Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

I'm at the same computer I posted from a couple days ago (there are 8 here, but I happened to be assigned the same one). It's funny what the auto-complete feature of this browser remembers.

I found Jenny and Don in the breakfast hall in the morning. It turns out that they had signed in the logbook, but we'd somehow missed it when we looked. Oddly, Jenny had also asked after me with the same receptions guy that I'd been asking after her with. Funny that he didn't mention that. They'd gone to sleep before I'd arrived, though.

Rather than doing the 5hr hike out, we elected to take the catamarans across Lago PehoÈ. That suited me just fine, since my body was pretty angry at me about the previous day's hike. Maybe day two would have been easier, but I'd as soon not find out.

There was some more of the lowland wildlife on the way out. I think I got some decent pictures of guanacos, and when we were stopped at the ranger station at the park entrance, there were some very tame foxes posing for pictures. We also passed a lake full of flamingos, and some rheas.

It's good that we'd all come to the conclusion that there was no way to make our flight leaving the day we said we'd leave, because, even taking the earliest available transportation at every point, we didn't arrive in Puerto Natales until after our flight would have left Punta Arenas.

We ended up booking a night at a comfortable guesthouse (Los Antiguos, on Ladrilleros) with very pleasantly hot water. We spent the evening running a few errands (The Lavanderia Servilaundry at Bulnes 513 was very nice and stayed open an extra half hour to finish drying our clothes).

Dinner was almost comically disappointing. We stopped at CafÈ la Alhambra, which had an interesting selection of Arabic dishes on the menu. We ordered the appetizer assortment for three people, which turned out to be not an assortment of the Arabic appetizers listed above it, but cold hot dog bits, cheese and ham on toothpicks, olives, peanuts, and pringles potato chips. For my main course, I had a "pocket bread" sandwich, which turned out to be white bread put through a bread press, rather than pita, with chicken, avocado, and enough mayonnaise to obscure any flavor of chicken or avocado.

We caught a 10am bus to the Punta Arenas airport, which was a pretty uneventful trip. It'll be another few hours before our flight. Time to read up on the lake district and figure out what we're going to be doing for the next few days.