Monday, January 09, 2006
3 January - El Calafate to Puerto Natales
Today was a day of travel and some new challenges in our game of Race Around the World.
We had a pretty good 6 hour public bus trip. The longest part was going through emigration and immigration between Argentina and Chile, taking about 2 hours all up. (note to selves - travelling in groups creates its own time delays).
Our ¨World Expeditions¨ tour was supposed to include 2 days in Argentina and 5 days in Chile, but there was no-one to meet us at the bus. Not a major drama, but a little irritating. After getting a taxi to our hotel, we set about finding Turismo Viente Sur, the local company for World Exp. It took us an hour walking around the streets to find them, as the address we had turned out to be an internet cafe that had never heard of TVS. Eventually we got an address (White Pages doesn´t seem to exist here either) from a local, and found them. They had not heard of us! Fabulous.
Luckily the manager there, Eric, got organised, and tracked us down using the Punta Arenas office, and after a couple of hours we had an itinerary and the essential Vouchers. We managed to buy more chargers and adapters that we would need. Puerto Natales is more like Batemans Bay, with more regular stores to purchase electrical items from.
EDIT: Forgot to mention we had one more ¨challenge¨, regarding money. We arrived in Puerto Natales about 5PM, and were leaving first thing in the morning. We were told we would need Chilean Pesos (which actually turned out to be mostly untrue, but that´s another story), so we decided to find an ATM. First challenge was that the ATM was secured and you needed your ATM card to get into the secure room. Ours did not work, so we waited until someone would let us in. Then trying to read the menu in Spanish was a bit tricky, and finally our St George card did not work. Fortunately we had thought to travel with a backup Commonwealth card and that did work (but it took us a while to think of it!) We would finally discover that our St George card worked fine in Peru - its still a mystery why not in Patagonia!
We had a really good seafood dinner with views of the lake, and decided that these challenges were just all part of the game!
We had a pretty good 6 hour public bus trip. The longest part was going through emigration and immigration between Argentina and Chile, taking about 2 hours all up. (note to selves - travelling in groups creates its own time delays).
Our ¨World Expeditions¨ tour was supposed to include 2 days in Argentina and 5 days in Chile, but there was no-one to meet us at the bus. Not a major drama, but a little irritating. After getting a taxi to our hotel, we set about finding Turismo Viente Sur, the local company for World Exp. It took us an hour walking around the streets to find them, as the address we had turned out to be an internet cafe that had never heard of TVS. Eventually we got an address (White Pages doesn´t seem to exist here either) from a local, and found them. They had not heard of us! Fabulous.
Luckily the manager there, Eric, got organised, and tracked us down using the Punta Arenas office, and after a couple of hours we had an itinerary and the essential Vouchers. We managed to buy more chargers and adapters that we would need. Puerto Natales is more like Batemans Bay, with more regular stores to purchase electrical items from.
EDIT: Forgot to mention we had one more ¨challenge¨, regarding money. We arrived in Puerto Natales about 5PM, and were leaving first thing in the morning. We were told we would need Chilean Pesos (which actually turned out to be mostly untrue, but that´s another story), so we decided to find an ATM. First challenge was that the ATM was secured and you needed your ATM card to get into the secure room. Ours did not work, so we waited until someone would let us in. Then trying to read the menu in Spanish was a bit tricky, and finally our St George card did not work. Fortunately we had thought to travel with a backup Commonwealth card and that did work (but it took us a while to think of it!) We would finally discover that our St George card worked fine in Peru - its still a mystery why not in Patagonia!
We had a really good seafood dinner with views of the lake, and decided that these challenges were just all part of the game!
