Buses, Buses, and…More Buses! From the Lake District to Southern Patagonia

Oct 4, 2009

So, this was our bus plan. We wanted to go straight from Bariloche to Punta Arenas but since it was so far, we had to take 3 different buses.

Oct 4: Bus #1 left Bariloche at 5:30PM and arrived in Caleta Olivia 16 hours later. Layover in Caleta Olivia for 12 hours.
Oct 5: Bus #2 left Caleta Olivia at 9:00PM for Rio Gallegos, which was a 10 hour bus ride. Layover in Rio Gallegos for 6 hours.
Oct 6: Left Rio Gallegos at 1:00PM for a shorter 5 hour bus ride #3 to Punta Arenas.

Having never heard of Caleta Olivia before, I did some research and found out that it was a small town (not your average tourist destination!), known for its oil refinement and beaches. Did someone say beaches? That sounded perfect to me and I got all excited and told the boys that we were going to the beach once we got there. Justin was a little skeptical, making a note that we were going further south so the weather probably wasn’t optimal for the beach. I didn’t care and was trying to be optimistic.

During our bus ride to Caleta Olivia, there were 3 movies playing. The first movie they played was ‘The protector’ in Thai with Spanish subtitles. It was an action packed movie and Justin had to translate with what was going on since very little was in English (they end up going to Australia so people didn’t speak in Thai the whole time!). Ocean’s 12 was fortunately in English with subtitles in Spanish! I forgot about all the little details like Brad Pitt eating/chewing gum in every scene, and the suitcase with the Chinese guy in it going missing. Good movie! The last movie, we didn’t really pay too much attention to but I ended up watching the end and I thought it was kind of cute. It was a Disney-fantasy type movie called ‘Under Dog’ but that was in Spanish so I was confused but got the jist of it.

Oct 5, 2009

An early arrival in Caleta Olivia, and the 4 of us (Garrett, James, Justin and myself) didn’t really know what to do. The sky was gray and the clouds looked heavy. Looked like the beach idea wasn’t so great after all. A pity, but there was nothing we could do. All we knew was that we were hungry and grabbed a cab to the downtown area for some breakfast. We went to a cute little coffee shop where we stayed there for as long as we could to past the time before our next bus 12 hours later. We talked about our fav movies. All 3 boys had ‘The Goonies’ as one of their all time favs and I hadn’t seen it before. Justin shook his head in disbelief of all of the movies I hadn’t seen. A movie marathon was in order when we got back to North America!

Garrett spotted an internet café where we checked our emails, facebook, blogs and even went on skype. It was already 2 weeks into my trip and it was the first time I called home. My mom picked up in shock and assumed that something bad had happened. It was really cute. She told me that Justin and I should come home soon because she missed us and didn’t want to see anything bad happen to us. It was so good to talk to her and hear her voice.

Justin and I also checked out the main attraction of Caleta Olivia: the statue of an oiler. It was unexpectedly a lot bigger than any of us thought it would be. Caleta Olivia was also surprisingly very, very cold. I couldn’t walk down the street without my gloves, scarf or toque (or toboggan/beanie for all of you Yankees!). I was freezing my A off and it was a rather uncomfortable feeling. We were only part way through Argentina, and Justin and I got a little afraid that it was going to be bone chilling down in Punta Arenas.

We came back within 3 minutes to the internet café (where Garrett and James were still on the net) and we decided it was time for lunch. Of course, as soon as we start to get a little hungry it was during siesta time. We searched left, right, up, down, even walked around their tiny plaza looking for anything open. Nothing. Not even a clothing store. We walked in the direction where we had breakfast and finally found a cafeteria that was open! Hooray! We weren’t going to starve after all.

Justin and I were pretty hungry. We ended up sharing a large pizza that had a ton of cheese, ham and green olives. Amazing! It was so delicious that we wanted more. We sat there, talked about more movies, and entertained ourselves quite well. We decided that we’d stay there until we had to go back to the bus terminal. It was another good 5 hours before we had to go back so we had to kill time. Even though the weather was absolutely cold, we were warm in the restaurant, and we craved ice cream. In Argentina, it was possible to order up to a kilogram tub of ice cream at a time. James ended up ordering the 2nd largest tub of ice cream. The ½-kg size. We all laughed uncontrollably at the fact that he thought he could eat all that by himself. Garrett kept pointing to the other single sizes to show that there were other options but being the Irish that James was, he said “ah, screw it, I’ll just eat it all”. It was hilarious! He got 4 flavors of ice cream and after realizing how massive it was, got Garrett to share it with. Justin and I decided to get the ¼-kg one. We got D3 flavours: Dulce de Leche, Mint and Strawberry. The strawberry was a bit of a surprise because I had told them I wanted vanilla. But no complaints here because the strawberry flavour was delicious. We scarfed that down pretty quick and before I knew it, Justin was helping James and Garrett with their tub of ice cream!

We finished our ice creams and ended up entertaining ourselves very well. With a hint of exhaustion and a dash of boredom, anyone would be surprised what one could do with pens and styrofoam bowls (that contained our ice cream). It first started off as innocent as a snowman sculpture, adding plastic forks as arms and drawing facial features. The snowman evolved into a hermaphrodite where we eventually made a partner for it, made out of a large plastic water bottle. It made the time pass fast and we couldn’t help but laugh the entire time.

The boys ordered some dinner and we got back to the bus terminal. Being super paranoid, I kept walking out of the terminal and checked to see if our bus arrived. About 1.5 hours later, the bus finally arrived and we were off to Rio Gallegos. They played the movie, Eagle Eye and it wasn’t too bad. It was actually the first movie we ever saw in theaters together back when we lived in Japan so that was kind of cool for me. Justin ended up missing the entire movie because he fell asleep but didn’t get any sleep after that. So sad. Too bad I fell into a deep sleep the rest of the night.

Oct 6, 2009

Our 7:00AM early arrival at Rio Gallegos bus terminal gave us 5 hours of nothingness, waiting for our next bus. Justin and I ate the last of our food for breakfast and we sat down and I decided to work on the blog. Justin took up 3 chairs and fell asleep. I wanted a cute pic of him sleeping so I draped my hot pink blanket over him and took the cutest photo. I had my fun on Justin’s account. Later on, we didn’t quite know what to do with our chocolates and olive oil. We weren’t sure if we could bring them across the border so we wanted to smuggle them in. How tragic would it have been if they confiscated our olive oil? Anyway, we put the majority of the potentially problematic products into Justin’s pack and hoped for the best!

Garrett and James were off to El Chalten to do something camping and trekking. Unfortunately, James wasn’t so prepared for that so the boys ended up going into town and buying some gear. When they came back, we all had lunch and said our final goodbyes. It was sad to see them go but we exchanged emails and life went on.

Our ‘El Pinguino’ bus was a double decker bus that was going to take us to our final destination, Punta Arenas. And yes, we got the panoramic front row view again. It was nice and there were tons of leg room for Justin.

When we finally went to the border, we had to take all of our luggage to the immigration building, including our packs! Our trip over from Santiago to Mendoza only required checking our carry-on packs and not our luggage packs. We started to get a little worried that our olive oil and chocolates would be taken away from us! After a very lengthy process with immigration and customs, and x-ray machine scanned all of our belongings. We put my stuff in first, then Justin’s. Surprisingly, they wanted to go through my pack immediately. Not understanding a word of what they were saying in Spanish, they kept saying little phrases in English like “do you have food inside your bag?” “that’s fine, it’s okay” “thank you, lady” I was guessing the X-ray images turned out a little skewed when it came to my big pack and I ended up having to open up my bag and take out half of my things. Although they were talking in Spanish, I could understand what the problem was. I kept everything in make-up cases, whether it was one for my shampoo, conditioner and soap for the shower or one with all of my make-up, or one with our toothbrushes, toothpaste, face soap, skin lotion and all of that stuff …and many more. All of the material from my giant make up cases caused the images to (I guess) make it look like I had something suspicious. But they saw that I had nothing harmless in there so they let us go. We were lucky that they didn’t go into Justin’s stuff and find our chocolates and olive oil!

Once we boarded the bus, the engine started and we took off. We were on our panoramic front row window minus the couple who had sat in front with us. What happened to them? While Justin and I were in customs we noticed that they were taken aside and sent to a room in a private hallway. And that was the last of them. Justin and I predicted what happened. Maybe they forgot their passport? Maybe their passport expired? Maybe they’re aliens? Anyway, we never found out. Mystery unsolved.

Now in Chile, we looked out the window for wildlife. We saw tons of sheep, cattle, and even flamingos!! They were so small that I thought they were pink buoys on the lake at first, but sure enough, they were wild flamingos! An awesome start to Punta Arenas.

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