Mighty Mouse

A blog post by Adam. How did Mickey Mouse become a super celebrity? Of all the animals to be the icon of a global empire, a mouse seems, well, rather mousy. This is the third thought that enters your mind after you are awoken in Torres del Paine by a mouse running across your head while you are sleeping.

The first thought is OMG, a mouse just skitted across my cranium and I'm probably going to die. The second thought is, I'm not going to die, but for some reason that tiny creature scares the crap out of me and Melissa needs to get it out of our tent as soon as possible (this is where you proceed to screech in horror, curl into a ball, and cover your head with your sleeping bag, and Melissa calmly escorts the mouse out of the tent). It is after this, that you start cursing the mouse and Walt Disney at the same time.

How do I know this? Because it happened to us on our first and third nights at Torres del Paine (on our second and fourth nights we slept in the safety of mountain refuges). We were warned ahead of time and we therefore hung all of our food outside the tent, but it didn't matter. The mice still chewed a hole through our tent and then a small hole in the dry bag with my clothes (perhaps because they smelled so sweet). For the record, we accidentally did leave a chap stick in the tent that first night and the mice chewed a second hole and pulled it out of the tent, but were unable to penetrate it's hard casing - we found it the following morning next to the tent door with bite marks in its lid. On the second night of mice adventures, the mice fortunately used the same hole that the first mouse had created, so while it destroyed any chance of deep sleep it did not further destroy our home. On our last night camping, we covered the hole with masking tape and either that or the horrible stench of our clothes (which had been drenched in sweat, mud and rain for several continuous days) kept the critters away.

Melissa claims the mice were cute. She also claims that dogs are our friends. So what is it - are mice tiny little fur balls just doing what they can to survive in a brutal environment or are they tent-eating, face-romping scoundrels who terrorize to no end? You be the judge.