2014/01 Chile trip - Punta Arenas |
|||||
Thursday January 23rd
We were at the airport next morning for our LAN Chile flight to Punta Arenas. LAN were one of my company’s customers and I presented to their computer people a number of times; never expected to fly with them though. Airport security seemed very casual; Chile has been relatively peaceful since Pinochet’sdeparture so perhaps terrorism isn’t a major concern.
The Airbus was full, with many European tourists around us. I thought they were going our way but they all left the plane at Puerto Montt,
our first stop, perhaps to link up with a cruise ship. The incoming passengers were very different, some tiny Indian people, too short to even touch the overhead bins. The country around Puerto Montt looked very pretty, with lush green fields and woods surrounding a big bay, similar to parts of Tasmania, which is at about the same latitude.
 |
|---|
We’d been flying south over the coastal plain on the west side of the Andes. South of Puerto Montt the Andes meet the sea in a confusion of islands and fjords; there is no road connection to the south without crossing the Andes into Argentina. Our flight took us over the tail end of the Andes and then directly over the jagged mountains and glaciers and lakes of Torres del Paine, an amazing sight. We were lucky to have a clear day and to be on the left side of the plane.
At Punta Arenas (which means Sandy Point) we opted to take the bus into town rather than a taxi, reckoning that we’d get a tour of the neighbourhood that way. And we did, as the driver didn’t have any concept of “full”.
We drove all around the suburbs dropping off a dozen or more passengers; most seemed to live in small bungalows. The town was bigger than I’d expected, definitely a working town with as many pickups as cars. There looked to be a healthy mix of house and municipal construction going on. We passed masses of broom and multicoloured lupines on our way into town, invasive but pretty.
Punta Arenas has a gigantic hotel on the edge of the harbour, but we were in another small one, the Hotel Ilaia, a comfortable little place up the hill from downtown. We took a windy walk down to the waterfront, the water being the Straits of Magellan, used by Drake and Darwin as well as Ferdinand Magellan. There are monuments there to Hernando Magallanes, the Spanish spelling of his Portuguese name, worth knowing as the name shows up in a lot of contexts and the locals confuse tourists by referring to him as Maggayanness.
|
Punta Arenas |
|---|
The wind intensified by the water, not surprisingly as Cape Horn is close by. These latitudes are the “furious fifties”; there is no other 
continent this far south, so the wind has the whole world to scream around before it returns to batter Patagonia again. It could be a rough week if this wind was normal. The chairs and tables were sensibly made from six inches of concrete, but the tables were inlaid with chess boards; no clue as to what the chess pieces would have to be made of – depleted uranium perhaps?
Out on the water was one of those gigantic cruise ships, frequent visitors to Punta Arenas. Closer were the ruins of piers from the city’s past, some with railway tracks holding the deck in place. Gulls and cormorants crowded the ruins, wing to wing.
Punta Arenas had more art than I expected from a working town, from elaborate sculptures to concrete textures and murals to these 
stylish tree socks.
We booked up for a penguin trip the next day and looked for a place to eat. First to open along the waterfront was Los Ganaderos, but it turned out to be a poor choice, noisy with European and American tour groups. The fish and meat dishes were great but I was having to encourage Sandie to eat her veggies: avocado and palmettos (palm hearts).