Day 12

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8:30am and we’re on the bus to Puerto Natales in Chile. The land outside is barren, A dry muddy green colour that stretches on for mile after mile after mile. Only a few stunted shrubs break the monotony of the landscape by boldly daring to stick their dark green almost black arms to the sky, screaming “look at me”

And so I’m using this time to catch up on my blog again, at this point it still just remains a document on this laptop.

(Okay a small jump to the future, it is now the 12th of Feb, and I’ve actually published some of this, so now to try and finish writing it.)

The bus ride to Puerto Natales is fairly dreary, a bus trip is after all only a bus trip and with unchanging scenery there is much outside to amuse oneself . After four hours we arrived at the border. First there is the exit from Argentina were we all had to file off the bus and pass through customs. Then after waiting 45 minutes for everyone to finish we climbed back onto the bus and travelled for an amazing 100 metres before get off again and going through the Chilean customs. It seems that Chile has as strict quarantine/customs regulations as New Zealand. We filled in our various forms indicating that we weren’t carrying any food or drugs etc… and then had all of our bags scanned. Unfortunately for us when we were filling in our forms the only pen we had to hand was a red one. I foolishly assumed that since we were no longer in school we could complete the document in red. I was wrong. Why is this I wonder? At school the teachers explained that they marked in red and thus it was more difficult identify their corrections etc… if the student wrote in red. This is logical. However there aren’t any corrections to be made on these customs forms and when the lady who checked us did scrawl on our newly completed, in blue, forms, she wrote in blue! Is this just another good example of bureaucracy/stupidity gone mad?

The Chilean border crossing added another hour to the trip. Finally however we got back onto the bus and a further hour later we arrived in Puerto Natales.

There isn’t much to say about Puerto Natales, it seems to exist for no other reason than to allow tourists to arrive, stay a night, and then progress with their journeys. As a rest stop, it is as good as you could hope for, small with enough shops to buy anything you may have forgotten.

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