After days of working deals with various government authorities and Lan Chile airline, we successfully arranged for a charter flight to come pick us up in Ushuaia this morning and fly us to Puerto Natales in Chilean Patagonia. It all worked very smoothly, and we were amazed to learn upon arrival that this was the first international flight ever to Puerto Natales. The local press even came to the airport to interview the Expedition Leader and take pictures. Puerto Natales gave us access to perhaps the most spectacular place in all of South America…Torres del Paine National Park. This enormous park covers 181,414 hectares (about 450,000 acres) and consists of mountains, forests, rolling hills and grasslands, colorful lakes, rivers, lagoons, and glaciers. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This amazing isolated grouping of mountains, which is not part of the Andes, presented a most wondrous and amazing sight...these are perhaps the youngest granitic mountains in the world, with an age of only 12 million years. They are topped with a thick layer of darker slate, which gives them a bi-colored appearance.
Once we reached the park, the road wound past several lagoons with lots of water birds, and low grass and scrub-covered hills where we stopped to get a close-up view of some wild guanacos. We also saw rheas and foxes in the surrounding scrub. A late lunch was served at the Hosteria Pehoe, located on a small island in Lake Pehoe and reached by a footbridge. Here, we were welcomed with pisco sours, and after a fine salmon lunch most people walked up a small trail to the top of the island for a view of the surrounding vistas. By this time, however, the clouds started to set in and we were soon experiencing strong wind and drizzling rain. We made more stops in the late afternoon, including an interesting place at the western end of Sarmiento Lake where we had a chance to walk within the scrub. It was then a long bus ride (with several rest stops) to reach Punta Arenas, the southern-most city in Chile, and the Caledonian Star.
