Archive for the 'South America 2008' Category

Had a lazy day today - didn’t feel like doing much and decided not to do any other tours. It was a horrible cold and windy day – Punta Arenas is known for its strong winds (the symbol of the town seems to be a windblown tree!).

We did go for a walk around the town a bit. We spent some time catching up on blogging, watched some movies on TV and arranged to have some washing done – quite expensive here!

Up early this morning so we could get to the office of the tourism operator by 6:50am ready for our tour to Magdalena island.

They put us all into two minibuses and drove us to 30 minutes out of town to a small port where two large Zodiacs were waiting for us.

We put on our life jackets and boarded the larger of the two boats - ours had seating for about 20 – with captain standing at the wheel at the rear (and getting very wet) and a first mate hanging on at the side and getting equally wet. The boat had a canvas roof to keep spray off us – which was good, since it was quite windy.

Once we got out to more open water, the swell rose, eventually reaching over 2m … made it very interesting in the boat - quite a thrill ride … much more exciting than rides at the show or a theme park. We followed a zig-zag path (to avoid travelling side-on to the waves) out to Magdalena island and arrived after about 45 minutes.

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We disembarked on the island amongst literally thousands of Magellanic Penguins, and followed a roped off trail up to a lighthouse at the top – past many nests and young Penguins who didn’t seem overly fussed by our presence.

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There were a lot of Kelp Gulls and Skuas too hanging around and making lots of noise. Some of them had nests too – although I only saw juveniles, not chicks.

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Apparently the penguin population is at least 50,000 birds, although some estimates we’ve heard put it at over three times that many.

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After an hour of wandering amongst the penguins, we boarded our Zodiacs again and headed further out to Marta Island, where a colony of sea lions lived. We watched them for a while – quite a few young sea lions visible, plus a couple of cranky males.

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We then headed back to shore, re-boarded the minibuses and were driven back to town, arriving around 11:30am.

We stopped for some lunch, and then walked up to a lookout with views over the town and Straits of Magellan.

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Took it easy for the rest of the day – watching TV and catching up with the blogs and emails.

Up in time to get breakfast this morning – not too early. Breakfast was cereal and toast – nothing special, but does the job.

After breakfast we headed out for a walk along waterfront to the port area to see if we could work out where our cruise would be leaving from on Wednesday.

We stopped at a supermarket to buy some water and fruit - and then headed into town to the tourist information office  to get some information about tours and attractions in the local area.

Next we went to the Cruceros Australis offices to confirm where and when we had to check-in.

Finally we visited the offices of one of the tour operators and booked a tour for tomorrow.

After lunch, we walked to the cemetry which gets listed in the guide books as a historical feature – with ornate memorials and a long history of settlement from people of many nationalities. It felt a bit weird to be visiting a cemetry as a tourist – there were both people tending the flowers on graves of loved ones and people taking photos of the tombs and memorials.

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While walking around the city we found we kept getting “adopted” by the local dogs – many of whom roamed the streets. A couple of times we had dogs start trotting along with us as we walked – one followed us around the block in the downtown area before we managed to lose him by going into a building. Another dog followed us all the way to the cemetry – several kilometres away. We found that if we avoided making eye contact and tried not to smile at the dogs they tended to ignore us. Leanne likes dogs, so it was hard for her to stop looking at them and smiling at them !!

Dinner was at La Luna – a seafood restaurant catering to mostly international customers – I had a chicken schnitzel which was very very nice and Leanne had Salmon (*yawn*)

Up rather late this morning – our bus wasn’t until 1pm, so we were able to take our time getting ready. Very nice to sleep in a bit! We eventually got up at 9am and headed for breakfast and then showered and started packing. Leanne went to collect the clothes (1500 pesos per kg – 4260 pesos in total … about AU$10). We finished packing, checked out of the hostel and arranged for them to look after our bags while we went for a bit of a walk.

We walked along the waterfront for a while with the camera – looking at all the birdlife there. At one point there is an old pier (just the poles in the water remain), which we had seen on previous mornings had a colony of cormorants living on it … we thought the one-bird-perch-per-pole was quite amusing. We had also hoped to get some good photos of the black-necked swans, but they weren’t around, instead we had Coscoroba Swans! Ironically as we headed past the same area a couple of hours later, the black necked swans were back as well.

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We stopped at a little cafe around the corner from the hostel for hot chocolate and cake – it was very very nice, and when we went to pay the bill, the owner got all excited and showed us the receipt book – we were customer number 22,222 ! All the staff came out to celebrate and they gave us a free block of chocolate! Lovely little place – and I would have liked to try a few more of their cakes and different types of hot chocolate too!

We walked back to the hostel and arranged for a remise to pick us up – we didn’t feel like walking to the bus station and being all hot and sweaty before the start of our trip. 1000 pesos flat rate anywhere in town (about AU$2.40) seems cheap – but given we had paid only 700 pesos for a 20 minute bus ride from Puerto Varas to Puerto Montt … it was a bit expensive compared to a 2 minute ride to the bus station. I guess this is a tourist town though and it was door-to-door service.

The bus left promptly at 1pm – 5,000 pesos each to Punta Arenas (about AU$12). It was a nice bus too - I had enough leg room to be able to pull my laptop down and catch up on writing some more blog entries – good thing I kept the laptop charged!

The trip passed fairly quickly – just over three hours, and we were pleasantly surprised to find the main part of the town to be relatively flat – I was worried that it would be hilly and we would have a hike to get to our hostel. As it turned out, it was quite an easy 5 block walk from the bus station. Ironically, the other choice of bus company we had would have meant only a 1 block walk to the hostel – but we didn’t know that until we arrived.

Punta Arenas is a large “coastal” city of over 110,000 people – large focus on fishing and also quite industrial, and is the main business centre for the Patagonia region. I put “coastal” in quotes, since it is actually quite a long way inland and us actually on the Strait of Magellan which runs between the South American mainland and the island of Tierra del Fuego (and the hundreds of other smaller islands which make up the coastline). Being a major centre – it has a large airport, and many people fly into or out of Punta Arenas from the large cities to the north (although the area is notorious for its galeforce winds – so I’m not sure how pleasant that would be!).

We checked in to our hostel soon after 4pm and got settled – they have WiFi – it worked in our room – it’s quite fast – and we even have a desk! So I’m happy – hopefully I’ll be able to get caught up on all my computer stuff before we head off on our next boat cruise on Wednesday!

We went out to explore the town for a while – found the ubiquitous Plaza de Armas and the offices for the cruise company where we would need to check in on Wednesday. We were hungry – we hadn’t really had lunch … and it was too early for dinner – so we stopped at a cafe and Leanne had hot chocolate and churros, while I had a banana split and a vanilla milkshake. Quite nice – but very sugary – we went for a bit of a walk around the downtown area before returning to our room to start our research and planning for our time here.

We ended up not going out for dinner – Leanne went to bed early while I got caught up on some blogging and posted the entries I had written up on the bus today.

Up early to finish packing, have a quick breakfast and then wait for our Remise (taxi) to the bus station. The bus left just after 8:30am and we both had a snooze as we drove across the barren plains of the Pampas.

I woke up as we turned off earlier than I expected and turned down a rough dirt road. I had seen a sign on the way in the other day which pointed to El Calafate – and I figured it was a “short cut”. I confirmed this on the map later … to follow the highway (like our previous bus had), we had to travel two sides of a triangle (with the short cut forming the third side).

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I’m not sure if the short cut was any quicker – at times we crawled along at only 20 – 30km per hour, and it took us over 90 minutes to get back onto the highway. I’ll have to check the distances to work out whether it would have been quicker to stay on the highway. At least we got to see a lot of Rhea’s along the way.

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As we continued, I started seeing landscape that I hadn’t remembered from the previous bus journey – and it soon became clear that we were going a different route to Puerto Natales rather than through Cerro Castillo like before. This was confirmed as we drove in to Rio Turbio, a coal mining town near the border – indeed, just past the outskirts of town we reached the Argentinian border control. At this point we once again handed over our passports while the driver took his passenger list in and got our paperwork processed. This time it took over an hour – while we waited on the bus.

Next, we drove about 15 minutes down the road (the border itself was clearly marked this time) before coming to the Chilean entry control. This time we had to get off the bus, collect our bags and line up – fortunately Leanne and I were near the front of the line – first to get our passport stamped, and then to have our bags inspected. We spent some time trying to explain to some other tourists on the bus why it was so important to not take fruit or vegetables into the country – they had no idea about fruit fly and other such pests and diseases – despite all the information given to them at the border crossings. It’s no wonder there is enough tension at Australian airports to make a TV series about it all … although given we come from South Australia, we are much more used to such issues with our fruit-fly exclusion zone than I’m sure many other Australians are!

Another 45 minutes wait and we were off again – we thought it was another 2 – 3 hours to Puerto Natales – we would be arriving a lot later than scheduled, but it turned out we were just down the road – we came in from a completely different direction to when we had left.

The satellite image above shows the two paths – light blue is from Puerto Natales to El Calafate via Cerro Castillo, and the dark blue is the return trip via Rio Turbio

With the time difference, it was about 2pm when we arrived – we had booked a room back at the Hostal Natales (which unfortunately was across town from where the bus dropped us off), so we put our packs on and walked – at least the main part of Puerto Natales is basically flat (just a gentle slope down to the water). We checked in, dumped our gear and went out looking for lunch. We also had a heap of washing we wanted to get done – there was a Lavandería just up the road with a couple of hard working girls who did a good quick job with laundry – so we took our bag of dirty clothes with us. Unfortunately they were closed for lunch, so we ended up carrying our dirty laundry across town as we headed for the bus company offices to book our bus to Punta Arenas for tomorrow.

For lunch, we ended up back at the vegetarian restaurant we had eaten at the previous week – but I left after eating to head back to the hostel for a sleep while Leanne stayed to enjoy a hot chocolate and read some magazines. One the way back to the hostel, Leanne was able to drop the laundry in and negotiated a 10am collection time for tomorrow morning – plenty of time before our 1pm bus.

We sat around the hostel for the afternoon while I enjoyed the faster internet connection and caught up on some emails and blog entries. Leanne curled up on the couch with a book from their collection at the hostel. We headed out for dinner after 8pm and ended up at a little restaurant where I had the rather greasy steak, onion, fried eggs and chips, while Leanne had a seafood soup.

We headed to bed once Leanne had finished reading her book at around midnight.

Tweets from today

on a bus back to puerto natales

15th February, 2008 7:42 AM from txt