(Even though we are already safely back home, we continue to post the rest of the photos 🙂
After our domestic flight, we stayed in Punta Arenas, a city that is most often used as a starting point south (to Antarctica) or north (to Puerto Natales). A quite nice city with old buildings and a sightworthy cemetery:
Further north we used Puerto Natales as our Basis for further exploration, for example up to the (very windy) view point on Cerro Dorotea:
In two day-trips we went to the Torres del Paine national park, of which everyone in the world seems to be very fond of. We are still not convinced, but it was quite nice. Everyone hikes the W (when looking at the route on a map, it forms this shape) but we think we were able to grasp the flair in several shorter hikes–the weather is a matter of its own, 4 seasons in a day are not unusual: for example, we had a day with constant winds of 100km/h.
In Puerto Natales we were told that the border to Argentina–our next stop–was closed for already a week because the Chilenean Border Control was on strike. Luckily enough just on the day that we had planned to go, the situation relaxed and we were only affected in the sense that we had to start our 6-hour bus ride in the late afternoon.
From El Calafate we visited the spectacular Perito Moreno. A 30 km long glacier that goes down into the valley. With a little luck regarding the weather you can sit there for hours and watch it calf. You sit in front of a 50-70 meter high wall of ice and every now and then a part breaks of and falls with a thunder into the water to form a little iceberg. During a Mini-Trekking we even were able to wander around on the ice. It was very impressive to see the different colors of the ice: the bluer it appears, the less oxygen the ice contains.
Southernmost stop on our travels was Ushuaia in Argentina, the southernmost city of the world (the souternmost settlement is part of Chile, Port Williams). The border between Argentina and Chile is the result of a compromise: Within tierra del fuego the border is a straight line and most of the islands surrounding it belong to Chile.
Anyways, when we arrived, a big snow storm welcomed us (they say it was the first time in many years that there was snow in December in Ushuaia) but the area won us over with a very nice penguin island (Isla Martillo), the Tierra del Fuego national park with the post office at the end of the world, and the Beagle Channel.
After Ushuaia, we spent the last 6 days of our trip in Buenos Aires.
