Montt-sters

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  Puerto Montt, Chile
Monday, January 7, 2008

Having arrived in Santiago bus station, we had to find where our connecting bus was going from. This turned out not to be that easy, as nobody seemed to be able to tell us. After some wandering about, we found another Pullman bus driver and asked him. We gathered enough from the rapid fire Spanish reply to understand that our bus would soon be arriving in the adjacent bay. When it did arrive, the same bus driver came over to make sure that we had found it alright. Nice guy.

We boarded our final bus for the last twelve and a half hours of this epic journey. The bus left on time and we headed around Santiago, stopping in a few more places to pick up more passengers. The bus then headed south. Various films were played, all of which were fairly unremarkable. We figured out that it was possible to select an English soundtrack through the headphones, so at least we could understand the films, which acted like chewing gum for the mind. The first few hours of the journey passed quite uneventfully in this way.

Around 1.30pm, we stopped at a services area, where we were told that we could get off, get food etc and would need to be back on the bus at around 2pm. Jacob got a hot dog, complete with a ridiculous amount of mayonnaise, and chips. Kirsty was still feeling a little peculiar, so just had a few of Jacob's chips.

We got back on the bus and headed off again. Not long after, one of the windows of the bus, just behind where we were sitting, exploded with a loud bang. It had been hit by a rock and had completely shattered. The bus sat at the side of the road, Jacob finished watching Ghost Rider (a 'boy film' according to Kirsty) and eventually some police types showed up. The bus driver and conductor made a vague attempt to tape the window back together, so Jacob offered to fetch our duct tape from our bags in the hold. After he had got these, the driver decided that a slightly simpler solution would be to push all of the broken glass out of the window onto the hard shoulder and draw the curtains, which Velcro together in the middle. And we were off again.

We then had to make another stop at another service station place and all had to get off whilst the bus was taken away to have the window seen to. We had ice creams: Kirsty had a 'Mega', which is essentially a Magnum and Jacob got a Danky 21, which is similar to a Cornetto. The '21', it would seem, refers to the age you need to be to have one: it's laced with rum, which is quite a shock when you haven't read the label.

After a while, our bus reappeared, with a big piece of plywood crudely taped to the window with parcel tape. Classy.

We were by now running about an hour late.

We carried on towards Puerto Montt, but soon found ourselves having to wait to be able to cross a bridge. It turned out that we would have quite a wait, as we had to wait for the truck that was lying on its side on fire to go out sufficiently for us to pass.

Now we were about 90 minutes late.

Then we hit some roadworks.

Now we were about two hours late. Our nice relaxing meal once we got to Puerto Montt was starting to look less likely.

We continued on, stopping to let some passengers off and others on. At some point, we lost a bit more time. We were now at least three hours late.

Next, we found a police roadblock. We don't know why, but we were turned back. The bus managed a 21 point turn in the narrow road and we then had to take a large diversion around the closed road.

God only knows how late we are now.

At this point, the conductor put on Die Hard IV, but a mother objected as her child was underage. So instead, we were shown a 'comedy' show. This consisted of three overweight men dressed in black standing outside a official looking building in front of a crowd. All three men shouted a lot and one man kept grabbing his crotch, or (apparently even more amusingly, based on the audience's response), grabbing audience members and pushing their heads into his crotch. Then there were the parts where he pretended to be having sex with a young child. The video was also played at an incredibly loud volume. The mother who had objected to her child being subjected to Die Hard seemed quite happy with this turn of events. We weren't.

Eventually we got into Puerto Montt at around 1.30am, around 7 hours late. We found a taxi who took us to our hostel and thankfully, knocking on the door raised the nightie clad owner who let us in, showed us our room and went back to bed.

We had a brief meal of a packet of biscuits, which was all we had left, washed down our anti-malarial tablets with the remains of our water and gratefully collapsed into the first bed we had seen in four days. We had been travelling for 77 hours.

We slept.

We got up in time for breakfast, which was also very welcome after our nutritional intake over the past few days.

After breakfast, Kirsty sorted out getting some washing done. We got talking to a guy called Rich, who was fixing his bike. Rich was from Northampton, but had been living in London. He had flown out with his bike, intending to ride a long trail down towards Patagonia. He had taken his bike apart in London and put it all back together without any problems. However, having taken it apart for the flight to Puerto Montt, he now, despite twenty four hours of trying, couldn't reattach the derailleur, which meant that the bike was essentially useless.

Some time later, he and Jacob were both quite oily, but after both had concluded that it just wasn't going to fit, Jacob reshaped the derailleur hanger with a file and attached it, much to the relief of Rich, who thought he might have wasted a lot of money transporting a bunch of bike parts to Chile.

We then walked in to town and did some shopping for our next few days on the Navimag. We had been advised that it was worth taking water and nibbles, and also a supply of alcohol. We therefore bought some water, crisps and nuts, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of coke.

We wandered in town for a while but were still feeling quite worn out from our journey through Chile. We decided to treat ourselves to another burgery type meal and went to a place recommended in our Lonely Planet. The food was really good, and we started to feel a bit more human.

After eating, we decided that we might as well have a lazy afternoon at the hostel and maybe catch up on some sleep. We went back and sorted out our kit ready to go on the Navimag the next day. Rich had given us a packet of biscuits as a thank you for helping with his bike, so we added these to our supplies.

By this time, it was getting late, so we had showers and headed back into town to see if we could find something for dinner. We wandered for a while, looking at a variety of places and giving the mating dogs a wide berth (honestly, the town seemed to be full of pairs of dogs, stuck together in a post-coital 'two headed, eight legged dog' way). We found a bar where Kirsty had some Ravioli and Jacob had Spaghetti Bolognaise and we had a couple of beers.

Back at the hostel, we had an early night, ready to go and check in for the Navimag sailing the following day.

An American couple staying at the hostel had told us various stories about the Navimag, including that we would need to go and check in as early as possible, as then we could bag the best berths. They also told us that 'C' class, which was what we were booked in, was going to be rough. They told stories of the huge dorms (twenty odd beds per cabin) and that it was best to get a top bunk so that we would not be in the line of fire when the inevitable sea-sickness kicked in. We were starting to wonder what we had let ourselves in for....

After breakfast, we walked down to the port and joined the queue for check in. When we reached the front of the queue, we were assigned bed numbers (so no bagging of beds to be had) and were directed to the desk to check in our bags. These would be taken on to the ship by the staff and put on our beds. We were then free to go off and do what we wanted as long as we were back by 2pm for boarding.

We walked back towards town, looking at some of the market stalls and suchlike en route. Having killed some time, we walked back to the port and sat in the waiting room, well, waiting. A short while later, a man standing on the podium made an announcement in Spanish to the effect that boarding had been delayed by three hours. We decided that we might as well go back out for a while if that was the case, so checked with the staff as to when we needed to be back, to be told that the announcer had actually been a fellow passenger, joking. Hilarious.

Jacob popped out anyway and came back with a couple of bottles of wine, having become jealous after spotting various other people who had brought some. After that, boarding started. As C class passengers, we were the last to board, by which time the rain had started coming down in bucket loads, so we got very wet walking across to the boat.

On finding our cabin, we were pleasantly surprised at just how nice the accommodation was. There were indeed 22 berths in each cabin, but these were arranged in groups of two and four. Each berth had curtains that could be drawn across, giving complete privacy. So much for the squalor that we had been led to expect.

And so, the next leg of our journey begins, on board a freighter through the fjords. Incidentally, it turned out that the Americans who had told the horror stories hadn't actually been on the ship for more than a decade. Hmmm.