Week 5/6: El Fin del Mundo (Punta Arenas & Puerto Natales)

Greetings!

We're writing to you on our first night in Valparaíso, the last stop on our tour of Chile.  We'll be here for five nights before our flight to Auckland, so we'll post again about our time in Valparaíso before we leave.  Valparaíso is quite a change from our previous five weeks in Chile, which we mostly have spent in small cities and towns or in the mountains.  Valparaíso is a port city on the Pacific Ocean of 250,000 people (nearly one million in the metro Valparaíso area).  A bit over an hour west of Santiago, it's busy and loud.  It's known for its cerros, or hills, which make the entire city kind of like the most hilly parts of San Francisco.  Walking back to our apartment after a delicious dinner of fish caught and delivered this morning was a nice, short workout.  Each cerro is kind of like its own neighborhood, as I understand it, and there are amazing painted wall murals all over.  We're staying in Cerro Alegre, which is particularly famous for its murals.

But enough of Valparaíso for now.  We've spent the last week in Punta Arenas (two nights) and Puerto Natales (four nights).  Our AirBnB in Punta Arenas was lovely, but I'm not sure we'd visit the city again.  Set on the Strait of Magellan, it's felt mostly like an access point for Tierra del Fuego, Isla Magdalena (which is home to a penguin colony), Antarctica, and Puerto Natales/Torres del Paine National Park.

We attempted to take the excursion to Isla Magdalena by ferry (which costs a fortune), but the trip was cancelled as we were boarding the ship because of high winds on the island.  Punta Arenas, along with all of southern Patagonia, really, is famous for its high winds.  Aimee and I found it particularly amusing that our AirBnB hosts let us know that the wifi in the house is great except at times where there is a lot of wind.  Which is always.

Instead of the penguin excursion (No penguin excursion = win, as far as I'm concerned.  Save hundreds of dollars not seeing birds that can't fly?  Perfect.) we went to a maritime museum that included life-size replicas of one of Magellan's ships (he started off with four - one deserted while they were rounding South America) and the Beagle, Darwin's ship.  Picture in your how big you think they are.  Nope, they're much smaller.  It was pretty fascinating and the boys really loved it.

We left Punta Arenas on Saturday and drove two hours north to Puerto Natales, a town full of hostals catering to those heading to Torres del Paine National Park.  We stayed a bit outside of the center of town on a piece of land owned by a man named Miguel and his wife, Angela.  They built their own house, along with two tiny-house "cabañas."  I'll rank the decision to stay with Miguel and his family right up there with finding Hostal Las Natalias in Futaleufú.  The tiny house we stayed in was great and the boys played for hours and hours in the yard, but like our time at Las Natalias, it was the people we met and spent time with that made the difference.

Miguel is a lovely man.  We talked for hours (in Spanish - more on this later) about all sorts of things.  When the boys and I were out on the lawn after a long day in the park, he brought a beer for me and ice cream for the boys.  On our last day, we planned to cook some meat on his home-made grill/fire-pit, and we were joined by the family from Santiago that had just moved into the other tiny house/cabaña.  We spent the afternoon playing soccer and dominoes, preparing food, and discussing music and history and politics.  After the kids had s'mores and went to bed, Miguel played all of his favorite 70s funk music from his extensive Spotify playlist while we sat by the fire drinking some sort of homemade liquor (warning!) made from the Calafate plant.  

One of things we hoped to get out of this trip was to get to know some Chilean people and perhaps establish connections or attachments, however small, with their lives here.  We haven't succeeded everywhere we have visited, but with Miguel's family and the family from Santiago, as well as with our time in Futaleufú, we felt that hope realized.  While our Instagram will be filled with beautiful photos of the incredible Chilean landscape, it will be these people and our shared moments that will fill our memories and our hearts.

That was heavy, I know.  

Anyway, speaking of incredible Chilean landscape.  We took two day trips to Torres del Paine, which is I don't even know what.  It's spectacular.  It certainly helped that we had perfect, cloudless weather.  We did a hike to view the "cuernos" (horns) one day and then drove to Lago Grey the next to walk the beach and view the Grey Glacier beyond the giant icebergs floating in the lake.  I know New Zealand also will be spectacular, but our tolerance for spectacular is reaching college-student-binge-drinking levels at this point; it's going to take something strong for us to be intoxicated at this point.

Here's a dump of photos from the park:

Aimee and I aren't sure if Torres del Paine is quite as stunning as Cerro Castillo (near Coyhaique), but it's certainly in the conversation.  Most people come to Torres del Paine in one of three ways: (1) day trippers from Puerto Natales, like us; (2) posh folks staying in one of the park's outrageously expensive hotels and carried about in Mercedes vans to see what there is to see; and (3) those who actually hike throughout the park, seeing the entire thing.  We would have preferred to have been in that third group, but, as good as Cam and Wes have been with hiking, that's not something you can do with young kids (unless you're German and you have German kids - they can do anything).  The routes through the park involve at least a few days of 20k-plus difficult hikes.  Not accomplishing that this time is, at the very least, a reason to return.

Another reason to return?  I can speak Spanish again.  It's amazing how much my Spanish has improved from our arrival just over a month ago.  Unlike then, it flows now.  It's definitely not always perfect and I sometimes get stuck on a word I don't know, but it mostly just pours out and it at least seems like people understand what I'm saying.  

I inadvertently speak Spanish to Aimee and the boys and also find myself thinking in Spanish.  Always a true test of linguistic progress.

But it is exhausting.  Last night, with Miguel and the family from Santiago, I sustained (and translated for Aimee) a conversation about the European conquest of South America (I'm reading a book called "The Open Veins of South America," which is excellent and awful) and how power corrupts.  After trying to keep up with Miguel and the others for hours, I was completely drained.  I'm looking forward to the break that New Zealand will give me, but I also don't want to lose all of this progress.  I'll have to find a way to keep it up back in Milwaukee.

We'll be back in touch soon - probably on Monday before our 12-hour flight to Auckland.  That said, we also have to post videos of the boys (we've been delinquent about that), so perhaps you'll hear from them sooner.

Quickly before we go - we wanted to let our friends in Futaleufú know that we're thinking about them as forest fires burn across the river from the hostel.  Stay safe.

We miss you all and hope everyone is well.

Love,

Max, Aimee, Cam & Wesley