Hostel Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 18.48.
I know I’ve found somewhere absolutely desolate when I hear myself throwing the word “beautiful” around like a flail. And that just about sums up Puerto Natales. Desolate. But breathtakingly beautiful in its desolation.
Wind the clock back. I’ve had comfier flights. The journey down to Puerto Natales via an hour’s layover in Puerto Montt was perfectly smooth, but I’ve not yet recovered from the debilitating impact of a fourteen hour flight in an air-conditioned box, so my eyes and nose were streaming all morning. To add insult to injury, my ears clogged up upon landing in Puerto Montt, which was less painful than a nuisance that it was impossible to ignore. It was some relief when the last of the new passengers had found their seats and the plane was up in the firmament once again.
I did, however, get my money’s worth from the window seat. Chile’s Lake District is nothing short of spectacular. Think Cumbria if you will, but on a much, much grander scale, where the lakes are larger than cities and the mountains are merely supporting characters for the real stars of the show: the mighty snowcapped volcanoes, rising up and out of the earth in perfect wintry cones. Some of them were gently smoking from their summits; others forced the clouds to crest their peaks like waves, adding a further sheen to their majesty. This place is very high on my list of options for the last week – if I can only find a way to get down here overland, that is. I think I’ll have done quite enough flying by the time I get back from this cold corner of the world!
After Puerto Montt, the world below disappeared beneath the clouds for all of two hours. It was only upon the final descent, mere minutes from the tiny landing strip, that the snowy wastes of Patagonia finally appeared. If Santiago felt like Spain and the Lake District looked like England or even Canada, this is something else entirely. I have no yardstick for this kind of world. Not even Poland in the grip of midwinter comes close. The indescribable vastness of it all, scored with cross-crossing tracks and frozen ponds, appearing and disappearing at will beyond the snow clouds… it’s almost eerie.
Landing was no small feat either. The captain had to pull up out of the descent just moments from touchdown due to fierce winds, the likes of which I have only read about in books about this place. The ancient explorers called this land Tierra del Fuego after the many fires lit upon the shore by the indigenous Selk’nam, but Tierra del Viento may be a more appropriate moniker – this corner of the world seems to be ruled by the wind.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to get from the dinky little airport into town, but that question was answered quickly by the local transfer shuttle service advertising itself loudly in the arrivals lounge, and at $5 for door-to-door service, they’re practically giving it away.
It would had been a shorter service had the driver heard me correctly and taken me to the Hostal Coastal and not the Hostal Austral, which whacked another twenty minutes onto the trip and gave me a proper scenic tour of the backwaters of Puerto Natales. I suppose it doesn’t help that the two words sound similar, and I can’t blame the driver for defaulting to the one that is actually in Spanish. But this B&B is wonderfully homey, if a wee bit of a trek from the centre (we’re talking the minutes, tops, but it’s enough to make me reconsider going out in the cold and the dark for supper).
Puerto Natales is immediately a very different world to the rest of Chile. Even our layover in Puerto Montt had many of the same birds flying by as can be found in Santiago. But not here.
If check-in hadn’t taken a little while, I could have practically fed the chimango caracaras that were perched on the fence outside. I went searching for them later, but a family of fishermen spooked them off. It was a shame, but it was just as well – none of my photos came out right anyway as it was getting very dark. That’s why I came out to look around, really – to get my bearings and play around with the camera settings so that I’m not caught out if we should be so lucky as to find any pumas over the next few days.
Apart from the caracaras, the wildlife here is much more like what you might find in Antarctica. Imperial shags bobbing on the water in the bay and sinister-looking dolphin gulls with their dark feathers and red beaks. White-eared grebes sharing the shoreline with upland geese, steamer ducks and… what the?
That’s right, the guidebooks aren’t goosing you. Puerto Natales hosts a herd of Chilean flamingos during the winter months. Quite why they come here, to this dark and desolate corner of the world, I can only guess. Perhaps it has something to do with the legendarily rich Humboldt current. Either way, they are a decidedly strange sight: a mass of crimson and salmon pink in an iron-grey Antarctic sea.
I think I’ll call it a day there. My ears were rescued until the captain had to do that emergency manoeuvre and now they’re right back to how they were before. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had some kind of Eustachian Tube Dysfunction, only the last time it ended in a burst ear drum and three bizarre and painful months of diplacusis dysharmonica. That’s why I’m not trying to force my Eustachian tubes open by the conventional methods. With any luck, they’ll heal in time.
A good night’s sleep would be nice – I didn’t get much last night because the five Brazilians in my dorm decided to turn on all the lights just before midnight and have a jolly conversation at full volume about their respective cities. They didn’t get the hint until they left for the club, and when they did, the chap from Rio decided to ignore his alarm at four in the morning, so the fellow in the bed above him had to creep out and switch it off. At least, I think that’s what he did.
But now I have a room to myself for five nights. Bliss! I intend to make the most of it. Starting with a good kip. Tomorrow is another day. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 