Hostal El Mirador Puerto Natales

What a couple of days getting from Ushuaia. What we tought would be an 18 hour journey turned into a calamity. We had to go through 3 border crossings between Chile and argentina which includes 6 border controls and a lot of stamps in my passport, a night in an argentinian police station and boy oh boy a lot of worries would it be worth it to get to this place. <br>We initially got our bus from Ushuaia to Rio Gallgos, an 11 hour journey by itself to get a transfer to Rio ...

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 ...

We crossed back into Chile about 3 hours south of El Calafate, arriving in Puerto Natales. This is the base town for trekking in Torres Del Paine National Park. We stayed 2 nights and stocked up for a 5 day trek in the park. We drove about 100km north of town to the park office. We parked the car, and put on our packs and started walking. We hiked the "W", an extremely popular ...

... day). The tour bus picked us up at 7:30 and we made our way to the park which took several hours. We stopped at many scenic viewpoints throughout the ride to snap a few photos, but it turned out to be a cloudy day for the better part of the morning and early afternoon. So unfortunately, all my pictures of the beautiful mountain range don't look so special because the jagged peaks are all in the clouds. Luckily though, the clouds broke ...

... 5 of them were swept off the road and into the ditch, and the sixth was picked up off her feet and dumped on her but right on the road. She looked like she got decked by Tyson and did not get up for a while and it turned out slightly hurt her leg. While waiting for the bus we bumped into a few people we had seen on the mountain. We shared our wind and weather stories, but apparently we were lucky. One couple was caught in the wind while walking on a ...

... again like El Calafate, it is not the town itself which is the draw but a nearby natural wonder - in this case, the Torres del Paine national park, the most famous and visited in South America, and in which we shall shortly be trekking. This afternoon we attended a talk on whats required for adventure, and on foot of this we reckon we´ll be spending 6 days trekking in the park, getting in tune with nature and ...

... that we'd had the night before entering the park, despite being a stickler for <br><br>Appropriately I ordered the "W" pizza, then we shared a "pizzastrudle", which was a sweet pizza with sliced apples, nuts and ice cream! It was absolutely lush-o-rama... <br><br> <br><br>Katie will LOVE ...

... 2 weeks! Legends ;) <br><br>So all 4 English teams were now through to the 1/4 finals for the first time in history (in fact the first team that ANY country has had 4 in the last 8) and Liverpool were odds-on to play one of them in the next round... <br><br>After the game finished I went out to help Katie finalise the preparations, so we had a manic couple of hours running around buying food, looking at backpacks, walking poles, etc etc. <br><br>In the ...