CHILE: Mylodons and Wind

By: MJ + PJ

Puerto Natales is an interesting town. It seems to have transient visitors who are either departing for or arriving back from Torres del Paine National Park. On day two we did a city tour which was an interesting history lesson, and gave us insight into the town and the social upheavals in the modern history of the continent.

As a town, Puerto Natales is only about 120 years old. It has a straight forward city street plan and numerous parks and playgrounds, which AJ visited on a daily basis. This was a nice change from other south American cities where playgrounds and parks are a little less numerous and accessible.

Being in town about 8 days, we got to see the other local highlight which is the Mylodon Cave. This was the location where extensive soft and bony tissue remains of some giant ground sloths were found. These huge creatures roamed the area in the era of the saber toothed tiger, and similarly became extinct only recently (10,000 years ago). We had an hour or so at the Mylodon Cave and look forward to seeing the Mylodon skeleton at the Natural History Museum in London… the Chilean staff at our hotel encouraged us to “find it and fly it back to the town” if we could. 😉

It is very windy in this part of the world. And that is a gross understatement. The speed and shape of the cloud formations make for great photography and for sedative or meditative cloud watching. During our time in the volcanic region of Bolivia and while in Patagonia we saw more lenticular cloud formations than we’d seen in our entire lives. The geography of the Patagonia area basically acts like a serrated windbreak for the Pacific Ocean winds that blow west to east. Yet at times, the ground air is still and the high altitude air is rocketing along. MJ was able to pick up a real bargain of a Banff Gore-Tex windbreaker coat for $8 at a second hand shop to help shield the wind through him. However, it did little to help him keep balance during the blast-like gusts of wind.

The sun sets late at this latitude, with somewhere near 14 hours of sunlight at the end of November. This is great for exploring and getting a lot done in a day, but terrible for getting a child to sleep at a reasonable hour and then up again in the morning. At about 51.5 degrees south of the equator, this was the furthest south any of us had ever been (and is probably an extended family record!). It was sobering to think that we were only just over half way to the South Pole (which truly must be the middle of nowhere, and incidentally has a ‘point-of-no-rescue’ latitude).

The Hostal Alcazar (aka hotel) we stayed in was exceptional and with our longer than usual length of stay enabled us to become quite familiar with the staff and owners. We stayed eight days near the Puerto Natales bus terminal. This hostal is near several playgrounds, a community park and amphitheater, and an ice cream shop. It wasn’t much further (15min walk) into the downtown area and a further 10 minutes to the edge of the bay which led to the Atlantic Ocean. Convenient and easily a walkable location for most needs.

This is an expensive area to stay at because of the remoteness of the region. We can technically say that we have experienced Chile, however this region is quite separate from the main Pacific coast stretch of the Chilean land area. It is more European in history and style, even though there were at least three distinct native tribes living in the region (Selk’nam, Aónikenk, and Alacalufe).

The infrastructure in the area is quite modern, however the reliability of local organization is somewhat inconsistent. We feel this may be related to the history of the town. Our biggest challenge was establishing bus services and times in relation to getting from Torres Del Paine to El Calafate. We were assured by several different people that our schedule, although tight, would work out. But there was no guarantee this would transpire, nor written information to instill confidence. This concerned us because if we missed or had delayed one connection we would have missed subsequent flights to exit the continent.

On the flip side, we had an exceptional experience at an information session explaining how to approach and manage hiking in the Torres del Paine National Park. The session is free and is hosted by Erratic Rock, and you are left with no doubt as to what you are facing on the trek. Kudos to them for keeping it real.

Despite these challenges, which have been noted by other travelers on online blogs, going to the Torres del Paine National Park and hiking there is exceptional and should be on any world explorers list. Having hiked and trekked a few times already on this trip it took us a while to warm up to what more this park could offer. But by the end it had clearly been an exceptional visit, with plenty of fun and challenging experiences that would simply not be found so closely together elsewhere. To explain this better: there was a piece of Banff National Park, a piece of what we would expect to see in Alaska, a piece of Rocky Mountain National Park, and a piece of Yosemite, all in the one area. 

With the experience of the Patagonia region under our belt we felt sad to leave Chile as we had literally only scraped the tip of the iceberg. There are clearly many more places to explore and experience on the western coastal regions of the country. Interested in seeing photos from our trip? Click HERE.

See our post regarding the Torres del Paine W Circuit trek, which we did over 5 days. We recommend reading as many accounts as you can before heading off on a trek in this region.