Puyuhuapi to Puerto Natales, Chile

18 - 20 Feb 2006

Glacier country in the far south

Although it is quite photogenic when bathed in afternoon sunlight, the small town of Puerto Natales isn’t much of a destination in itself. But it has the nearest airport to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. Since we’d ‘gained’ a couple of days by bypassing the area surrounding Laguna San Rafael, we had 3 nights there before we were due to drive to the park. Over a cosy dinner of lamb roasted on the spit at Puerto Natales’ most lively restaurant, the Asador Patagonica, we decided to devote the next day to a boat ride on the Sena Última Esperanza (Last Hope Sound). In the restaurant, we got talking to a young Englishman called Charles Halifax, who said he was working in the travel business. By coincidence, he hails from Beaconsfield, Bucks, where Angela went to school!
The weather wasn’t bad for our excursion aboard the 21 de Mayo to the Parque Nacional Bernardo O’Higgins. As was to be expected, there was the odd rain shower, but not when we were walking. We needed to wrap up against the biting wind, though. This was the first time we had to don hats and gloves since we’d shivered at dawn at the geysers high up in the Atacama desert.
After packing in so many activities in the past weeks, we were thankful to have a day to stay put in Puerto Natales, so the next day we did just that. We weren’t idle, though. Flemming badly needed a haircut. So while Angela worked on the website at the hotel, he went in search of the town’s only barber. This turned out to be easier said than done. He could have done with the GPS coordinates! In the end, a friendly guardia (policeman) showed him the way. It was in someone’s private house with no sign outside!
Later, back at the hotel, Flemming’s mobile phone rang. It was the Argentine authorities. At last they were acknowledging receipt of the fax we had sent from Villarrica requesting permission to fly to the Falkland Islands. But it was not good news. Apparently, although Flemming had made a general search for Falkland Islands in his text, and replaced with Islas Malvinas, there was one place where he had erroneously typed Falklands Islands, and of course the computer had not picked that one up! But, not only did we have to make that correction – every time he had written Port Stanley, Islas Malvinas, he was to replace that with just Islas Malvinas. So, back to the drawing board we went and tried to send off a fax with the necessary correcciones. This proved to be impossible from our hotel and by this time, the only shop in town where we might have been able to send it from was already closed for the day. It was a 2-hour drive to Torres del Paine national park from Puerto Natales and we only had two nights there, so we certainly weren’t going to wait around in the morning for the shops to open. We would send the fax on our return, before departing to Punta Arenas.