Day 40 - 14 Jan.2012 - Punta Arenas

Today’s initial plan was to drive from Rio Grande to Puerto Natales. However, it didn’t work out that way. We left Rio Grande at half past nine in the morning, which we thought was plenty of time to drive the 450 km today. We arrived at 10:30 at the border in San Sebastian. And did not believe what we saw. The border was crowded with cars trying to leave Tierra del Fuego. We parked our car a couple of hundred meters away from the border control hall and walked, with our documents in our hands, to the checkpoint. There, the people were queuing outside the hall in snakes on the street. We joined the snake at its tail and shortly after us joined a lady asking “is this the queue for the toilets?” it was a great laugher and the initiation to have a looong chat. In fact chatting away with fellow people in the queue greatly helped us to kill the time. It turned out that we spent almost 6 hours at the border. We said good-bye to our fellow sufferers and hoped to see each other again at the ferry across the Magellan Strait. However, when we arrived there after 130km earth road our new friends were already gone and must have taken the previous ferry.
On our way through the gravel road we met our friend Yura on his bike again. He indeed made it into Chile and was on his way to Ushuaia. We are sure, he will manage the last border as well.
When we reached the mainland again it was already 19:30 and it looked like we needed to tweak our initial schedule. Instead of going all the way up to Puerto Natales, we went to the closer city of Punta Arenas. According to our guide not really a city worth visiting unless you need to do some duty free shopping in the Zona Franca of the town.
On our way we went though a place called San Gregorio. It looks like this used to be a thriving Estancia in the past but for whatever reason was closed down and all its buildings and even ships are in a state of decay. It was in fact quite an eerie experience to walk past these old derelict buildings, which must have been abandoned some decades ago. At the nearby beach were the rusty remainings of the steamship and barge of the Estancia, which must have bee used to export the products such as wool.
We reached Punta Arenas and booked ourselves into the hotel El Condor del Plata. This was a name of an old plane used by two German pilots Gunther Plüschow and Ernst Dreblow. Unfortunately their story found a sad ending when they crashed with their plane in the lands of Patagonia.
We had a lovely dinner in El Saboroso with a really entertaining garcon who told us that his and his colleague’s dream is to go to Rio de Janeiro for the Worldcup in 2014 and sell coconuts wearing bast skirts at the Copacabana beach – he really made us laugh. We finished the dinner with pisco sour and pisco calafate recommended by our waiter.