Amazing Grace in Patagonia

I have every right to be a little bit tacky when I see something this incredible. Took me a week to write about it, I know. But now that I’ve plowed through a tedious set of final papers and Spanish vocabulary words I’m ready to take a look at my journal and tell you the story. Very simply, this is the most beautiful place in the world.

Check that out. It’s awe inspiring. I thought it was so awe inspiring that I found a track of Sufjan Stevens singing “Amazing Grace” on my ipod and decided to listen to it 25 times in the course of my 4 day trip to Patagonia.

In case the picture isn’t quite enough to get the message across, here’s how the trip went. I left on Friday after Thanksgiving early in the a.m. and flew to Punta Arenas. I went with 10 quirky amazing people from Stanford, and as soon as we got out of the airport I could just tell that the air was different down here. It kind of feels wild. Alaska is the only similar place I can think of–including the bizarre amount of daylight. The sun doesn’t set until 11pm here.

Anyway, the first day we went to a penguin colony. (I can now do a penguin impression. You should ask me about it sometime.) Unfortunately for Patrick who begged me to go fishing down here, these penguins were the only fishermen I saw. They were pretty cool though!

Then, we got up the next morning and got on a bus to Puerto Natales, the jumping off point for Torres del Paine. Normally when people talk about going to Patagonia, they mean Torres del Paine. There is a good reason for this:

When you first get there your jaw drops subconciously. It’s that beautiful. We got to experience it via boat ride across a vividly blue lake with the mountains half hidden in clouds, and then got to our campsite behind Grand Lodge Paine. We spent the next few days hiking.

In an Earth Systems geek moment, I really have to tell you that the rocks here are awesome. They have stripes, layers of minerals smashed against each other that probably took momentous forces and lots of lava to make. No big deal.

The Torres themselves have some pretty awesome geology. They’re not really part of the Andes mountain chain, and formed when lava flows pushed layers sedimentary rock and granite upward into the sky. It sort of looks like lava fell into a pile of molten rock and then the splash solidified in splash position. That’s not actually how it happened, but they are very cool looking.

You know what else are cool looking? Glaciers. I saw 2 of them: Glacier Grey and Perrito Moreno.

I came home awestruck with a sense of how strong nature can be and how tiny my life is. Even if it’s totally insignificant– stories, passions, jokes, mistakes, dreams, everything– coming here felt significant anyway.