It´s Getting Chile

Blowing in the wind
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The alarm didn´t go off, it was pouring rain and the dogs were still barking.  It was by all accounts time to leave El Calafate, except for that it was dark and pouring rain and we had to pack up the tent and get to the bus station in record time.  But after all those buses we can do it like clockwork, with time to spare and almost dry.  And when the very throuogh Chilean customs officers opened my pack to find a wet tent, I was given diplomatic immunity from the standard unpacking of bags.  Clockwork.

Chile
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Sitting on yet another southbound bus, over ever increasing proximity to ¨the end of the world¨was turning our desire to get there obsessive.  But for the time being our new home was the Chilean town of Puerto Natales.  We were happy to find that not only did the border strip cheese, apples and cold cuts, but also the posh touristic excesses of Argentine Patagonia.  Puerto Natales is not lacking in travelers but still opts for the look and feel of a sea weathered sailors home.  While the town serves as homebase for the famous Torres del Paines National Park, time was running short and the shape of our bus bound daydreams was of sitting at the end of the continent looking across the Beagle Channel towards Anartica.

The fools who could not rest

The spirit of adventure
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Given this doggedness, it would take something truly good to distract us.  Puerto Natales was up to the task.  After saying goodbye to the ocean in Panama we finally found it again.  While technically it was the same body of water, the last 10,000 miles were rougher on it than they were on us (as far as we can tell, at least). It traded in warmth and welcomingness for blue, frothy waters very much the opposite.  The ocean did, however, bring with it wonderful, warming seafood stew and in the middle of it all was a campsite that dreams are made of.   Though, like all good dreams it ended with a new beginning at daybreak and we awoke to meet our own restlessness to keep moving.

Monument to Magellan
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Next stop, Punta Arenas, southernmost town on continental South America and one time home to ministers, European aristocrats, millionaires and billionaires mingled with murders, aborigines, hunters, gold diggers, poets, painters, Nobel Prize winners..  The land connecting Punta Arenas with the rest of the continent is a flat windy shelf of rock.  Sheep grow thick coats, trees grow low to the ground so as to survive.  It seems the only reason for this barren land to exist is to provide a place untouched, yet to be conquered for those that will always need to see and feel a land that is base and wild.  And the wildest of all make their treks to Punta Arenas, best known as the port town on the Straights of Magellan.  Sir Francis Drake, Shakelton, Pinochet, and Magellan himself to name a few.  Shakelton, one of the the most revered references for the spirit of adventure, perhaps puts it best, in the guest book of one of Arenas historic homes:

Seaworthy?
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We were the fools who could not rest in the dull earth we left behind/ but burned with passion of the south, drank strange frenzy from its wind./ The world where wise men sit at case, fade on our unregretful eyes/ And thus, across this uncharted seas, we stagger on our own enterprise.

July of 1916, Punta Arenas

Yes, this is a land for the restless, the brazen, the eccentric and the heroic.

It is also a place with great crab.