We are really enjoying the wild countryside of Chile. We are travelling by local buses up the Carretera Austral. It is considered by many travelers to be one of the great journeys on the world.The actual road north starts in the tiny village of Villa O'Higgins. Which is literally the end of the road in the south of Chile,apart from the section beyond the icefield between Puerto Natalis and Punta Arenas. The road ends here because mountains and fiords stop the building of roads.
I mentioned in my last blog that we returning from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natalis, back into Argentina to El Calafate and then further north to El Chalten to go over a pass between Argentina and Chile that requires taking a bus, a boat, horses and another boat. We thought we had organised boats and horses but ------ the story will unfold!
Buses in South America are well organised - booked in advance with seat allocation.
The luggage is loaded in the hold.
dogs are always hopeful!
And buses of pretty good standard.
After a few hours we stopped for refreshment.
In the wilds.
The inside of the cafe was a very comfortable and full of bits and pieces.
It was warmed by the wood stove, this was the first of the wood fire stoves we had seen.
antiques were everywhere.
Everyone knows who owns The Falkland Islands!
It was a welcome break as the next few hours we drove through more pampas,
with the Andes and glaciers in the distance.
Arriving in Chalten we were surprised to see the familiar 'torres' of granite jutting into the sky.
Chalten is built in a National Park as a tourist centre for hiking
Not a very pretty town.
We dropped into the tourist infomation centre to find out where our hotel was and mentioned that we were planning to take the boat across Lake Desierto to pick up horses to take us to Estancia Caldelario. The guy looked at us and asked when we were going. 'tomorrow' was the reply. 'ah' he said 'there is no morning boat on Monday and Tuesday' - we were planning on Tuesday!!!
Holy crow the horses would be waiting. He suggested we talked to the boat owners. Off we went - 'So sorry, no boats - el Capitiane didn't want to work on Monday and Tuesday mornings!!!! 'Why not take the afternoon boat at 5.30pm'?? - gulp - and then ride 22kms before it got dark at 10.00pm.
A 'phone call to Villa O'Higgins was needed, skype didn't work, so off to the telephone booths where we waited for 45 minutes to get a booth! We then kept dialing for another 45 minutes to get through to the guy who was arranging the horses. Finally we got through - It would appear that he did not know who we were and no horses were booked, despite us having an email in our hands saying that the horses were arranged! however, he said, he had a group going through from the opposite end to catch the afternoon boat. We could return with those horses. Great, yes, we would do that, and he actually emailed us to confirm that Ricardo would wait for us.
So we settled down to enjoy our stay in Chalten - there was nothing to do except the laundry, and the wind nearly blew us off our feet - all quite normal according to the locals.
Our room must have had the best view of the 'Needles' as they call the peaks in Chalten and I spent a few hours testing the abilities of my new camera. Hope you like the results.
We wandered around a bit admiring the telephone booth:
laughed at the garbage bin!
Noticed a very strange cloud formation over one of the needles. When asking someone what it meant they said 'Bad weather tomorrow'. We hoped they would be wrong.
Ate a very nice dinner.
Finally watching the sun go down and the moon come up and wondering what would happen tomorrow.
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