Chapter One - Punta Arenas, Tierra del Fuego 2006

Having departed Heathrow, grabbed a couple of beers in Madrid & then settled back for the long haul across the waters to Chile. To bloody many hours later we all got to stretch our legs in ever so briefly in the airport lounge at Santiago before embarking on yet another flight south via Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas. It was at this point that arrangements went just a tinsy wincy arse over tit. The jolly chaps at the Civil Aviation Authority closed there eyes & stuck a large blunt instrument into the works & what should have been a quick stop over turned into six days holiday in the sun.

Punta Arenas, literally in Spanish "Point sands", is the most prominent settlement on the Strait of Magellan and the capital of the Magallanes y la Antártica Chilena Region, Chile, and is claimed to be the world's southernmost city. (Ushuaia, Argentina also makes this claim, but is much smaller). Punta Arenas has also been called "the city of the red roofs" for the red-painted metal roofs that characterised the city for many years.

The Magallanes region is considered part of Chilean Patagonia. Magallanes is Spanish for Magellan, the explorer who, while circumnavigating the earth for Spain, passed close to the present site of Punta Arenas in 1520. Located on the Brunswick Peninsula, Punta Arenas is the southernmost city of its size in the world. Early English navigational documents referred to its location as "Sandy Point."

After checking in at the Tierra del Fuego, a couple of beers & a good nights kip it was time to investigate the streets of Punta, after all we only had one day, or so we thought. The city itself seems to radiate out from the central square, the Plaza de Armas, in which most days there's a cluster of entrepreneur's stalls selling all the usual hand made stuff, yeah right, that tourists like to buy by the bucket, & yeah, I did put my hand in my wallet, eventually.

Central to the square is a memorial to one of Chile's national heroes, Ferdinand Magellan, local folklore believes that if you kiss the big toe of the native figure sat at Magellan's feet you'll always come back to Punta, personally I'll happily stay away.

The first day was spent wandering the streets, shops & suburb's of the city, whilst the central plaza gives an air of relative luxury once you get 10 minutes walk or so away you enter tin sheet city, the people are pretty friendly on the whole & the exchange rate/cost of living means your pound goes a long way the bar/cafe's. Over the six nights or so in Punta we got to sample the best & the worst of the hotels on offer from the luxury of the Cabo de Hornos to the pits of the Hotel Calafate.

Having realised we were going to get a paid holiday courtesyof BAS's frustrations with the CAA a couple of 4 x 4 pick ups were hired & we headed for the ferry to island of Tierra del Fuego via the town of Porvenir. According to the glossy's Tierra del Fuego has quite a lot to offer, unfortunately most of it seems to be on the other side of the island & what we did really didn't do it justice. Having photographed everything in sight, mainly grass but interspersed with Guanco's & Lesser Rhea's, we headed for the ferry at Punta Espora only to sit for bloody hours as every truck in Tierra del Fuego decided it to was time to to catch the ferry, still we had a nice view of the mine fields, had a lovely cup of tea & got to throw rocks at the natives.

Back to Antarctica