Month: May 2016

Dates Explored: February 11-13

Last I left off, we were exploring Castro and Quellon on Chiloe Island, which I am really glad we visited, even if we had to sacrifice time in the Lakes District to do so. We needed to return our rental car to the kiosk at the Puerto Montt airport on the mainland of Chile on Thursday, February 11th, and catch a flight to Punta Arenas, from where we would begin Leg 3 of our journey on a 4-night cruise through the Patagonian fjords. Just in case something went wrong, we left our B&B in Ten Ten, Castro pretty early. We were again lucky to catch a ferry without waiting in line. On the ferry back to Pargua, we saw some jelly fish. It’s a very short trip, just a commuter ferry, but very pleasant. You are expected to pay on-board, and they do come around and check. So make sure you have pesos handy.

We knew where the airport was, but we now had time to kill so decided to look for a place to have lunch. Unfortunately, we wound up in a light industrial area of Puerto Montt that wasn’t very appealing. I was beginning to understand why I had been advised to head straight to Puerto Varas when we first arrived in Puerto Montt a week earlier. In fact, we were mighty tempted to drive to Puerto Varas for our lunch! But we got so lost in Puerto Montt, needing to hang out our window and beg directions from a nice fellow who turned out to be a taxi. He was generous enough to let us follow him around construction detours to get us back to the road to the airport. We stared driving to Puerto Varas, then thought better of it. You just never know what might go wrong. So we headed back to the Puerto Montt airport, settled things with the car rental agency, and ate in the airport. Not a first choice, but honestly we couldn’t find anything else that looked decent and didn’t have the time or inclination at this point to continue driving in circles.

I don’t want to do Puerto Montt a disservice. For us it served as a base to land and then visit Puerto Varas, see the volcanoes, and circumnavigate the lake. Once you’re at Puerto Varas, the inclination is strong to head north and keep exploring the Lakes District, so I didn’t research Puerto Montt at all as a travel destination. For us, it was a means to an end.

Our flight to Punta Arenas went off without a hitch, and we had booked a transfer in advance to our hotel, Boutique La Yegua Loca. This beautiful boutique hotel was a splurge for us. It wasn’t cheap, but we really wanted a nice place at this point in the trip (not knowing where we were going to be for those two nights in Castro in advance). And it was worth it. I get motion sickness, and between the ferry and the flight and tiredness, I was pretty bagged by the time we had dinner at the hotel (very nice small restaurant).

Here’s me outside the hotel the next morning:

Too late on Thursday night, I remember SILly and I were thinking of doing the Magdalena Penguins tour on the Friday, our “rest” day in Punta Arenas. I knew we could book once in Punta Arenas, but you really need to book a couple of days ahead. The tours were all full by the time I looked into it, after we’d settled into our rooms. It’s a six-hour tour, and I knew I was heading for motion sickness on our small cruise ship, so we decided to forgo the penguin tour (not that we had a choice, considering everything seemed booked), knowing we would get to see some penguins, if not as many, during our Australis cruise.

Travel Tip! It’s very easy to book the Magdalena Penguins tour once you are in Punta Arenas. Here are a couple of spots. Viator. Solo Expedicions. There’s no need to book weeks in advance UNLESS it is something you simply must accomplish. Then, maybe book a few days to a week in advance. Or months in advance. Up to you. We wanted to play this leg free and easy.

Punta Arenas was a pleasant surprise (visit that link for a list of things to do). The flea markets were reasonable, you can visit a statue of Magellan and rub his toe for good luck on your seafaring adventures, there’s a wide boulevard with lots of sculptures, a maritime museum, a lot of replica ships that you can visit if you have a rental car or book a tour, plus the aforementioned penguins. We only had so much time, so we visited the Naval Museum (totally worth it) and then walked to the Sara Braun Municipal Cemetery, which was beautiful. An above-ground cemetery, again worth the visit.

I did take lots of pictures at the cemetery, but whittling down, they aren’t the sort of pictures I usually keep. We had a brisk walk back.

There are plenty of nice places to eat in Punta Arenas, but the place revolves around the cruise ships either docking for a day or departing, as ours was, so you’re not likely to get a great deal on a meal, shall we say, but the food was great.

For our cruise, we chose Fjords of Tierra del Fuego on the MV Stella Australis. This 4-night expedition cruise departs from either Punta Arenas or Ushuaia, Argentina, or you can elect to do a round trip of 5 or 7 nights, but a couple of the excursions will duplicate. A 3-night option is also available.

Check out the Australis website for the various options. I would definitely recommend this cruise. It was top-notch.

For our one-way trip, a few days before our sailing date of February 13th, I received a PDF from the Australis folks with instructions for boarding, but it would not open on my iPad and I did not receive an email back when I tried to contact someone to see what it was. So we dragged our suitcases from the hotel down to the address we had on our tickets, only to discover that the “office” was closed. We knew there were souvenir shops around the corner, and folks were coming and going from another ship. BILly and My Liege went ahead and tried to find out how we were supposed to board the Stella Australis when the office was closed. It took a lot of rig and a ton of marole, but finally they found where we needed to go through, and then we basically backtracked to eventually discovering a big waiting room and souvenir shop just for the Australis cruise folks. I am thinking it might have been nice to learn what had been on that PDF, but oh, well….

There was a huge lineup of folks checking in, so we just hopped in line and resigned ourselves to a lot of waiting. Eventually, we made it through to the souvenir shop, where we ultimately discovered we had to board buses to get driven down the dock to the cruise ship. It was easily walking distance. Not sure why the need for buses, but I guess it helps them organize.

Once on the ship, each couple is greeted by one of the expedition guides and taken to your cabin. This was a very nice touch, very personalized, and we came to realize that the Stella Australis is a beautiful small cruise ship. Ours featured a big window for viewing.

You settle in for a short period and then we were invited to the Darwin Lounge for a short briefing and welcoming. I am not much of a drinker, so did not research the liquor rules in advance, but we found out that all booze throughout the 4-night cruise was free. The Pisco Sours were delicious, but I can only manage one. The meals were all delicious, as well.

If you suffer motion sickness, make sure to bring supplies. I was using the ear patch, which I used to great success in Galapagos in 2012, but this time the side effects were nearly as bad as motion sickness itself. Our Galapagos cruise was two weeks, and by the fourth day I had settled in with the patch nicely. The Australis cruise wasn’t long enough for me to settle in with my motion sickness, so my stomach felt pitchy the whole time.

Another traveler advised to cut the patch in half, which I tried, but then some of the medicine leaked out and stung my skin. I would try the patch again (after having success in Galapagos), but would cut it in half and then cover with one of those little round bandages.

However, I’m come to realize over three small cruises (Galapagos, Cuba and the Patagonian Fjords) that no motion sickness system works for me entirely. I’m still trying to find the best solution.

Do you suffer motion sickness? Any tips for my next cruise? (Likely a couple of years from now, hopefully to Alaska.)

Date Explored: February 10th

On our second day in Castro, my husband declared he wanted to “go to the beach.” So we set off to find a Chilean national park with beach access. We did have one in mind, but we wound up taking a road trip instead. On our way south out of Castro, SILly and I spied another of the UNESCO World Heritage wooden Churches of Chiloe. We had only seen the one, in Castro, and we knew we wouldn’t have time to see another if we didn’t stop at Iglesia Nuestra Signora de Gracia. The construction is amazing, and we managed to squeeze in our visit before a tour bus pulled up. Score!

Thus:

SILly and I were able to climb the bell tower and walk along inside the shaped dome from one end to the other, where we looked INTO the church through a peephole. The guys, meanwhile, were having a siesta in the car. Silly men.

The church is about 4 klicks south of Castro, so don’t miss it if you’re in the vicinity.

After the church, SILly and I were ready to take Steve and BILly to the beach, but the guys had decided we might want to drive south to Quellon instead. I knew this from my research, but had forgotten — the highway we were on stretches 21,000 kilometers from Anchorage, Alaska to Quellon, Chiloe Island, Chile. When would we get another chance to drive to the end of the highway?

Never, my friends.

So instead of going to the beach, we drove to Quellon. It was a bit of a tricky business because, like on Easter Island, we were following our noses with no real clear plan of what was occurring. Were we on the right road? Did we take the proper turn? Turns out we were and we did. We arrived at a monument heralding our destination:

The very end of the Pan-American highway. We didn’t have time to drive back up to Anchorage and back, so we stopped in Quellon for lunch instead. Everywhere appeared to be closed (damn siesta). But finally we found a restobar filled with locals, and I made fun of BILly’s “cheese soup” lunch until all the locals started ordering the same thing. It was delicious.

Here’s a view across the road from our restobar:

I had read that Quellon was a small place not worth a stay, but we liked it just as much, if not better, than Castro. You can use Quellon as a base to take a 5-hour ferry to Chaiten, from where “the boat sails through the inner channels of the Chiloé archipelago” (taken from the ferry link). When we were planning the Chile trip, we knew we wanted to do the Australis cruise through the Patagonian fjords, but BILly kept whining about a place called Tic-Toc. I researched and researched and researched “Tic-Toc,” which I finally discovered is in a new Chilean national park that was so new during my research period that I couldn’t find out anything about it.

But now, now, thanks to me (not really, thanks to Google catching up with BILly’s ideas after we came home), you can find out about Tic-Toc Bay. If our group was serious about seeing Bahia Tic-Toc, we wouldn’t have had time to do the Patagonian cruise. Things turn out like they’re meant to. We left Quellon and revisited our quest to find My Liege a beach. We used our wily skills to make our way to Cucao, where we spread out on the sand along with quite a few Chileans, with the big difference that they would go in the water and we would not. Way too cold for us wimpy Canadians!

We did put our feet in the ocean. Ya gotta.

Then it was back to our B&B in the Ten Ten area of Castro where we had a relaxing night and left the next morning to catch the ferry back from Ancud to Puerto Montt. We needed to be at the airport in time to catch our LAN flight to Punta Arenas, from where we would begin the cruise that inspired us to visit Chile in the first place. The entire trip up to the cruise was an effort of backward-planning. Very handy and simple. Choose a primary destination where you HAVE to be somewhere at a specified time, then explore options previous-to and afterward. If you’re like me, you wind up in the country for a month. So much fun!

Any questions?

Stay tuned!