D15 -- Heading to Patagonia

Yikes! When we woke up Tuesday morning Thomas’ face below his nose was practically purple, and his hands and neck were sunburned too. Apparently, he had applied sun block only to his forehead and nose during our volcano ascent. My upper lip and nose were swollen and red (sexy!) because I had been wiping my runny nose all day on the volcano and must have wiped off my sun block in the process. Just exhaling was painful for me, since the warm air from my nose would pass over my raw skin. I was more worried about Thomas, though, because I thought I could see a couple of blisters on his right cheek. It was hard to tell for sure, though, under all that facial hair. Amazingly, our legs weren’t really sore, though I would have traded muscle fatigue for our sunburns in a minute if I could have. During breakfast we spoke briefly with a German couple who also climbed Villarrica the previous day- they were sunburned, too.

We drove 4 hours to the airport in Puerto Montt, and had an uneventful flight to Punta Arenas. At the end of the flight, Thomas befriended a very nice couple from England, Kimball and Jo. I made reservations for the four of us on a 6:30 p.m. bus, and we shared a cab to the station. We met a German woman there who made arrangements for us at her father’s hostel in PN, but when we arrived at 9:30 the hostel turned out to be – in Jo’s apt words - “a bit spooky.”

Thomas and I went to a local internet café and after five or six phone calls I was able to get us rooms with private baths at a place called Hostel Natalino. (My Spanish has really been coming in handy down here!) It wasn’t exactly The Plaza, but fairly clean and cheap with plenty of hot water. At dinner, Kimball entertained us over excellent pizzas with stories about his climbing exploits and showed us pictures his family has published in our guide book. We retired early, as we had a 7:00 a.m. bus to El Calafate, Argentina to catch and our English friends were off to Torres del Paine National Park the next day.

A couple of side notes: Puerto Natales is located on the Straits of Magellan, and looks more like a fishing town then a tourist destination. Since the sidewalks were pretty bumpy we finally decided to use our backpacks as backpacks instead of wheeling them around. Heavy, but convenient…I’m finally a “real backpacker!”

-Elva