The journey to Chile, Puerto Natales and more horses...

We were relieved to wake up on Sunday not aching too much from the horse riding, as we were catching an early bus to Puerto Natales in Chile. This was a relatively short journey - about 4-5 hours, which incidentally in the UK I would have thought was a lifetime - and we realised soon enough why they didn't put a definite time on it. When we reached the Argentina-Chile border, we had a long wait to get our exit stamps before another short drive followed by a similar wait to get our Chilean entry stamps. It was interesting to note that Chile has Australia style restrictions on bringing certain foods etc into the country although their checks are nowhere near as thorough. It is of course completely understandable that they want to protect their country's wildlife, but hard to grasp how a country with such an extensive border could possibly be able to achieve this. Fair play to them for trying though.

Anyway, we didn't have any problems getting through, it just all took a bit of time and we finally reached Puerto Natales at around 2.30pm. It was incredibly cold and windy as we walked to our hostel, and we soon got the impression that this was pretty normal here. That said the day before had been windy even by Puerto Natales standards, so much so that the phone cables had all been knocked out! We wandered into town, and unlike many places we have been which seem to have very extensive opening hours, the town was dead on Sunday, which to be honest made quite a nice change. We tucked ourselves away in a small cafe for a late lunch and ended up staying there for ages as it was so grim outside. We got chatting to another English couple about many things including their plans to trek the "W" ie the most popular 4+ day circuit of the nearby Torres del Paine national park.

We had already decided not to do all of this, but still wanted to do more than a one day tour of the park. When we headed back to our hostel we spoke to the travel agent conveniently located next door, who suggested a trip involving a bus out to the park, a hop across the lake on the catamaran and an overnight stay at a refugio. This would mean heading out early on Tuesday, doing a full day trek on Wednesday and then getting back late on Wednesday night ready for our our 4 day trip from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt.

This left us a full day free on Tuesday and after a few glasses of red - yes, it's very good and cheap in Chile too - together with another English couple (hi Pete & Jo if you're reading, we'll check your blog to see how you get on up north!) we decided to do some more horse riding. This time the horses were a little less tranquilo, but still no great problem. We got into jeeps then went across to the peninsula opposite the main port on a barge, drove a bit futher into the estancia and off we went. The views were even better than those in Calafate as you can see from the photos - it really is a beautiful setting, with snow capped mountains all around. We even got to ride the horses through the lake itself, which was fun for us but probably not so great for them...

The only issue was that the horses often wanted to go faster than we did, so we did get thrown around a bit more and have the bruises to prove it...didn't help that the side of the saddle was digging into my leg for 2.5 hours as well. It was definitely worth it though, and quite funny that after years of not going near a horse we had managed to go riding twice in 3 days!