Stuck in Punta Arenas, Almost

Day 10, Monday, December 30, 1996

The day started out in Puerto Natales like any typical transit day. Aside from the bus being late, our ride was fairly short and uneventful. At the bus stop in Punta Arenas, we were greeted by a shy young girl, who gave us a flyer in English which said that her school had dorm beds to rent out. She showed us photos. She didn't say anything but looked at us with her bright eyes. Well, we have pretty much put our hostel bunk beds days behind us. We declined with a smile. Another man approached us and wanted to get us a taxi and get us to a hotel. We declined, but he was rather persistent and followed us for quite a distance. That struck me as a bit odd, since he wasn't hustling us or talking to us. He just followed us. By and large, on our South American trip, we had met with very little hustling at airports or bus stations or train terminals or ferry jetties. The guy gave up after a while, as we headed towards the LP midrange Hostal Chapital nearby.

Hostal Chapital was managed by a woman who seemed to be in her early forties. We were shown a spacious room with no attached bathroom, but the spic-span clean common bathroom is right across the hallway. We were pretty much the only customers that day, so we accepted. The small hotel was very well kept and neatly decorated with the attention and touch of a woman. What I like about the bed-and-breakfasts and the small hotels of Europe or South America or Asia is their distinct character. Each one is different. Each one gives me something to remember about. I remember the nice ones; I remember the dirty ones; I remember the odd proprietors; I remember the tiny elevators; I remember the church bells ringing next door. The same cannot be said about the cookie cutter franchised hotels in the U.S. Every place is pretty much the same. They are dependable and convenient because I know exactly what to expect, but they so lack that personal touch.

Ed and I set out to see Punta Arenas. We passed by a post office and got some stamps and postcards. The town center is fairly compact and organized on a grid pattern. There is a statue of Magellan in Plaza Muñoz Gamero. The little park is surrounded by colonial buildings of European style. Before anything else though, we wanted to arrange for passage to Ushuaia, preferably a flight leaving tomorrow. It quickly hit me that we were faced with a logistics disaster.

We walked about and checked several travel agencies for plane tickets to Ushuaia. All categorically told us that all flights to Ushuaia were full. We checked at the office of DAP airline. Nothing for Tomorrow; nothing for Wednesday; nothing for Thursday. Nada. We checked bus companies. They were closed. Nobody had buses going to Ushuaia in the next few days because of the New Year holidays. It was possible to take a bus on Friday. That would give us zero time in Ushuaia. It would also involve delaying the flight from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires. Who knows what we would need to do to get our connecting flights changed. We might have to skip visiting Colonia, shorten our stay in Rio, ... It's a nightmare! I don't want to be stuck in Punta Arenas for four days with nothing to do!

When we planned our trip, we had most of the segments all laid out with plane tickets in hand. The only unknown part was how to get from Río Gallegos to Ushuaia. It didn't seem to be too hard since we had more than a week to do it. I knew that going from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia would be troublesome by bus because that would require a ferry ride across the Strait of Magellan to Porvenir and then a long bus ride on roads marked with unconnected dots on maps. There seemed to be a plathora of regional airlines that fly the route. We didn't book tickets ahead of time because these smaller airlines were difficult to reach from the U.S. I didn't expect at all that the seats would be in such high demand.

The old woman at the last travel agency we visited told us that she would check the plane tickets for us. She couldn't get the information right away because it's lunch time, so we had to come back later. I was a little surprised that she spoke such excellent English. One would normally expect the young people to speak more. I wondered how she came to speak English so well. I don't know if it's because English is so dominant nowadays that it's the undisputed second language of choice for most people, or if it's because there are a lot of English descendents in Patagonia, or if it's because Punta Arenas is a port. Had the Spanish Armada not been defeated at the hands of the English, all Americas would probably be speaking Spanish nowadays.

It's a little odd that I would find it necessary to digress here given the urgent situation at hand. If we couldn't get to Ushuaia in time, the rest of our trip would fall apart. We didn't panic. We remained calm. We remained foolishly calm because I had no clue how to get to Ushuaia if the buses didn't run and the planes were all full. I comforted myself that a lot of things could be made possible with a sufficient amount of money. We could rent a car or even hire a private plane. I had little doubt that there would be a way out of Punta Arenas, but I really didn't want to wreck our original schedule or spend a major load of money.

The woman at the travel agency seemed quite confident that she could get us the tickets to Ushuaia, in stark contrast to the responses from the other places, but it was hard to sit tight and wait. I suggested that we check more airline offices. We set out to LanChile. It turned out to be a wise move. "Ushuaia. 31 December. Departs at 19:55. That would be 40,090 pesos each." That's about $95. The short hop from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia was costing the same as the long flight from Buenos Aires to Río Gallegos. Then again, who's complaining? Thank God we have tickets. You'd never see Ed whip out his credit card so fast. Please, please, please charge me.

The story is so much less dramatic with a happy ending. It's also a lot less dramatic in retrospect. I can't imagine what we actually had to go through had we been unable to find any flight. With a sigh of relief we could finally go have lunch, but not before we went back to the travel agency and left a note for the helpful woman, thanking her.

Now that the logistics crisis is resolved, I am allowed to digress a little. When I cleaned up my emails weeks after the trip, I re-read one of the messages Ed had forwarded me about how to get from Puerto Natales to Punta Arenas and Ushuaia. It's a response to Ed's post on the Usenet. The person who sent him the message, Wayne Bernhardson, referred to his LP guide. I didn't catch it at the moment. The fact is, the LP guide on Argentina is his guide because he wrote it.

After we booked a penguin colony tour, we had a pleasant lunch at Quijote. It seemed to be a popular lunch place with quite a few tourists. We ordered the set menu. I admired the two waitresses who had to take care of some eight tables. They ran from table to table in a frenzy, setting down silverware, bringing out the dishes, cleaning up afterwards. Yet they remained courteous and pleasant.

It was a fairly long ride in a not-too-comfortable minibus to the penguin colony at Seno Otway, Otway Sound. The young American couple whom we saw on the bus from Puerto Natales this morning was on the tour too, which was convenient when we were a little short on pesos to pay for the preserve entrance fee and had to exchange some dollars. It was incredibly windy. Surprise, surprise. Most people seemed to have anticipated this and brought wool caps or hooded parkas. I had to tough it out in my fleece pull-over. It's not all that cold, but a hood could really make a difference under the wet ocean wind.

I had at first thought that the trip would involve taking a boat to some island. The penguin colony is really on a grassy area near a beach. It's a long walk from the parking and entrance area to the colony itself. The foot paths meander through the penguin borrows, fenced off here and there. These are not the more majestic king penguins, but the smaller Magellanic penguins. The baby penguins are covered in a cute coat of brown fur. There are also some rheas in the preserve. A lot of the penguins were on the beach basking in the sun. Some walked around. Some stayed in the burrows. None seemed to care that humans were walking about looking at them with great fascination and snapping pictures like crazy.

We went to the LP "highly regarded" Sotitos for dinner. It's a fairly upscale restaurant, where most of the patrons seemed to be dressed in better than mere street clothes. After a long day of battling logistics crises and chasing after Magellanic penguins, we must have looked a bit out of place there. The waiter shouldn't be too unhappy about what we ordered, though. The restaurant serves a number of popular Chilean Patagonian dishes. We had a salad of king crabs or centolla. The crab is a huge creature. What was on out plate might be no more than two legs or claws. Still that was a substantial amount of crab meat in the salad. I had baked conger eels. It tasted like fish, but the meat was firmer, tougher, more chewy, and more resilient.

There was a time when I shopped in supermarkets to cover my meals in order to save money. But I have come to believe strongly now that fine cuisine should be an integral part of the travel experience. After a day of running around, I find it a great pleasure to be properly served a good dinner. My accounting for this trip showed that even though I spent as much on meals as I did on lodging, the two combined only amounted to 25% of the total cost. If I want to save money, I should save on transportation, which accounted for 60% of the total expenses.