Puerto Natales

We are leaving Punta Arena this morning to head to Puerto Natales. Puerto Natales is a port city on the Señoret Channel in Chile’s southern Patagonia. It’s the gateway to Torres del Paine National Park to the northwest, and the port for boats touring the Patagonian fjords.

We went to our usual breakfast stop ,wake up., which we have found serves great coffee and avocado and poached eggs on toast. We got there just as they were opening at 7 am and got our usual window seat. I am finding it really nice to be able to walk so much compared to going to an office every day

We headed back to the hotel loaded our bikes and set off out of town on the Ruta del Fin de Mundo. About 50 km out of town the road forks with one direction heading back to Rio Gallegos and Argentina and the other swinging north and up the spine of the Andes towards Puerto Natales. The road was good but the air was cool and we soon found ourselves beginning to get a little cold. The journey today is only 290 km and the so once we got to approximately 100 km left we stopped for a coffee and a really nice roadside restaurant. We had coffee and home-made chocolate chip cookies and added our trip sticker to their window collection.

We then rode into town stopped at the gas station and filled our tanks and all of our additional petrol sacks. The reason for this being that once we head into the tourist Delpine national park there will be no fuel stations and when we leave the National Park we will be heading directly north back into Argentina and the petrol stations on this part of Route 40 can be a little sketchy in terms of whether they have fuel available. The last time I was here seven years ago I had an incident with one petrol station closed and waiting for the tanker to arrive in the next 80 km further down the road out of action with a broken fuel pump. this ended with me having to change my rooting for the day and getting dangerously close to running out of fuel. So on this occasion, we are taking their chances.

Extra Fuel

We found our hotel right on the seafront with very nice rooms overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Even though the city is at the end of the fjords, the water is actually Pacific. we dopped off our bags and met in the lounge and sat at a window seat looking at the snow cap to Andy‘s and the fields and marvelling at the fantastic scenery.. the second beer just made us sleepy. So we decided to have a small siesta before heading out on a walk which ended at a barbecue restaurant. We had the obligatory ribeye steak and apple crumble. Before heading on a further walk around the town which we found to be surprisingly touristy until we actually thought about where we were on the boundary of one of the most famous national parks in Chile and an area renowned for tracking and outdoor pursuits. They were several amazing outdoor stores and souvenir shops all surprisingly at market. Our walk ended back at the hotelwith us ready for bed after another exciting and adventures day.