Puerto Natales, Chile

The town where we paid US $10 to do a load of laundry. End of blog.

Ok fine, we´ll tell you a little more about the sleepiest town on the planet. It happens to be the only gateway to Torres Del Paine National Park. So we had to spend a night here, in an obnoxious green house of course. Our host was an extremely cordial and informative man who sent us around to the right people for all the right bookings.

Apprehensive as we were, the refugios (hostels along the trekking route with bunk beds) still had room for us for two nights.We were told that food at the park was prohibitively expensive, so the next task was grocery shopping. Too bad the paranthas were over by this time.

Fresh vegetables and fruits are in short supply in Chile, at least south of Puerto Montt. Guess it´s hard to transport things that far after the country disintegrates into fjords and glaciers. Apart from some worm-eaten lettuce, we found tomatoes and cucumbers along with an exotic variety of green chilli (very tasty). We finally got enough food for three days, not a light load coupled with the 6 liters of water we needed to carry. And we had to lug all this on our backs during the hikes. This was not going to be easy.

But we were finally headed for Torres del Paine!