Patagonia Day 1: Punta Arenas/Puerto Natales

So, as my loyal followers may have noticed, I was in Patagonia for the past 10 days on one of the best trips I've ever taken.  I saw so many cool and beautiful and otherworldly things that it doesn't seem possible to sum it up in a single post.  Thus, I'm going to break it down by day, and give a more detailed account of what happened in the southermost areas of the Americas.

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Day 1 started in Santiago.  My flight left at the crack of noon, so I got up early.  Real early, like 9:00 AM early.  Packed up, I threw my backpack on and started to walk to the subway.  It was funny, as soon as I started walking through the streets of Santiago like that, I went from a perceived "possibly a local" to "GD tourist".  I felt a few strange looks, people wouldn't hand me flyers, and gift-sellers pursued me harder than usual.  All in the 3 blocks to the metro station.

Once at the airport, I picked myself up a little light reading for the flight.

Surprisingly, this turned out to be a great tool for tweaking my Spanish.  The pictures help determine the context, so its relatively easy to figure out what any unknown words mean.  Also, since they all end with a "joke"  (signified by the appearance of "Plop!"), it usually indicates a double entendre.  So really, reading comic books makes me smarter.  Take that, teachers.

Also, the security for national flights in Chile was about as airtight as a screen door.  Here's a shot after getting through security:

The security rivaled the strictest of public libraries.  But they have no terrorism problems, so why bother?  Everybody kept their shoes on, photo IDs were not checked, and the X-ray machine conveyor belt was set to "overdrive".  It was great, I haven't felt so unmolested at an airport in a long time.

Even the flight down was very enjoyable.  The trip was 4 hours in total, broken up by a 15 min layover in Puerto Montt (approx halfway to Punta Arenas).  It sounds like it would be annoying to have a layover on a flight like this, but it sort of kept things changing and interesting.  We ascended, got an in-flight meal, had another 30 mins, descended, then repeated it again after the layover.

Now, I know what you're thinking.  "Sure, you repeated the cycle, but no way you got a second in-flight meal, right?"

WRONG.  TWO in-flight meals.  And they weren't just some peanuts and a plastic grin.  These were full meals.

I took a picture of the first, but I didn't feel comfortable taking a picture of the second.  The guy next to me was clearly surprised when I took a picture of this meal, and I didn't want to come off any more asian than I already did.

Anyway, once we arrived in Punta Arenas, I decided to try and get a bus right away to Puerto Natales so I could get into Torres del Paine the next day.  I was able to get a 7:30 PM bus out, so I had about 90 mins to kill in the city.  Punta Arenas is right on the Straits of Magellan, so I hiked down and got a look.

The town seemed unique, albeit a little vanilla.  I would spend a little more time here at the end of the trip, so I wasn't worried about exploring much further.

Puerto Natales was about 3 hours away by bus, and by the time we got there it was about 11:00 PM.  It was cold and windy, especially compared to the last 3 months of Santiago summer nights.  I ducked into the first hostel I saw, bought bus tickets into Torres del Paine the next day, and relaxed a bit.  There were 3 girls who had just finished their time in the Israeli army, and were traveling around South America for a year.  They had this method of trimming stray mustache hairs by twisting up a piece of strong threat, and using it like scissors on each other.  We spoke for a little while, and then called it a night.  I slept that night with images of enormous mountains and lush forests splayed through my dreams.