This morning we woke at 6am, had breakfast and were ready to taxi to the bus station at 715am. We said goodbye to Robert, fellow Canadian who was heading of in a different direction. Five other adventurers have left the group as well, but we didn’t see them this morning… late night perhaps? We taxied to the bus station and boarded a public bus with reserved seats.
The bus travelled along through the country side, which was pretty barren, so we took the opportunity to sleep for awhile. We shared some snacks and ate our apples that we were not allowed to transport to Chile.
After leaving the pavement, we travelled along a rough dirt road and arrived an unassuming Argentinian border to clear there customs. The bus driver went into the office first and then motioned for the rest of the bus to come in, taking only our passports. We received a stamp in our passport, marking the date we left the country. We then continued on for several kilometres and crossing into Chile, back onto paved roads and then to the Chilean border office. There a dog came out with an official to sniff our bags under the bus and we headed into the customs to have our passports stamped and received a small white piece of paper that we need to keep with our passport at all times. They scanned our bags, looking for any fruit, vegetables, or meat.
Everything went smoothly, until Rodrigo informed us we had a “situation.”
The Canadians assumed perhaps that someone had attempted to transport illegal goods, but no. He stated that there was a car race going on and the only road to Puerto Natales was closed. So we visited a small gift shop, restaurant at the border crossing.
Rodrigo used this time to provide us with a briefing and information for the upcoming portion of our trip. We spent about 2 hrs there before deciding to carry on and see if there race was over.
Well, as my dad used to say, if it wasn’t for bad luck he would have had no luck at all! Five km outside of Puerto Natales, traffic was stopped on the road. The race was still underway. There we sat for about 2 hrs. At least we were entertained watching the rally cars speed by lap after lap.
We eventually made it to our final destination, Hotel Eberhard, and got settled and began packing and organizing for our 4 day, 3 night, 62km hike in the Torres del Paine National Park. We were then provided with dry sacks and instructions we could load them up to 4kg and that they would be delivered to the campsites for us, thus we would only need to carry our day packs.
We headed out for a delicious supper in the quaint little town, and had many conversations about the conversions of the Chilean Peso to CDN dollars. We didn’t have much time to explore due to our four hour delay in arriving.
So as we are off camping and hiking in the mountains for the next 4 days, the blog will be radio silent until we can reconnect. In the words of the gypsys – Latcho Dum or Safe Journey!
