Punta Arenas

The next day (the 18th) we were back at the airport. We took a flight that we thought would take us directly to Punta Arenas from Santiago, but little did we know that we were traveling on a puddle jumper and ours was the last stop. We touched down in Puerto Mont, and Balmaceda before reaching our final destination. Nate calculated that he’d been on 10 flights in the last 10 days. It was neat though, to see the span of Chile from above and also to receive two airline-portioned typical Chilean meals of meat and bread, pudding(?) and cake. Nate and I do not like Chilean bread products so it left us hankering for a real meal.

In Punta Arenas, we found a taxi and informed the driver to take us to a “hostel economico”, which is how we ended up at hostel Victoria welcomed by a man named George and his yellow lab Chickie. Chickie made the place instantly endearing to me (missing Gus so) despite the fact that we paid $40 US to stay there.
We hit the town on foot. It was a nice sea-breezy ten minute walk to the Plaza De Armas and we found a little place that had chacarero and carne con queso on the menu. Awesome. This was the place I first tasted a pisco sour (archetypical high-octane beverage of Chile) and it was surprisingly frothy (egg) and served in a wine glass. We had fun chatting and people watching and eventually headed back to the hostel.

Punta Arenas is in the extreme south of Chile, in the heart of the jigsaw archipelago that is southern Patagonia. The weather is coastal, meaning gray and misty, much like Nate’s parents’ home in Humboldt County. The terrain, flatish. In the winter, it turns bitter cold, and, as Galen Rowell put it, “The wind sweeps the land like the broom of God.” It’s the only city of size in the area (130,000) and is a hub of shipping, ranching, and, it seems, strip clubs. It’s known for having a nice cemetery, which is probably better than being known for having nothing nice at all. But barely.

Nate already mentioned the stray dogs. In Guatemala they were called Chuchos, so that’s how I refer to them here. I read in a guidebook that chuchos (the ones with balls and no collars) as well as dogs who have owners (plumper with collars and no balls) roam the streets at will. I think they have learned to hang out by restaurants and wait for portly tourists to come out with leftovers for them. I think they also know they will get sympathy from people like me wielding huge backpacks indicating they are not locals and that they might have a shot at some sympathy and a snack. Anyway, on our walk, I spotted one or he spotted me (I’m not sure who spotted who first) and I started talking to him (“hola perro! El Chuuuuucho…”) and he seemed to like my tone or could smell that I’d recently been around meat (one of the two) and he began to follow us around every corner. We talked to him along the way and noted that he was easily distracted by passing cars. He seemed to be specifically on the look out for taxis at which time he would abandon our gait and tear off into the street barking and trying to bite the front wheel of the taxi traveling at 35 miles per hour. The taxis would not break or even slow down. It seemed like a game (Taxi drivers vs. Chuchos). We were laughing so hard and affectionately started to call our friend “Taxi”.



When we got back to the hostel, I ran upstairs to find something for him to eat. I unwrapped a peanut butter granola bar and tossed it on the ground. I hoped he would enjoy it but he stiffed it, left it where it was, and looked up at us wagging his tail as if to say, “I can find better shit in the trash, would you come back out and play with me?”
We snapped a few photos and said goodbye. After ten minutes or so I went to see if he’d taken the granola bar but it was still there on the sidewalk…In the morning though, it was gone.