Plaza Punta Arenas

... say 5 hours it doesn't register that 5 hours and 14 kms is that far but after 2 hours there was still another 3 to go. It was when I met a friend coming from the other side and she said there was about 2 hours to go that I really felt tired. Although the majority of the trail was along the base, you often have cross raging rivers, climb steep hills and often the trail was just rocks and although the view was beautiful you really don´t get the time to enjoy it as you have to ...

... all together in this crazy place. The Torres (Spanish for Towers) for which the park is named jutt violently from the rough center of the circuit. These huge pink granite structures, like much of Patagonia, would make an excellent fantasy movie set. The Cuernos (horns) del Paine were to me, even more impressive due to the marks of the wind carving. They´re located in one of the windiest sections of the park, with whorls etched into ...

... entry to the country. If you slime your way through the land border, then apparently you avoid the charge. That's cool, almost making up for the humiliation of spacing out my entry card in Uruguay and having to buy my way past the immigration point. The weather's cool too, as you might expect this far south, cool and rainy, but I eventually find the hotel I've reserved and exchange some money at the same rate I passed on at the ...

... Could it be because most of the planet's landmass (and its population) is in the northern hemisphere? After the viewpoint, we went to a museum where we had a great overview of the city's history. Fascinating place filled with the adventures and haunting stories of the city's earliest inhabitants. We then continued the tour to the city's cemetery. Morbid, no. Stunning, yes! The cemetery was opened in the late 19th century by one of the city's richest citizens ...

After a week or 2 of intense glacier action we were ready for a bit of change of scenery. That, and Iain's giant blister on his heel led us to postpone our trip into the Torres del Paine national park for a few days of hiking and camping in favour of visiting the penguin colonies off the coast of nearby Punta Arenas. To get there we had to cross back into Chile which was relatively painless despite the border control police insisting that they had to search every ...

... expect anything too good on that. Not long after<br>seeing the condors we ran through a rain shower and the windows on my side of the bus received a nice coating of mud.<br><br>A few miles further on we reached a ferry crossing the Fitz Roy channel to the island. Wait till you see the pictures of this! It was poles apart from the ferry Dick and Marlene took us on in Edmonds last year. We survived the short crossing and went on to the estancia. We had a very good ...