Chilian Patagonia

WOW, we are having trouble believing that 6 weeks have gone already. Our last update was 23 Feb after being in Pucon. It seems that we have done so much and yet so little over the past 4 weeks so I will try and give everyone a little piece of our time.

Building the excitement for the Torres del Paine

Puerto Veras. We arrived here from Pucon. The purpose of being here is to avoid staying in Puerto Montt which is really just a large port town and not particularly impressive. Puerto Veras however is a pretty little town on a lake about half an hour north of Puerto Montt by local bus. The hostal we have is a quaint little place with really nice people running it. Little did we know that we would return here several times through the next couple of weeks. We did some interesting little walks into some close by parks and towns and took a peek at one of the nearby volcanoes.

Punta Arenas; and the start of our time in the Patagonian region of Chile and Argentina. We took a flight from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas because the bus trip to Puerto Natales (our intended destination) was likely to be around 36 hours. Yeah on a bus with no overnight accommodation or decent time to take food from a restaurant. Flying was good and only cost a couple of dollars more than the bus. Stayed two nights originally and one on the way back up north at the same hostal. Punta Arenas is below the 50deg latitude mark and is pretty cold this time of year. It surprised us to see the difference in the number of tourists in the area between the start and end of the three weeks we spent in the Patagonia region, by the end of March they had all but disappeared. Basically Punta Arenas is a cold, wet and wild place where the wind blows pretty much endlessly. It is set right on the Straits of Magellan so it is what you can expect.

Puerto Natales. The bus trip from Punt Arenas to Puerto Natales is about 3 hours and there is little to see along the way. There is not much difference between Puerto Natales and Punta Areans (am I confusing you yet with all the puntas and puertos?) in terms of climate however PN is really set up for tourists. It is the area hub for people entering and leaving Torres del Paine national park. Expensive and touristy are words that readily come to mind. We did get to have a very nice pizza, wood fired oven with fresh topping and a nice wine a la Sooky and Wok. We topped up a couple of supplies, hired a tent and sorted out some kit to leave behind with Omah at the hostel and then we headed for the park, Paine, Torres del Paine that is. The whole purpose of our trip down to Patagonia. I should note at this time that we had also left some kit in the hostel in Puerto Varas to collect on our return. So much stuff we are carrying we didn’t want to take it all around the park with us. With all our gear and food for a 9 day hike around the park I think Kaye had about 12-14 kilo in her pack and I had about 18kg in mine until it started raining and I packed a wet tent into a wet backpack….read on.

National Park Torres Del Paine. Gotta give this place a great big WOW capitals and bold type. I will just give a brief summary of the days and see how that goes to start with.