Puerto Natales
Day 23 1st February
Packing all our excessive stuff into insufficiently large enough bags is already getting tiresome but we hope that once we have the car, it will be possible to use that as extra dumping space. It’s also heavy too so it is great that we are being spoilt with personalised chauffeurs transporting us from one place to another. Today though we would be suffering the ignominy of having to get a regular bus! Outrageous!
We knew from previous travels in South America that it would be pretty luxurious and it was.
A few things confused us about this bit of the trip:
Why were we travelling south again just so that we could come back up north? and
Why does Google Maps show that this is a 3hr 30minute journey when the bus driver is telling us that it will take around 5 to 6hrs?
We are still puzzling over the first question and can only think that it is because we have to pick up and drop off the car in Chile and that Puerto Natales is the best place to start the journey. This is bit spurious though as there is an airport in PN as well as in Punta Arenas further south so we could have gone there straight from Ushuaia. Another thing on the list for Ed when we get back…
The answer to the second question became apparent as the day went on. Firstly, a bus just doesn’t go as fast as you would do driving your own car. Secondly, some sections of road weren’t that great so the bus slows down even more. Thirdly, and most significantly, we had to cross the border from Argentina to Chile.
The border check point in Argentina was a modest collection of shacks with a few bored looking security and customs officers. The dire warnings of punishment for trying to take something illegal and dangerous like an apple over the crossing point like seemed to be a bit of a miss match to the reality of the situation. It was, however, a slow process as everyone had to get off the bus and traipse into the office where the guards perked up a tiny bit at the prospect of having a bit of a laugh at some passport photos.
It went smoothly enough though and we were soon bouncing along the no man’s land dirt track towards Chile.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
The border control designers at Don Guillermo had obviously given this conundrum careful consideration before coming up with their layout for the building at this remote station. There must have been endless debate of how to best deal with stacks of people essentially moving in opposite directions without a clue what to do, where to put the staff coffee machine and, most importantly, where does the really impressive super big X ray machine need to be so that everyone notices it. On the day that they finally came up with the solution they must have thought ‘Eureka! We are going to totally ignore any logical patterns of flow and build something that is so foolish that complete fools will be so confused that they will all pass through normally and think everything is perfectly fine’.
The crazy thing is that they were right! Gangs of ‘what do I do, where do I go, aaah!’ Tourists huddle in groups like sheep whilst guards bark at them in a language they can’t understand until they meekly fall into the right position to be processed. Bumping into each other all over the place, tripping over bags and saying sorry distracts them from thinking ‘how can I make it awkward for these guys to do their job’.
Well, it certainly adds a bit more fun for the border control officers than just laughing at passport photos! Their ultimate pleasure though comes when the x ray machine blares out an alarm when a dangerous object is found and some dumb gringo says ‘oh I didn’t know that a banana counted as a fruit’.
They enjoy stamping documents too and do this with relish at each of the two windows that everyone has to visit. Different windows for people coming into the country to those going out. Obviously.
We finally arrive in Puerto Natales at around 3pm unfeasibly tired from the six hour bus journey and very happy to see our man waiting with a sign saying ‘Tunna’ ready to whisk us to our hotel.
We drove through the basic but nevertheless nice looking town to the lake featured in the cover photo for this blog, past what looked like the last building in town, along a road for 10 minutes and finally turned off the main road opposite the airport that we could have flown into two days ago. Down a rubble road for a bit, we arrived at a small shack in the middle of nowhere with the driver scratching his head whilst looking at Google Maps to realise that this was our ‘hotel’ for the night. The mystery of our first puzzlement of the day remained unanswered as we gazed out across the undoubtedly beautiful landscape wondering why on earth we weren’t staying in town for the few short hours that we were in this place before picking up our car.
As a place of solitude and reflection, the hostel we were in was perfect with only one person running the place, no other guests and just a few stray dogs to keep us company. We didn’t fancy or believe the ‘short walk into town’ so chose instead to take up the offer of home cooked pizza. Big mistake in every sense of the word. Two huge slabs of dough were delivered with not much on top other than huge dollops of fatty cheese oozing over the sides of the unsavoury timber board on which it arrived. We ate almost none of it but couldn’t bring ourselves to be critical of the efforts that the young girl left to run the place had made. We left the next morning with a doggy bag full of heavy material that we knew not even the stray dogs would want so found the nearest bin to deposit it in.
Picking up the car went without a hitch and we are set for our drive back north through Chile and Argentina on the Ruta 40 and the Carratera Austral. We left Puerto Natales believing that it was another place in Sourpth America that was not deserving of the surroundings in which it sat and hoping for better places to come.