penguins - ilivetotravel's travel log

Beginning the Journey into Patagonia: Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales

While Punta Arenas was my entry point to Patagonia (see map for a good visual!), I wasn’t going to spend too much time there – I had places to go in Patagonia! Punta Arenas is known for being very windy but much to my joy, the landing was very smooth.

Final approach before landing in Punta Arenas, Chile

Final approach before finally landing in Punta Arenas!

After a quick lunch at La Luna near the new costanera (“coastal”) avenue (chupe de centolla – a delicious king crab dish) and a failed attempt at using a coffee shop’s wi-fi on Ave. Pedro Montt after buying a coffee (the wi-fi “didn’t” work, something that seems to affect most places in this part of the country who claim to have one…), I walked around town for a couple of hours before I finally left town to head north into the heart of the Chilean Patagonia.

Chupe de centolla (crab dish) in Punta Arenas, Chile

Chupe de centolla. Yum!

Along the waterfront

Cormoranes on the waterfront of Punta Arenas

I made a stop at the penguin colony in Otway (I didn’t know I was going to see penguins right off the waterfront in Punta Arenas!). It was fascinating to walk among all the penguin nests on the shores of this body of water (more enclosed than a bay, but not a lake) – you stay on a slightly elevated walkway to avoid mis-stepping onto a penguin nest.

Penguins in Otway, north of Punta Arenas, Chile

On the way to see the penguins with dark skies in the distance

I was beginning to feel the wind and also be slightly disoriented in terms of direction. In Punta Arenas the water was to the east of the town yet somehow my brain thought it would be south and my many months in Chile would make me expect water to the west of land. Going to Otway, the water was to the west again. But my brain had a hard time processing this as I had not studied a map yet. My driver told me everyone from Chile goes through the same disorientation so I felt better.

Heading to the beach

“I’m sexy and I know it”

At the beach!

Younger penguin testing his strut

From Otway, we went back east to the main road again and headed north the remaining 2.5 hrs or so until we got to Puerto Natales, a small town of perhaps 20k inhabitants that tends to serve as the main launching point to explore the Chilean Patagonia. I am assuming El Calafate may serve a slightly similar purpose on the Argentine Patagonia. Puerto Natales does not have necessarily tons of charm but going to the coastal avenue does provide a 180 degree (plus) view of mountains and water that is very nice.

I stayed at a nice hotel called Aquaterra whose staff was very friendly and helpful even if the rooms were somewhat spartan. The best eating experience in Puerto Natales had to be the highly recommended La Picada de Carlitos. I was expecting to eat meat but the waiter recommended the chupe de centolla and, boy, he was right! It was phenomenal and easily beat the one I had at La Luna in Punta Arenas. Here is what it looked like:

Other than this, the only other thing to call out about Puerto Natales that I saw was some of the architecture and some bright coloring of house facades. I found the town to be charming and a great platform to launch into the rest of Patagonia. The views from its waterfront were beautiful.

Yours truly loving life!

From here I would begin my visit to Torres del Paine, glaciers and fjords… Majestic!!

Getting to the Windy Chilean South, the Deep South

24 December 2010 by Raul 1 Comment

19 yrs ago, when I spent 3 months in Chile with work, I dreamt of going to Punta Arenas and the southern tip of the American hemisphere (American as in the Americas’ hemisphere). However, the three flights a day or so they had back then were not available on the dates I could travel. Perhaps that was all for the better as the Internet and such resources didn’t exist and I wonder how I would have determined exactly what to do and where to go had I been able to make it then…

But the yearning remained and for 18 yrs, the yearning included getting back to Chile, period. Well, that happened in November 2009 but the trip down south was still a “pending”. As my work in Chile wrapped up close to 13 months later, I figured I needed to make this happen. So I made it happen. I only had a few days between the Christmas holiday and the end of my assignment so I cut my assignment short a couple of days to give me a full 5 days down south (yes, not enough but enough to hit the items I wanted to hit).

I searched online for possible ways to organize my visit but work was in the most difficult stage (pre-rollout and rollout of 4 new systems, 2 of them major, for my client in Chile). So I didn’t get to do my research and planning as I would have liked. I ended up using an agency to organize my visit (www.visitchile.cl). Margarita was my contact there and was very helpful in organizing what I was interested in with an efficient itinerary and offering a couple of good suggestions.

So, all I had to do was get my plane ticket and go. The direct flights from Santiago turned out to not be convenient in terms of schedules so I ended up taking the flight that makes a stop in Puerto Montt (abt 30 mins, you don’t get off the plane unless that is your destination). Pricewise, it wasn’t dirt cheap but given I booked all this about 3 weeks or so in advance, I did well enough.

So I took a 630 AM flight down south. A major sacrifice as you can imagine… I landed close to 11 AM in Punta Arenas, expecting a lot of turbulence given the famous strong winds in the area. The plane barely moved as we approached, took a hard bank right, and landed. As I met my driver, he told me the day before they had had about 120kph winds and planes were made to circle for like 40 minutes until it was safe to land, safe to use the jetways, and safe for ground crews to be out and about (I asked myself, why not land the planes, park them off the runway, and save those poor passengers all the jumping around…). Later in my trip, people I met who flew on that day described rather disturbing jumping around as they landed in Pta Arenas and I counted my blessings!!

Pta Arenas is not, in my limited exploring, a beautiful town. While you sit in the Straits of Magellan, I can’t say the setting is beautiful per se (I hear this is in contrast with Ushuaia in Argentina which I did not get to visit) but the winds, the penguins by the waterfront, and the idea of where I am in relation to the rest of the world did make me feel I was somewhere different, perhaps special.