Days x and y (have lost count!)

We'd been told that our arrival in Puerto Natales would be delayed because they were running the annual car race (souped-up Fiestas etc) around a 16km route that included the road into town. The delay wasn't as long as expected because the race had been stopped by an accident. Carlos, our driver, found out from the radio that one of the spectators had been killed. The story was that she was 20, had been drinking and had been sliced in two.

Puerto Natales is built on a grid, like all Argentinian and Chilean towns as far as we can tell, and has a population of about 20,000, who mostly live in brightly-coloured, single storey houses. It sits next to the Seno de Ultima Esperenza (Bay of Last Hope), a fjord which leads into the Pacific. It's only existed since 1911, originally as a place for fishing, mining and meat packing, and now mainly makes it money out of tourism.

Our hotel, the Indigo, didn't look promising from the outside - a five storey wooden building that looked as if it might once have been a fish processing factory, but was a revelation inside - about as hip a hotel as I've ever stayed in, with dark wood, bamboo, criss-crossing staircases and ramps, a very cool bar and restaurant and a spa on the top floor with panoramic views over the town and fjord.

On Sunday after breakfast, we were met by Ellen, our horse riding instructor for the day. She was originally Dutch, the daughter or a horse trader and married to an American who is a keen climber and persuaded her to move here from Oregon five years ago with their family so that he could carry on climbing and run a hostel and mountain equipment rental centre and she could look after horses, which is what she's always down. None of them spoke any Spanish at the time!

We drove about 20 minutes out of town, stopping to photograph a condor which was circling a dead rabbit on the road, to an estancia where the horses - Amadeus, a spirited ex-Argentinian military animal for Christopher, Canadia, a lower slung native Chilean horse for me - were waiting for us. Once we'd signed the disclaimer form in Spanish, which meant nothing to us, strapped on our helmets and chaps, and been instructed how to go forwards, stop and steer, we were off into the wide blue yonder with Ellen and Fernando, our baquianos (the Chilean version of a gaucho). The wide blue yonder went across country as far as it was possible to see (about 30kms in all directions was our guess), with virtually no sign of human life. It was unbelievably spectacular - mountains covered with snow, scudding clouds, acres and acres of pampas and a few cattle here and there.

We rode for two hours, mostly uphill and across a few steams, until we reached the cave of the miladon. The miladon was a prehistoric sloth, about 10 feet tall, but a herbivore, the remains of which were found near the cave at the end of the 19th century. The cave is huge - its mouth is probably about 40 feet high and we were able to walk about 200 yards into it. There was a graph of statistics at the entrance, which said that visitor numbers had increased by about 10% per year for the last 20 years (from 10,000 to 70,000).

After lunch, we retraced our hoofprints back to the estancia. By squeezing with our knees and letting the reins go loose (held in one hand, the baquianos way, in order to leave the other hand free for lassooing) we were able to build up to a trot, or a canter if you're feeling generous. A very light pull on the reins, left or right, got the horses to move in one direction or another very satisfyingly.

We drove back into town, collected our laundry, separated our kit between what we needed for our trek and the stuff that we'd leave waiting at the Indigo and between what we'd be carrying and what the porter would be carrying for us, met Alex, who talked us through our itinerary for the next five days, tested the product of the local micro-brewery, ate, read and went to bed.

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