The long road, not taken (part 2)

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  Puerto Natales, Chile
Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Up at 6am, a quick shower. Today, we are catching the bus to Puerto Natales, Chile. This is a 5 hour drive from El Calafate. And if I hadn,t mentioned before, we are taking comfortable, but public busses. They are always jam packed with trekkers and campers. IN addition to being hot, the busses often have this remarkably foul odour which is the stink of dirty socks. You kind of get used to it (I have at this point), but thankfully I had a Vicks vapo-rub inhaler handy, so I was better placed than most. (NOte - it is apparently against the law to take one,s shoes off on a bus in Chile, but no such law appears to exist in Argentina).

The bus ride was long, and covered a lot of really dry, flat land before we reached the border areas. It was here that we had to get off the bus and formally enter Chile (and my passport is now filling up with exit/entry stamps!). It was a short drive across the border and into the city of Puerto Natales, which is another small city of maybe 5,000 or so people. But it had all the creature comforts...a bank, an ice cream shop (Patagonia is known for its great ice cream), a pizzeria and an internet cafe

01 - Puerto Natales, Main Drag

. I have been hitting the internet cafes wherever I can to update this blog and to keep up with the news back home.

We were booked at a little hotel / hostel called the Hotel Blanco, which was essentially a house converted into a 3 story hotel. It looked, and smelled something like your grandmothers place (kind of reassuring really), and the hostess Clara (spoke no English) was great. She spoke with such volume, and such a high pitch that it was hard to listen for very long, but she gladly took everyone,s dirty laundry and stayed up late into the night to get all of it washed! (By now, i think we are carrying 5 days of dirty clothes, which are especially ripe from being rolled up in plastic bags in the heat!).

Aside from ending up with a pair of underwear not belonging to me (a travelling companion from Holland later claimed what I think we would call banana slings), it was nice to have the clean stuff!

The rooms were fairly small, and we were paired up. I really liked the satin bedspreads, and the outside of the doors were upholstered in white padded vinyl a la 1970 bedroom headboard. Besides being kitschy, it was a really comfortable and clean place, which by this time was feeling five starts!

We had about 4 hours to roam freely about the town (think 6 blocks long, 4 blocks wide for the commercial district), and I used mine for Internet time mostly. But I did get a chance to hit the grocery store to stock up on provisions for the next leg of the trip

02 - Our dinner locale, Puerto Natales

. My haul included (in no particular order) many of the things I missed most from home.... Oreos, Peanut Butter, Chocolate, plums, chips. I also grabbed one of those vacuum packed containers (think drink box) of wine. I figured, somewhere along the line in the next 2 days, were all going to want to get drunk on a mountain top, so this would be my contribution. Later on, I would discover that I wasn't the only one thinking that way, and that we all had come prepared with an alcoholic donation!!

Time then for dinner in Puerto Natales (I had an amazing roast lamb dish), and a brief meeting with our new guide, Jose, who would be taking us through Torres del Paine starting the next day. Jose was 20-something and had been taking trekkers through TDP for a couple of years. He was pretty cool with our group, and pointed out that he had had only one near fatality on the trek (!). He was kidding, but TDP is known as a higher risk climb because of the steepness of the climb, the fact that you're climbing on loose rock and boulder at the higher elevations, and that the park is very far from any cities or towns, therefore any emergency requires someone to fly in to rescue you, taking several hours.

But we were undaunted, and some of the group were probably wishing for a quick death by this point anyway (note - I wasn't yet ready for death at this point). I should also tell you that a number of the group (maybe 4 of the 9) had booked through a company that accidentally described the difficulty of the treks on this trip as 2 out of 5, when in fact they are 4 out of 5. A couple of them had opted out of treks along the way as a result. But at Torres del Paine, you could not opt out of the treks, because we were to trek to the back of the park, camp, and trek out again. There would be nowhere else to go.

In any case, we all hit the sack around 1 am, to be up and ready to go at 8 the next day.

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