So, after an amazing, relaxing time on the beach in Bahia Inglesa, Donna and I headed back to Santiago where we would be catching our flight out of Latin America and onto our next continent. We had deliberately given ourselves one last night in Santiago in order to have a nice dinner to say farewell to this amazing part of the world. During the day that we arrived back in Santiago, we didn’t really do much but sit on the terrace of our hostel, and whilst I read, Donna got her head down as she had woken up with a bit of a headache from the overnight bus. It seemed like any other day in Santiago with the sun beating down on us, the traffic zipping around in every direction and both tourists and locals going ... read more

With the wind in my hair, the sun on my face and being beside the beach you would think that I would be happy, but I wasn’t. Unfortunately, being happy was proving difficult at this moment as rather than lying on the beach or swigging a beer, I was in the back of a truck. Who’s truck? to this day, we still have no idea, but as Donna and Lisa sat inside the truck trying to tell these random people (who we had accidentally hitchhiked with) where our cabana was, I was being thrown all over the place on the outside of it. I was a tad miffed! To be fair, these people were amazingly friendly in giving us a lift even though they had no idea where our cabana was and after driving round aimlessly ... read more

We arrived in the little town of Santa Cruz after a fairly short bus ride from Santiago and immediately got to looking for accommodation. Our tactic was for the girls to hang out in the palm treed plaza whilst I wandered around the town looking for somewhere for us to stay. Looking back at my plan, it seems I may have given myself a bum deal! Luckily for us, there was an information point in the middle of the plaza and so I went over to see if they had any recommendations. Fortunately, the elderly lady at the information point had the perfect place for us to stay and set about making the arrangements on the phone for me to go see this ‘hotel’. I was guided to the accommodation in Spanish and immediately thought I ... read more

Day 3 – Italiano – Los Cuernos 16.5km Our third day started out badly. This was purely due to lack of sleep, and the reason for this lack of sleep? The Wind. It started to get really strong around the midnight mark, and although the trees did provide us with a lot of shelter, the noise was simply horrendous. We actually felt quite safe in our little tent and therefore had no worries there, it was just the constant roar of the wind that kept us from falling asleep that bothered us. I think we got around 2-3 hours sleep at best that night, however we wasn’t about to let that spoil our day. It was around 7.30am when we got out of the tent in order to have breakfast, and both of us were more ... read more

I’m not sure what we expected from our first stop in Chile, however it probably wasn’t this. Puerto Natales is pretty much the main jumping off point for the Torres Del Paine treks which we had heard so much about, and so we had subsequently come here to do exactly that. The town itself is hard to put into words really, and that is generally due to the fact that it’s just so non-descript. I think Donna and I both imagined a bustling town with hikers everywhere, more Gore-Tex shops than you could shake a stick at and at the very least, some atmosphere! However on arrival mid-afternoon, we were simply greeted with an eerily quiet suburban type town where the streets hosted more stray dogs than people. To be fair, we had got there slightly ... read more