Puerto Natales: Enter the Towers of Pain(e)
Travel Location: Puerto-Natales,Chile
Oops, I don’t remember too much! We went here as the starting point for a 5 day trek through Parque Nacional Torres del Paine (read the review for more details). Puerto Natales is a small town on a lake overrun by tourists seeking to do the big trek. We stayed at a hostel the first night called Adventura Patagonia, which was a nice wood-paneled place. The girl at reception was really helpful so Mark took the opportunity to ask lots of questions about the trek. One problem with the hostel was the extremely noisy wooden floorboards. Not good at 6am being woken up by people leaving to do the trek! That night we went for dinner at the little restaurant next to the hostel. Eager to try some local seafood, I had the crab lasagna and Mark had a steak, which I ended up being very jealous of!
The town was extremely cold and windy so we tried to keep our time outside to a minimum and went around looking at rental equipment for our trek. We needed sleeping bags and pads, a tent, stove gas, cooking utensils and food for the trek. This was getting hardcore and I was getting worried. How would I survive walking up hills all day carrying all this stuff only to “feast” on a “meal” of soup and a bread roll at the end of a hard day? [Mark: Making me carry it!] Unfortunately hiring all the equipment was proving to be rather expensive and when we were told that the cost of hiring cutlery would be about AUD$20 for the week, we went and bought it. We also found some giant ceramic mugs at a local hardware store that we were able to both drink our milo and eat our pasta from.
Chocolate and steaks, here we come!
Once we had sorted the equipment and food for the trek we were free to relax at our new hostel, Casa Cecilia (Adventura Patagonia was only available for one night). It was quite a nice place with good common areas and free internet. The breakfast was great! We got homemade grainy and white toast, homemade jams, scrambled eggs, hot chocolate, cereal and yoghurt – awesome! The manager was really friendly at first but become less friendly once we checked in – probably because we didn’t end up hiring our trekking equipment from him. On the final day before our trek, we went for lunch at Mesita Grande, a pizza joint in town, and loved it so much that we went back for dinner too.
You can read more on the trek itself from Mark’s review, but suffice to say we were exhausted when we got home and headed straight to Mesita Grande for a welcome-home pizza and then to bed… finally, a nice warm cosy bed with no mice! Breakfast the next morning had never tasted so good and we helped ourselves to about 5 servings each.
Our last day in town was dedicated to doing some much needed laundry and organising ourselves for the bus ride the next morning to our 2nd country… Argentina! Chocolate and steaks, here we come!
