hotel garden

I can't overstate how much we liked our hotel in Torres del Paine, the Hotel Las Torres.  Oh, the rooms could have been more luxurious, perhaps, but they were certainly comfortable.  And the view?  Come on!  I've also commented on just how good the all-inclusive food was as well.  And here's a cool thing about that food: a lot of it was very very local indeed.

We had some time between breakfast and our long ride to El Calafate to walk around a bit, so Conrad and I found ourselves wandering into the hotel gardens. 

No, not exquisite beds of fragrant blooms, but a working vegetable garden.  Not to mention apples, pears, and plums in the orchard! 

We saw rhubarb and currant bushes and gooseberries, the source of ingredients for drinks and desserts.  We saw the carrots that were served with dinner dishes and adorned the lovely salads at lunch.  There were greenhouses as well.  Guests were welcome to walk through the area, and I can only hope it made people appreciate the hotel and its food all the more.

In addition, there was the little brewery. 

A small building standing near the garden entrance, it was the source of a beer that one of the Brits on our excursion the day before had raved about.  Jenny, who lives in Belgium (where they know a thing or two about beer) ordered one before dinner the night before, and she approved.  I just wonder whether there was the space in the there for distilling the gin they made!

day two in Torres del Paine

Day two in Torres del Paine sort of featured more of what we did on day one:  a trip to the waterfall (there was a British couple sharing the excursion with us), views of the horns.  But we ranged farther afield in the park, stopping at more locations to appreciate the views,

take photos,

hear more details about the park.

Our guide was Sebastian, and he was a treat.  Over the course of the day we learned more about the training and testing that he had to go through in order to be a guide in the park, and it was impressive.  He could talk about the peaks and the lakes, but he also knew to watch for fossils

and to point out edible berries like the calafate

and this pretty pink one that was blandly bittersweet. 

He fielded all of our questions with grace and humour. 

And believe me, with our motley group,

that grace was needed!  😂

The scenery was no less stunning than the day before,

but - happily - the winds weren't as great.  At a point in the afternoon, Sebastian and the driver even had a surprise set up for us:  a spread of refreshments that people were curiously bashful about enjoying. 

Not I!!

The stay in Torres del Paine has me wanting to go back, and this time bring Van.  It's a special setting, and I am so grateful that I got a chance to visit for a couple of days.

a break in the South America posts

More from Chile and then Argentina to come, to be sure, but why not have a break in the South America posts.  After all, we've been back in the US almost a week now.  Wow!  That's a little weird to think.  Two weeks ago today we were in Valparaiso for the afternoon.

We came down to the desert on Thursday for the four-day weekend.  We have a few activities planned in relation to Modernism Week, but mostly we're just enjoying relaxing time together at the Rancho Mirage house.  Not all laziness for us, though - we got ourselves onto a moderate trail in Palm Desert this afternoon for a nice little hike.

And with that little weekend glimpse given, back to the blogging of the South America vacation!

hotel food (no, not a bad thing)

It was a delightful surprise to us to find out, upon arrival at Hotel Las Torres, that it was an all-inclusive package.  Aside from a very few cocktails (and we didn't even check that against a wine list), everything on the menu, including beverages, was part of our accommodations package.  And let me tell you, we had some, well, average/mediocre hotel food on our trip (mostly at breakfasts), but this hotel did not let us down at all.  Nope!

Before we even got into our rooms and then off on an afternoon excursion, we sat down in the lobby bar area and enjoyed lunch.  They called my meal the Patagonian sandwich,

which essentially consisted of lamb (tender, pulled) on a ciabatta with cheese and some sort of a sauce.  Conrad and I could have had one between us and still not finished it.  The servings were substantial as well as tasty.  Also:  steak fries, and nicely done ones at that.  Meanwhile, as tempting as it was to try an adult beverage, we had some afternoon hiking, so I asked for the mint lemonade that Audrey, who was sitting next to me, was already enjoying.  My request was rather literally lost in translation, for what I received was a lemonade but assuredly not green and minty!

Dinner was over in the restaurant, and we had a table for eight of us in the middle of the room.  Wine flowed as much as we wanted (but we didn't let it flow too much), and there were three choices for each course.  First up for me:  salmon tartare. 

A fine start.  Next up:  hake. 

A nice white fish, cooked properly.  The carrots were from the hotel garden (more on that in a future post).  It was served with a potato puree that functioned as a sauce and was perhaps made using a food processor - it had a bit of a gummy texture that can come about from mashing or pureeing potatoes in a device like that.  The dessert featured bitter sweet beer jellies with meringue and crumbles. 

Swiped together, it was a nice mouthful of contrasting flavours and textures.

After dinner, I decided to have a nightcap cocktail.  The bartender makes his own gin, so I indulged in a martini. 

It was clean, light, and a good end to the evening.

I didn't photograph the breakfast buffet or omelet station, but we didn't go hungry at breakfast any day there.  The second day, we were out on excursion at lunch time, so we had box lunches that included some enormous sandwiches.  Smoked salmon for me with arugula from their garden.  We made it back to the hotel well in time for dinner, so I cleaned up and raced down to the bar ahead of Conrad.  I got to chat with the bartender then about his gin, his beer (more on that in a future post as well), and his infusions.  He was drying local berries and making syrups and more.  He was using leaves and branches such as the sticky, medicinal-sweet paramela.  He let me try the latter in his infused pisco even. 

But I settled on a pre-dinner drink that took advantage of the rhubarb that was grown in their garden. 

Wow, that punched through.  It was a beautiful drink to look at, and it had a suitable sweet-tartness.  I enjoyed it a lot.

It was off to dinner after that, and the menu was a little different.  You've seen the guanaco carpaccio already, but I share it again. 

It's a very mild meat and needed its accompaniments to sharpen it up.  It was also cut rather thick.  I was happy to try it, but it wasn't something I would seek out again.  The fish was hake again. 

Served with a carrot puree and baby turnips and an onion marmalade, it was a better dish than the night before.  The dessert thrilled me to see on the menu:  a crumble featuring gooseberries. 

And given that the hotel garden produced rhubarb, I was confident I would see actually gooeseberries, not Cape gooseberries (physalis).  Sure enough, I did.  And they were a little weird - I could swear that they had been pickled somehow because they had a brininess that I hadn't known in the fruit before.  A couple of other people at the table didn't like them (and I should add that the main part of the crumble was a mixture of other berries, including currants), and left them out, but I found that when enjoyed with the other parts of the dessert, it added a savoury edge that I appreciated.

Hotel dining, especially when a captive audience, can be a decidedly mixed bag.  Conrad and I had an especially good experience several years back in Tuscany.  Happily, we can consider this lovely hotel in southern Chile a success!

day one in Torres del Paine

We had gotten off the plane (oh, that bloody early morning flight from Santiago) and then rode a lengthy shuttle drive and arrived at the hotel in Torres del Paine in time for lunch and in time for an afternoon excursion.  We were off to see a mighty waterfall first, then do a mild hike to a viewpoint of the horns.

The park is set amidst peaks and glaciers, and the lakes and rivers and waterfalls all have that extraordinary blue of glacial melt. 

The waterfall was indeed mighty,

but more impressive, I think, was the wind.  Oh, what a wind.  I knocked us about a bit, and I am not a small man.  It drove spray at us, but it wasn't a cold wind, happily.  We enjoyed the waterfall then pressed onward.

The hike was about forty-five minutes.  We kept coming to vantage points and thinking, wow, this is it.  But there was further to go and a new view to see.  The horns are not the towers of the park's name, but they are impressive nonetheless. 

What was funny to realize, though, is that a few days earlier, when we had been east of Santiago, we were at an elevation about as high as the top of the tallest peaks we saw.  Weird to wrap our heads around that one.

I think that was the most relaxing time we had on the trip, in a sense.  As we hiked, we de-clumped and strung ourselves out along the trail. 

There weren't too many other people around.  We were able to drink in the view and chat in different combinations and just have time to ourselves.  An ideal afternoon, all in all.

Day two brought more amazing views and a broader survey of the park, but had we only had that afternoon in the park, I would have been very happy.

guanaco!

That word was the one we said the most in all of our vehicles and otherwise, I think.  Guanaco!  Every time we saw one, it seemed, someone called it out.

We first saw these animals on the way from Puerto Natales to our hotel.  We saw other cars and shuttles had pulled over to take photos and we asked that our driver do the same.  They were behind a wire fence,

and so we thought that they were part of a domesticated herd, being raised for meat or wool or both.

As it turns out, and according to our guide, Sebastian, they are wild, not herded at all.  And kind of dangerous if you anger them.  They big, they can stomp you, they can spit a fungus-infested saliva in your face.  Yeah, we may have been unwittingly foolish to take photos.

Guanacos are relatives of llamas.  Apparently if you see one alone, it is likely a male,

whereas the females gather in herds.  There is a hunting season for them as well, it seems.  As for the taste?

Well, very mild.

Jumping ahead

Another short post, sorry.  It’s Monday, and we’re heading home tonight.  Come mid-morning on the fourteenth we’ll be at Marengo with Van and Olive.  Yay!  Trips are great, but when they are near an end, I am always glad to have the travel over and be done.

More to come on Torres del Paine and El Calafate and Buenos Aires in detail.  In the meantime, I’ll jump ahead of my narrative and post a couple of photos from Argentina.  One from Patagonia, one from the big city.  Wish us safe travels and watch for more posts when I am back in California with my laptop!