My dad and I had been planning a trip of a lifetime. We would be spending 3 weeks in Patagonia near the tip of South America. This is a very remote region that half of the challenge is just to get to this place. Well, we had done the spending part of it by buying the plane tickets and now we just had to embark on the journey. To save a few bucks, our trip would require us to fly during New Years. That wasn't a big deal to us, though, so we were off. It started from Dad's house in Port Angeles where Laura was going to give us a ride to the airport. With a short stop for a haircut, we were then off to the hotel near the airport. On the way, I started to feel a bad tingle in my throat and sure enough, I was getting sick. This made me very nervous considering Jacqueline and my trip home from Tasmania which had been so brutal with my cold. I knew that I was in for it again.
After a big dinner at IHOP across the street, we tried our best to retreat to an early night's sleep. Dad had an easy time of falling asleep, but I struggled. Between his snoring, my oncoming cold, and my dread of having to travel with a cold, I struggled to get some rest. I got a few hours, but we were up nice and early for our first plane flight.
We were flying from Seattle into Los Angeles, then L.A. to Lima, Lima to Santiago, and Santiago to Punta Arenas. This was going to be quite the experience especially being sick. For now, it was just the sore throat. In L.A. I bought some sore throat drops and packed my pockets with some toilet paper to blow my nose. After experiencing the most excruciating pain on the plane rides home from Tasmania, I strategized to continue breathing through my nose to keep my sinuses clear during take-off and landing. It worked out okay and I didn't have quite the head pain that I had the last time. The planes were fairly nice with your own choice of inflight movies. I took a window seat, but there really wasn't much to see from the window. Dad had the aisle seat so he could get up and walk around easily. We had a rather full flight with a whole bunch college and high school age kids obviously in a church group on their was down to do some missionary work. We had more selfish endeavors planned, but mainly some good father-son time in the wilds of South America. We spent New Years sitting on the plane in Lima, Peru.
We got into Santiago, Chile early in the morning and the airport was completely deserted. We tried to find the darkest, quietest place in the airport to attempt to get some rest. I found myself underneath the benches, not really sleeping, but resting. If it was quiet, maybe I would get some rest. It was not, though, as I am not sure what LANPASS is, but I don't want to get one. The sleeping didn't go so well and as the airport began to fill up, we gave up and instead played some cribbage and read our books. There was going to be a lot of cribbage on this trip and our tally had already begun.
Finally, in the late afternoon, our flight for Punta Arenas showed up on the big board. We were soon loading and finally off to Punta Arenas. The flight went smooth, our luggage was there to be picked up, but the guy that was supposed to meet us at the airport was nowhere to be seen. We barely made it onto another bus and I learned very quickly that not speaking Spanish was going to put me at disadvantage. Luckily, we had Dad whose Spanish was far more advanced than mine. I am not sure I could have made a trip like this by myself, because my lack of skills was showing strongly.
We were dropped off at Hostel La Estancia and showed to our rooms. The guy there was very nice to us despite the fact that by this point, I was trying my best to not let my large supply of mucus disgust anyone. It was Sunday night, so we were going to have a tough time finding a place to eat. We wandered around the city and finally found a restaurant with a very nice woman willing to serve us. It was quiet to say the least and according to Dad, we were just rather early for dinner also. I had some pollo because at least I knew what that was off of the menu. We took some showers, chilled out, and went to sleep with the sun still shining. This was going to be a common occurrence as the sun was shining 20 hours out of the day. I slept rather well on this night as Dad's snoring did not get to my an incredible amount.
The next day we were up bright and early. We were out and about before much was going on. We were able to get a bus ticket to Puerto Natales on one of the first buses out. We found some breakfast, went to the store to get a bit of food, and looked for camp fuel. We even had some time to go down to the water to see the damage done by the New Year's weekend with beer bottles scattered about. We could see the big building, but this is not what we came halfway across the world to see.
The bus out to Puerto Natales was a learning experience for me. For one, the bus was excellent. It was very comfortable with big windows. We could see the pampas very well as we drove through the sparsely populated area. This was going to be a common occurrence also to go from the "big" city to driving through nothing but grasses, rivers, and the occassional la estancia or ranch house to arrive at the next big city. We did arrive at the next big city which was Puerto Natales.
Our original plan for getting into Puerto Natales was to have a quick stop before getting another bus ticket for Torres del Paine. The one problem with this idea was that Torres del Paine was on fire! My friend Tim had let me know before we left and unfortunately for us tourists, that meant that the place was closed. We were still planning our travel around going to Torres, but unfortunately at this point it was closed without any timetable for it opening. We asked around town about it and going wisdom was that Wednesday was the soonest it could open. That meant one extra day in Puerto Natales, but we could handle that.
We did our best to make the best of the situation. We spent a good amount of time wandering around town supplying ourselves for our trip into Torres. We weren't yet in the shopping stage of our trip, so we did some sightseeing going down to water to at least get a glimpse of the mountains that were in our view, but not within our grasp. It was such a difficult place to be in. We were anxious to see something spectacular after so many grueling days of travel and now we were forced to just wait it out. You had to look on the bright side, at least my cold would disappear before we would see the towers.
So with our extra day in Puerto Natales we decided to go for a walk. First, we went to the Chilean equivalent of the National Park Service to talk to their government officers. They were meeting there about the fire when we got there, but the guy who spoke English the best was able to tell us that at this time the park was going to reopen the next day, though he still thought that it might be a bad idea because the fire was still rather dangerous. We were willing to take our chances, so we decided to walk up the road to where we could see a trail to a lookout on our map. We walked through the real part of town and past the monuments of empty pop bottles filled with holy water? It looked rather strange, but for someone this had some religious significance. We walked a long ways out there and never found this trail, but were finally able to spot it far, far away. This was going to too much for us on this day. Instead we just walked back by the road. This just added to the frustration. We went back into town and contemplated taking a ride out to see the cave of the Milodon which this town was so proud of. This is an ancient sloth type creature that was found in a cave outside of town many years ago. There was even a huge statue of it as you got into town. The cost for a cab ride out there was going to be too much for me as it just looked like a tourist trap and frankly I was not entirely that interested. We were here for the mountains, not the large ancient sloths. So we read our books, played more cribbage, and hung out checking the internet to see what fire coverage we could find. We were so ready to go see some mountains. We did have a good dinner at a wood fired pizza place, but I wasn't here for the restaurants either. Let's go see some mountains!
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