Let's Explore Patogonia

We land in Santiago and travel to our hotel, the Intercontinental. The hotel is nice and we have a good room, but there is not really much to do in the surrounding area. We do, however, walk to the nearest shopping centre to buy a large holdall, as the main airline carrier, Latam, have a strict 23kg per suitcase weight limit, so we need to distribute our belongings over more bags and pay an additional baggage fee each time we fly. The shopping centre is like any shopping centre in the world; we could have been in London, New York, Beijing or Sydney. The next day we go back to the airport to fly south to Punta Arenas, which was originally a penal colony, but is now Chile's most southerly city. We stay at Hotel De Hornos, opposite the main square. We have a stroll and find a nice restaurant, Jekus. The meal was good, but the portions were amazingly large, so we spent about 2 hours getting through the meal. Whilst there, there was a middle aged couple who were slowly getting merry, to the extent that they insisted they had a photograph with us in front of the Patagonian flag, that was hanging in the restaurant. It was all quite bizarre. When we leave the restaurant, we are told that it's the last night of the Winter festival and so we go over to see what's going on. To our delight, there is a carnival like procession right in front of us, with people on horesback, bands playing, many dancers and then a float with Miss Punta Arenas 2019 giving us all a wave.

The next day, we travel the 6 hours to Torres del Paine for our 3 days of trekking and other outdoor activities. We arrive at the Explora Hotel, that overlooks Lake Pehoe, and it really is a magnificent place, surrounded by snow capped mountains and in the middle of the National Park. We have a great time here, combining 4 treks with 2 horseriding turns. On each occasion, we see something different or just enjoy the feeling of being with nature. On one of our treks, we were fortunate to see a puma from about 50 metres - quite a rare sight apparently. We saw many guanaco's, that are related to the camel family. Keith tried guanaco tartar one mealtime, but he said it did not really taste of anything particular. The only drawback was that, on our second horseriding trip, Diane pulled a muscle in her back when we were in a canter, which has subsequently caused her some discomfort. But, she still loved riding the horse. It was quite cold in this part of the world, although no snow and the hotel staff did say that the weather was unusually warm for this time of year. On the day of our departure was our wedding anniversary and we were delighted to find in our ròom after our final trek on the morning, a bottle of wine as a gift from the hotel.

So, after the 3 days, back into the car for the 6 hour journey back to Punta Arenas and the same hotel. On arrival, we seek out a restaurant for our celebration meal and like the look of one on a side street, called La Casa de Dona Maria. It was empty when we arrived, but after we sat down, a table nearby was taken by, we think, some town officials, so we guessed the food would probably be okay. It turned out that the food was fine! We then retire back to the hotel, ready for our next trip, to Puerto Varas, the Lake District of Chile.