Blogs from Magallanes, Chile, South America - page 5

K - We booked our Navimag ferry trip between Puerto Montt in the lakes and Puerto Natales in southern Patagonia way back in August. 3 nights/4 days cruising through the beautiful Patagonian fjords with the opportunity of seeing glaciers and a bit of marine life sounded much more attractive than yet more airports or tackling the notorious Carretera Austral, a challenging 800 mile road route. Once booked we hadn’t thought about the ferry much more until a couple of days before arriving at the departure town of Puerto Montt. That’s when I went on line and saw that the new Navimag website had some beautiful photos but that everyone in them was wearing Gortex and woolies. Further research identified blogs highlighting how rough part of the crossing can be. This is when the ferry moves out ... read more

Woke up way too early this morning so only got about 4 hours proper sleep, so not the best way to start this day, doing the most difficult trek on offer, the Los Torres Sendero del Ascencion or in other words the trek to the base of the three towers (Los Torres) which our hotel is named after. This trek turned out to be very close to the hardest physical challenge I’ve had, the other being the 23km uphill cycle ride in Yunnan province in high altitude. I joked that yesterday’s tour was called Full Paine but it was a more appropriate name for today’s hike. The hike is 9kms one way then 9kms back the same way and is basically in three parts, the first is 5km, fairly steep to the rufugio where back-packers trekking ... read more

Left our apartment on schedule at 8am walked with all our luggage for 30 minutes to the Los Heroes bus station. It was an easy walk, all flat, so was worth the effort as the bus fare for both of us was about $7 compared to about $63 for a direct transfer. There were people lining up for the bus when we arrived but not many of them had luggage so this was used by people working at the airport as well as travelers. Bus ride was about 35 minutes and we arrived at the airport around 9:20. We mis-read the boarding pass in Spanish and went to Gate 35, but luckily the correct gate 27 wasn’t far away, but there was a long line of passengers waiting to get on. The flight was amazing. I ... read more

There is no way I can share the last 6 days in detail, it would make pretty sad reading. I knew the trek was going to be “jolly hard work”, maybe “a physical challenge of unprecedented proportions”, or maybe even “dreadful”. So why and how did I come to be on it at all when I had said quite clearly and loudly last September when the subject first reared it’s troublesome head in the Lowe household those immortal and much ignored words: “I AM NOT DOING THE W TREK”. Now I am not a difficult person and have used this sort of direct language only rarely in the last 30 years and one would like to think that my clear and unenthusiastic response would at least have been noted. But somehow (and I have yet to ... read more

Booking accommodation in the Torres del Paine National Park has been an ordeal. There are three providers, all of which operate in complete isolation of the others. All have websites and all of these are unrelated to reality. The threat is that if you arrive at a site without a booking then you will be fined and thrown out of the park. The reality is that if you get to a refuge in an evening there is nowhere else to go.... so they book you into one of the many “fully booked” vacant rooms and campsites. All this for £160 a night for a fully kitted out tent and food. Staff generally behave as if they are doing you a big favour to acknowledge your existence and service requires perseverance. One of our nights we were ... read more