Nine Perfect Days in Patagonia...Day 6
Nearly all of Day 6 was taken up by transportation. This is a common theme in Patagonia. Nothing is actually that close and there can often be "roadblocks", so factor this into your itinerary. Because I didn't want to leave anything to chance, I emailed Bus Sur ahead of time and prebooked our bus tickets from the Calafate bus station to Puerto Natales in Chile. You can now buy directly from their website which is a couple steps easier than what I did. Either way I think you'll be ok. We saw a couple people buying tickets that morning and I want to say our bus still had at least a couple empty seats on it when we left. Bus travel is really big in Patagonia, so they are set up for it and I think have a good amount of availability compared to, say, rental cars.
It is not super simple to cross between Argentina and Chile like you might imagine if you've done a lot of driving in Europe. There are specific borders that you have to cross at, and they will look something like this:
You have to remove your luggage, get it scanned and I also believe there were sniffer dogs. Then you have to go through passport control which took HOURS. While we were waiting in line, there was a bedraggled gentlemen writing ever so cryptically in a leather bound notebook and I was so nosy about what was going on with that but I never figured it out.
I will say that the bus operator for Bus Sur (and I'm sure they're all equally this wonderful) helped us out a lot with where to go and what to do when we got to the checkpoint. As is the theme in Patagonia, everyone is nice, everyone wants to help you, everyone knows that $hit takes time and everything will get done just maybe not on a North American agenda.
Once we got back on the bus we were driven straight to Puerto Natales which is where nearly any bus service between Patagonian Argentina and Chile will end. From here, we took a taxi to the Hertz rental office. Here is another example of people just going with the flow. We had no Chilean money for our taxi driver, he didn't take credit cards so we just asked if we could give him $10 USD to take us to the rental car office. He literally just shrugged like yeah, ok whatever. It was a slow day.
Once we picked up our rental car (which we were like 2 hours late for...YOLO), we got groceries in Puerto Natales and headed straight towards Torres del Paine. Puerto Natales is not worth a day of sightseeing - it is mostly an industrial sort of depot town, but a good place to refuel and stock up before moving on.
There was a little parking area right near the center of town and we sat for a minute so I could organize the GPS and get snacks and whatnot. There was a teenage couple sitting in the car next to us, obviously going through a breakup and I don't know why me and Jorge were so fascinated with what they were doing.
Are they just fighting? No, no...this is more serious than that. Do you think he's breaking up with her, or the other way around? He won't even look at her. Oh, man, now she's crying.
Finally we realized we were being voyeuristic weirdos so we left, but I do hope everything worked out and I would like to tell her that she was like soooooooo much kewter than him.
Instead of staying directly in Torres del Paine, I booked a hotel in Rio Serrano which is the closest you can get without staying in the park. About an hour outside the nearest gate, Rio Serrano is amazing. I was actually surprised at how much I liked it and when we go back, I might decide to stay there the entire time instead and just drive in/out of the park each day.
This area is named after the Serrano River which has its own glacier, the Serrano Glacier.
This was the view from our window. I was wholly unprepared for how beautiful it was in this area and was actually kind of bummed that we were only staying one night. I could easily spend a week here.
After over 10 hours of total transit time, we spent the rest of the evening wandering around the property, taking pictures and enjoying the hotel. Originally a working estancia, our hotel, the Lago del Toro, was beautifully laid out and had so many interesting things both in and out. The same family has owned it for generations and there were family pictures and heirlooms scattered throughout the common areas. If you go to Patagonia, really think about spending at least a day in the Rio Serrano area. So many people head directly to TDP and I think miss out on this not so hidden gem. The next morning would be an early one as we would be embarking on the longest hike in TDP. Jorge, of course, didn't know this at the time :).
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