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jonros74

50 - The Gateway to Patagonia

Hi Everyone,


I suspect the post today will be quite short as most of the day was spent travelling.

We woke up around 5:45 to catch a bus out of Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales. It was a fairly long bus (arriving at 10:15) but Evelyn and I mostly napped/ rested while I listened to my audiobook "Overreach", which is about the lead up to the Ukraine war.


When we arrived in Puerto Natales, we quickly dropped our bags off in storage, sorted some other admin and realised we still had 4 hours until our next bus. These were spent very pleasantly taking advantage of the free wifi (Emily will be glad to know that Pokemon Go did indeed work in the bus stop) before strolling into town to pick up some essentials from the supermarket and visit the local museum. The museum had some fascinating exhibits on the Milodon (an ancient extinct giant sloth-like creature that used to inhabit the area) as well as histories of the local nomadic peoples such as the Selknam of Tierra del Fuego and the Tehuelche and Kaweshkar based more around Puerto Natales, some even being maritime nomads living out of canoes!


The next bus was much shorter, only a couple of hours, and passed uneventfully as we entered the Torres del Paine national park.


We managed to get a shuttle bus from the entrance to our refugio, which took us past some amazing scenery and wildlife. We saw many Guanacos (a variety of small llama very common to this area) as well as some Rhea (an ostrich-like bird) and even some Flamingos in the laga amarga. All of these were surrounded by some fantastic views of the mountains, hills and glaciers of this amazing park!


The weather forecast since we left the Falklands has been portending doom for our trip here, with a huge washout of rain over all the days and very strong winds. We have our fingers tightly crossed for a change in the forecast but our expectations are low. On arriving at the campsite we were shown to our tent for the night (a cute little yellow one) and were told it was definitely worth getting up at 1:30am to walk up to the base of the Torres del Paine for the sunrise, though I'll leave that story for tomorrow. With this in mind, we caught an early night after a hearty dinner of sandwiches (given our limited supplies, the sandwiches are definitely going to become a running theme....)

06/02/23

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