Torres del Paine walking: the hike to the 3 Towers | A guide's journal, part 2 of 2

The moment you cross from Argentina into Chile, the landscape does something you don't quite expect. The otherworldly openness of the Argentine steppe gives way to something greener, more rugged, more immediately alive. The mountains feel closer. The wind, if anything, feels more present. Chile's side of Patagonia is beautiful in a completely different register from Argentina's, and that contrast is one of the things that makes this journey worth making.

We were heading for Torres del Paine National Park, and for the walk that most people, when they plan a Patagonia trip, are secretly planning around. The hike to the 3 Towers.

I will not pretend it is an easy walk. It isn't. The approach through Torres del Paine is superb, and the final section, the climb up and over the moraine to reach the lookout point above the lake, demands something from you. Your legs know about every metre of it. The wind is there to remind you where you are, in case you had forgotten.

But the views when you arrive. Stunningly crystal clear on the day we made the climb. The 3 Towers rising ahead of you, their bare rock faces catching the light, the turquoise water below them still and almost impossibly vivid. You stand there and feel it settle over you: this is one of the finest walking destinations in the world, and you are standing in it on your own two feet.

Something happened at the viewpoint that I keep coming back to. Two of our guests, both talented, sat down with their materials once we reached the top and began to paint and sketch the 3 Towers. They worked quietly while the rest of us stood and looked and took photographs and ate whatever snacks we had left.

Later, they shared what they had made with the group. It is a rare thing, to see a place interpreted through someone else's eye in real time, and to realise that everyone in the group was experiencing the same landscape and finding something slightly different in it. It felt a privilege to be there. That is the only word for it.

I have led walking holidays in a good many places, and I know that the moments that stay with you are rarely the headline ones. They are the quiet ones. A painting shared. A group falling silent. The quality of light on bare rock.

The walk down from the moraine is kinder on the spirit than it is on the knees. By the time we reached Las Torres, the group had earned everything that dinner had to offer. And dinner, as it turned out, had a surprise waiting.

Free Calafate sour cocktails with the meal. Appreciated by all is an understatement. The Calafate berry, native to Patagonia, makes a cocktail that tastes of the place in exactly the way you want something to taste of a place at the end of a long day. We raised a glass to the 3 Towers, to the guanacos, to the steppe, to all of it.

One of the guests put it well: fabulous walks, stunning scenery, well-organised trip. I could not have said it better.

The Magic of Patagonia walking holiday takes you through two countries and two entirely distinct versions of what wild landscape can be. Argentina's side is vast and strange and humbling. Chile's side is dramatic and green and demanding in the best sense.

Between them, they offer something that is increasingly hard to find: a genuine sense of remoteness, of being somewhere that has not been softened for visitors, of earning your place in a landscape that asks something of you in return.

If you would like to experience it for yourself, Ramble Worldwide's Magic of Patagonia holiday covers both countries with expert leaders and a small group who will, likely, become people you are glad to have walked with.