Punta Arenas

First, the airport in Puerto Montt has three gates, but they seem to only use one. So, we were there about 2.5 hours early, as we were trying to account for any unforeseen things that might crop up, and none of them did, so we sat and read. Four other flights left from the same gate in that time, each time making us nervous that it was our flight, and we’d missed something in the announcements in Spanish.

But, we made it. When we got in, we experienced the first truly bad weather of our trip, as it was raining hard, and had been for days. We were in a place a long way from the bus drop off point. There’s no central bus terminal in PA, and each bus company has its own little terminal (typically a few parking spots on the road), which makes it hard to find stuff. We hired a cab to take us, and when we finally found the place, we found a nice little old lady who was renting out rooms in a rambling structure she’d extended from her house, and who tried to stick warm cups of tea in our hands as soon as we came in. She’s very nice, and can speak a little bit of English, and can help you arrange bus tickets, tours, etc. We stayed one night, before catching an afternoon bus to Puerto Natales (gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine) the next day. The next day, it was bright and clear and windy, and the lakes of water that were standing on the roads the day before had somehow disappeared, so we explored. We tried to hit a few of the sights the guidebook listed, without a lot of luck.

Example: in Bruce Chatwin’s book In Patagonia, he visits the house his distantly related uncle lived in – this uncle had sent him a fossilized piece of giant sloth skin (the Milodon is big down here – just google “Milodon Patagonia” to learn more), which apparently inspired the trip to Patagonia in the first place. The guidebook mentions Charley Milward’s House as one of the tourist attractions. So, we went, found it, despite the wrong markings on the map, and it’s just a house surrounded by high hedges. No museum or tourist info except a plaque. I’m glad I was there, since when I re-read the book someday, I will remember standing in front of it, and being frustrated that there wasn’t even a brochure. The house is for sale, by the way – now that would be a fun piece of history to own, kind of.

Punta Arenas is a Chilean town, but was settled by equal parts Chileans, British, Italians, and Croatians – there is a Croatian consulate here that we stumbled across, and we’re told there’s still a Croatian language radio station. It was strange to see tourist info posted in English as well as Spanish. There is a series of touristy historical information plaques up around town, a large proportion of them having something to do with Ernest Shackleton (the plaque on Charley Milward’s house mentions Shackleton staying there, for example.) He apparently stayed in PA while regrouping to rescue the crew of his ship (which I didn’t know – I thought he took off directly from St. George’s island or wherever it was.)

The most interesting thing, which Lonely Planet for once got exactly right, was the town cemetery. They’ve run out of room, so part of it looks like a traditional cemetery, with graves and family crypts packed up against each other, the way you would expect to see in an American cemetery. But, for more recent graves, you see these coffin hotel structures, where there’s coffin sized crypts, six high, and right next to each other. Visitors access an area maybe 3 by 4 feet in a wall (big enough to shove a coffin into lengthwise, however big that is), which they decorate extensively. I don’t know if this is a catholic thing or a Latin thing, or both, but many of these areas were heavily decorated, not just with flowers, but pictures fading in the sunlight, yearbooks, medals, etc. I guess Catholics are against cremation, so you have to put the stiffs somewhere. And once you’ve put them somewhere, you can’t stop the survivors from turning it into a shrine. This whole thing was frequently behind plexiglass, to shield it from the elements. There were many many of these structures, six coffins high by maybe 50 or 100 long, on four sides. Most of the people here had Spanish surnames. In the more traditional section (not sure what else to call it), there were many English, Italian, and Croatian surnames scattered in – the older section had graves from the early 1900s or before.

In the morning, I ran the few blocks to the Straits of Magellan (Estrecho de Magallanes). It was pretty filthy with litter, and I could see Tierra del Fuego across the strait. We’re not going to make it over there this trip – there’s just too much to do, and it would be several more days. We need time to devote to hiking in the park, so that cuts out a few fun things. I think the main reason I wanted to go, though, was to see how far south I could go. Ushuaia, Argentina, bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. It isn’t quite, as Puerto Williams, Chile is farther south, but it only has a thousand people or something like that. Still, PA is very, very south. If you look on a map, we’re below New Zealand, way below the southern tip of Africa. It doesn’t really get dark here until about 11PM, and even then, it’s not really dark. At midnight, there’s still a glow to the southwest in the sky. Then it’s light enough to read again about 530AM. You can’t really see the stars down here, as it never really gets dark enough (and we’re so tired late at night, that we can’t stay up until 2AM, to see if that’s late enough.)

A word about names. Chile has a few founding fathers, and in every town, you find the streets named after them. There’s O’Higgins street, which is usually a main drag, there’s two different Montt streets, after two different presidents. There’s always a Baquedano, and so on. There are also occasionally streets named after holidays. September 11^th is big here, too, but not for the same reasons – something to do with a naval victory over Peru or something like that. You find yourself looking for addresses on the same four or five streets, no matter which town you wind up in.

We only spent the one night (we came back for another night after our adventure in the park.) We stayed up late talking to a british guy in the hostel who apparently was a stockbroker who one day chucked it all and has spent the last two years drifting from one volunteer project down here to another. He’s hoping to spend new years at the end of the world (Ushuaia, probably, unless he can get a cheap last minute ticket on a boat to Antarctica) before heading up to spend one last year one some project in Mexico before finally going home and getting retrained. He only knows how to be a stockbroker, and is no longer interested in that, so it’s retraining for him, he said.

We caught a bus the evening of that second day from here to Puerto Natales, which is the gateway to the park we’re here for.