Mostly about the future

More photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45804996@N03/

I got up insanely late (about 1pm) and decided not to go to Santa Teresa; the guide book implied it's slightly safer in the area around the tram stop to go up there during the week, and although I am starting to get a bit sick of that kind of advice, I couldn't see any pressing reason to go today instead of tomorrow.

Instead I went for a walk along the beach in Flamengo, i.e. a couple of minutes from the hotel. This is where I went on my first day here but this time I took a camera, it didn't start raining and I walked a considerable distance, all the way along the beach to the end, then back and continued round towards Marina da Gloria, then retracted my steps back to the hotel.

Pretty nice views, the inevitable SLM featuring prominently in the view from the beach as you can see from the new photos.

Afterwards I had something to eat and a single beer at Bar Getulio, then it started to spit and they insisted on my paying up. I could have stayed, but I'd already said I needed to have a quiet night in and try to sort out more of the rest of the trip.

Torres del Paine was the big piece of the puzzle to try to fit in. And, yet again, having tried to investigate it further, it just seems impossibly complex. I found one hotel which was on-line bookable for precisely two days when I could vaguely have been there (something like the first Monday and Tuesday in February, although - note to self - if I decide to come back to this, don't take those dates as correct), even if it cost getting on for £200/night and apparently isn't that nice.

But I then fell at the hurdle of getting to the hotel. As noted before, the park is enormous (242,242 hectares) and I doubt it's well supplied with taxis. The various web sites that describe the park seem to consider a dynamite travel tip to be something like "fly to Punta Arenas, then take a bus". Getting to the park in the general sense is not rocket science, there are a number of buses from Puerto Natales which get there in 2-3 hours. But how to get from any of the places the bus would go to to the hotel is a mystery. My 2005-era Chile guide book which, to be honest, I rather distrust (I bought it a few months ago, it just happens to be that old) says there is a minibus from the administration centre of the park to the overpriced hotel I could have got a room at. But they give no contact details and I can find not a single shred of evidence online or in my other guide book that this minibus also exists.

So to be honest, this just seems too far off the beaten track. The whole place seems so oriented towards camping and hiking types that unless I have a very clear idea as to how to get to the hotel, I could visualise myself being stranded at the park entrance with no camping gear, no way to get to my hotel and no way to get back to the relative civilisation of Puerto Natales. I'm sure someone would help me out somehow, but really, this is pushing things a bit too far. Unless I have a major change of heart, I'll probably go to Puerto Natales and do a bus tour of 'the more easily accessible parts', as the Chile guide rather sneeringly puts it. (Neither guide is nominally aimed at hiking/camping types, so why they concentrate so exclusively on that aspect of the thing I don't know. It's clearly possible to stay in the park without actually camping, if only you knew how to get there.)

If I could drive then I think hiring a car would be the idea solution, but I can't, so it's not.

I have found a possible hotel in Punta Arenas, but because I want to check that they will look after my suitcase while I'm away in Puerto Williams and because I will be checking in very late when I return, I've had to e-mail them first rather than just booking. I hope they will get back to me tomorrow. If not, the only consolation is that there doesn't appear to be an enormous rush on hotel rooms in Punta Arenas at the time I want to go.

After much thought I am going to stay in Santiago for six nights and I've booked what looks like an extremely good deal at about £31/night. I'm not exactly running out of money but I do need to economise a bit where possible. In any case, while I'm not exactly pretending to be a backpacker, the plan was also not to stay in luxury hotels all the time either. Judging from reviews on places like tripadvisor.com the place I've booked is actually fairly nice. It's supposed to have free wi-fi too, which is always valuable. I am not certain, but I think it may be a very high-rise building right in the centre of Santiago, so maybe I will get some good views.

The plan after that is to fly down to Punta Arenas (£480-ish for a return, it's daylight robbery for a 4h-ish flight) and flit between there and Puerto Natales (for the Torres del Paine park tour) prior to getting the flight out to Puerto Williams. I half feel I may end up not spending as much 'quality' time (i.e. time when I haven't just arrived and/or have to leave the next day) as I would like in either Punta Arenas or Puerto Natales, but on the other hand what with the Puerto Williams trip and so on, I will have spent almost exactly two weeks in various parts of (extremely) southern Chile by the time I return to Santiago, and it seems silly to 'waste' more time down there when I only have 9 weeks for the whole country, and ideally bits of Peru and Bolivia as well.

I should have said this the day I went, but I was too hacked off so I'll waffle now. The statue of Christ the Redeemer is fairly impressive. I have to say it looked rather small when I saw it from the plane flying in, but in hindsight the mere fact that you can clearly see it from the ground miles away and the plane suggests just how big it really is, for a statue. Standing at the base of the thing and tilting my head right back to see the top gave me a slight feeling of vertigo, the sort of thing I've had before when standing on the deck of a sailing ship and looking up at the crow's nest. But I think the views from the top of Corcovado are the real highlight, the statue is just a bit of a bonus.

I am up insanely late and I was hoping to be up for breakfast tomorrow, or failing that by about 10am, so I'd better clear off now.