We camped for 5 nights at TdP NP and the view of the “Torres” never got old and changed every minute and we have hundreds of pictures – none of them even remotely capturing the grandeur of the mountain peaks. Neither did my very basic pencil sketch of the mountains that I felt compelled to draw 😉😂

There was no internet unless you paid for hourly access which was only possible while the kiosk or restaurant were open and had power which often was interrupted. We only bought wifi access in order to let family know we had safely arrived and to find out about the safe arrival of Andrew’s fourth grandchild – Luca James North.

We spent our days with sleep ins, late breakfasts and short walks near the lake, bird watching, and two longer hikes – one hike (8 km) was up to mirador Cóndor and then a longer back route down the mountain to the waterfall “Salto Chico” past the hotel Explora (which is a real eye sore in the beautiful landscape) and back to the campsite – it was on a windy day and on the exposed parts of the route and on top of the lookout you almost got blown of the mountain. The other longer hike was on the only calmer of the days when we rode the bikes past our campsite to another larger waterfall (Salto Grande) and continued to another lookout of the mountains (mirador Cuernos) which allowed a different angle and much closer views of the peaks. On the way back, we saw a pigmy armadillo (Zaedyus pichiy) – also known as “Pichi” walking along our track. We watched the condors soar high in the sky on multiple occasions – they soar so high in the sky that you barely see a tiny dot but Andrew managed to get one picture. We watched more of the Crested Caracara (Caracara plancus) at the campsite with a juvenile and other campers annoyingly fed them corn 😞

We had dinner at the restaurant for 3 nights and enjoyed our camp cooked pasta meals with a bottle of red Malbec we had brought with us on the other two nights.

Every moment at TdP NP was awesome and it was hard to leave that place – definitely one of the absolute highlights of the trip so far.