First of all, to Mom and to Iris, Happy Birthday! And to everyone else, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! It kind of went by uneventfully here, but I hope those of you back home make up for it by celebrating on my behalf.
Heading South
Today, we left hot and sunny Santiago behind for cold, windy and wet Southern Patagonia. Well, three out of four of us did, anyway. Chris kinda overslept, and since he didn’t have a plane ticket anyway, he decided at the last minute to just go back to sleep. I think he ended up heading north instead. At any rate, we said a rushed goodbye to him at the hostel and loaded into a taxi to the airport.
Breakfast consisted of Dunkin Donuts at the Santiago airport, which was even worse than Dunkin Donuts back home. There are two main airlines in Chile: LAN, the international carrier, and Sky, which is a budget local airline. Scott and I were both booked on a LAN flight and Julie was on a flight with Sky. But we were all departing and arriving in Punta Arenas within an hour or so of one another, so it was all good. Scott and I had a bit of time to kill after Jules left, so we browsed the souvenir shops. I bought a shot glass and a lapis lazuli bracelet. The bright blue semi-precious stone is particular to only two places in the world: Afghanistan, which I’m not too keen to visit at the moment for obvious reasons, and Chile.
The plane ride south was really spectacular. It was a clear day, and I had a window seat on the side of the plane overlooking the Andes. The whole way down, I kept snapping photos of the amazing views through the plane window.
Welcome to Punta Arenas
We arrived at the tiny airport in Punta Arenas on schedule, and luckily, so did our luggage. While we waited for Julie’s flight to arrive, Scott and I sorted out a rental car for the next few days for our trip to Torres del Paine.
Punta Arenas is the capital of Chilean Patagonia, and one of the southernmost cities in the world, at a latitude of 53 degrees south. It’s about as close to Antarctica as I’m likely to get in the near future. While the city has a considerable amount of tourism, its main industries are oil, shipping, agriculture and fishing, giving the city a sort of industrial feel. The landscape around it is extremely remote. It really does feel like being in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
We headed into the city and walked around a little. There are some interesting mansions and buildings around the main square. A group of schoolchildren made friends with Scott as he took photos of the statue in the square. We stopped off at a tour office to reserve a penguin viewing trip for Friday.
Dinner was at this sketchy restaurant we stumbled upon. Jules and Scott both ordered steak a lo pobre, which means it comes with abundant fries and two eggs on top. Very typical Chilean. Unfortunately, their steaks as well as my fish were pretty bad. Since we’d had such great food up until then, we shrugged it off.
After dinner, Julie went hostel-hunting, as she was planning on spending her whole time in the south in Punta Arenas. Scott and I both wanted to go onto Puerto Natales to visit Torres del Paine National Park, so we opted to leave after dropping off Jules at her hostel.
Drive to Puerto Natales
How do you get to Puerto Natales from Punta Arenas? Follow the road. Yep, there’s pretty much just one road for the entire three-hour trip, and it goes through some of the most remote and desolate landscape imaginable. Luckily, the road is fairly new and paved, so we made pretty good time, even though most of the drive was in the dark.
We arrived in Puerto Natales, and despite the small size of the town, got a little lost, since the whole town consists of odd one-way roads that sometimes change direction in the middle of the street. That, and the street signs are basically nonexistent. We managed to find the hostel we had booked, where the owner explained that she didn’t have any rooms, but she had found us a room at her friend’s hostel around the corner. It was all good; we checked in and got some sleep in preparation for Torres del Paine the next day.