a tasty broth. Perfect for a warmer. The crepes were a winner and Tab and Leslie took turns flipping them.