El Chaltén ⏩ Puerto Natales

Once again we needed to be at the bus terminal by 07:30 which meant getting up at 06:30 to pack and walk to the terminal. But we were in for a goodbye treat: The morning sky was beautifully illuminated in red and pink 🌄 Also the weather was really nice without any wind and the views to the surrounding mountain peaks were perfectly clear 🥰 At the bus station we got a coffee and empanadas and soon afterwards boarded the bus to El Calafate. With a short change at El Calafate we continued on to the border crossing to Chile.
The drive was pretty uneventful, there were no landscape features, just Steppe plains with yellow, low grass and an occasional Guanaco 🦙. We sorted out our pictures from the Perito Moreno glacier and watched series and time passed pretty quickly. Then came the border crossings... Getting out of Argentina took us a bit more than an hour, weirdly enough checking our passports took a minute. So we have no idea what was the holdup but then the bus driver walked in and said that someone didn't do the passport check 🙄 On closer inspection the one missing was a 1 year old baby that's wasn't even on board... So we continued on to the Chilean border expecting it to be pretty strict from the last experiences. But it was in fact super quick and we didn't even need to get all the luggage off the bus.

When we arrived at Puerto Natales we had already made a plan what we needed to do:
The first item: "Book a bus to Torres del Paine National Park" was easy and done within 5 minutes for the day after tomorrow. Then we checked for tours but the only company offering tours was too expensive. At last we needed to walk to the hostel which is located about 20 minutes away. There we checked in to the beautiful, clean and welcoming hostel and tried to book a tour through the owner... Still no luck 😒 So our last resort was to find a tour operator in town but it was already 20:30 and the two ones we found open said that all spots are full. And one mentioned that the weather is supposed to be pretty bad in two days and that we should consider going to hike tomorrow 🥲
So we hurried back to the bus terminal to reschedule our bus ticket which luckily went well. On the way back to the hostel we stopped at a pizzeria for a late dinner. The pizza was really good and enough to take the leftovers for tomorrow's lunch 🤩 Back at the hostel we just took a quick shower and then went to sleep because our alarm will go off at 05:30 😴Læs mere