Chasing Summer –

This morning, I caught an eight am. bus from El Calafate, Argentina to Puerto Natales Chile. It’s a five hour bus ride through rolling pampas (grasslands).

A ticket on a comfortable regular bus costs 25,000 pesos. There are a couple of bus companies that offer rides to this destination several times a day, so double-check you’re on the correct bus before you load up.

A digital declaration form for Chile is filled out on your phone before you reach the border. A qr code with a link is on each check-in counter and on the bus I traveled on.

Each passenger also received a snack bag with water and a few treats for the long ride. This was a very good thing since the bus didn’t stop anywhere where passengers could purchase anything and we were later than anticipated.

Along the way, birds, rheas, wild Guanacos, and even a rabbit could be seen in the estancia fields along with sheep and cattle.

While I realize busses don’t always take the most direct route in order to provide more service to the wider community,  I do wonder at our convoluted path.  Some even on gravel roads and stops in the middle of nowhere.  Nobody else ever got on.

The gravel road led to the border crossing, Rio Don Guillermo. The bus pulled  up shortly before noon, and we made it through the other side of Argentina at 1:07. Our bus seemed to take a lot longer than others, but I’m not sure why.

Sadly, the washrooms at the crossing were closed, so I had to use the toliet on the bus. The outside handle came off in my hand, the waste basket was coming out of the wall, and the entire area was less than clean. The toliet had a sign that it was exclusive for urine. Thank goodness that is all I needed.

As soon as you enter Chile, the road is again paved. It is an 8 minute drive to get to Chilean immigration and customs from the Argentinian station – and everyone needed to drag their luggage off the bus and through the customs house x-ray. At 2 p.m., we finally were back on the road. I think the 5 hour mark was optimistic. The bus man says we’ll be there at 3 pm. 7 hours after we were supposed to start rather than 5.

Puerto Natales is a small tourist town, and when we arrived on a Sunday afternoon, not many things were open. I checked into my hotel, the Veat hotel, and went for a late lunch at a beer and sandwich shop, Fuente los Primos Sandwiches. The meat sandwich was huge and delicious.

It’s only 5:30 and I’m already looking forward to bedtime. Lol 😆, tomorrow is a full day touring the near by Torres del Paine.