Patagonia: The Return Home

**Completed in November 2019, The Torres del Paine ‘W’ hike and Fitz Roy are Sylvia and Brian’s fifth and sixth BucketList adventure completed together, respectively. We have never ventured further to put a hike in our bucket.

And so it was over. Except for the long, long road back.

After our success on Laguna del los Tres hike, all that remained was to return safely home. We’d seen the storied Fitz Roy…but now we were eager to get return, back to the other Fitz Roy, the one which is much more significant to us personally…this Fitz Roy, here…

We had not seen our beloved dog Fitz Roy in almost two weeks. This was especially hard on Sylvia, especially because whole swaths of the Torres hike we had no reliable internet connection and were unable to get any updates from our support crew back home.

Thus, we were leaving Patagonia with a sense of fulfillment, and an eagerness to return to the home we missed.

Just as there is no easy way to get in, this is no easy way to get out, either. We faced a total of three bus legs, each about three hours long, to return to Punta Arenas. As this seemed a very large amount to bite off in one day, we instead chose to break it down over two…stopping first for a night in El Calafate, then continuing on in the morning with the last two legs of the trip to Punta Arenas, stopping briefly in Puerto Natales again on the way.

As it turned out, this was probably the right call. It certainly is possible to go the whole way in one day, but if there are no significant delays. And the second leg on this trip included the border crossing, which had caused a significant delay on the way out.

We hopped the morning bus from El Chaltèn back to El Calafate. We would spend one night in this small and fairly convenient city which we were already familiar with, before setting out on the last two bus legs of the trip the next day.

One of the things that was most heartbreaking for us about this trip was to see the large numbers of homeless dogs living in the streets of virtually every Argentine and Chilean town. It had been much the same if not worse in Peru, of course; and in Mexico and other countries we had visited.

But we had not been dog owners then. Some of these dogs were very handsome and fine animals who would have doubtless made great pets, but they were condemned by accident of birth to the hard and probably short life of a semi-wild dog, prowling the streets for scraps. Almost every dog we saw was limping or struggling in some way, probably as a result of car accidents (we many times witnessed dogs standing or even sitting in the street oblivious to  the danger presented by traffic.) It was terrible to see, and made us ache to get back to Fitz Roy all the more strongly.

We used our night in El Calafate to dine on red meat for what would probably be the last time for a while, lest we both be stricken by gout.

This leg of the trip had gone well…but we were both waiting for SOMETHING to happen, which in travel this far flung and complex, is almost inevitable.

Well, we were about to see what something was. The bus trip the next day went pretty well…up until we turned down the dirt road to take us to the border crossing. recent rains, probably the same ones we had seen in Fitz Roy, had made the condition of the dirt road far worse than it had been on the outbound leg. But our bus driver knew his business and kept things going all the way until the border crossing was in site. Then, for no apparent reason, we stopped.

It was long before we learned the reason for the delay. There were seven buses in front of us at the border crossing. On the outward leg, we had been stopped for ninety minutes by two or three buses in queue, plus some motorcycles. Now, we would likely face a delay at least twice as long…and this delay would repeat itself on the Chilean side. In fact, it might even be worse.

The driver had a solution. His conductor announced, in broken English, that we were going to attempt another border crossing further south which would be speedier. Not exactly the news we wanted to hear but…we had confidence in our bus driver, who seemed to know what he was about.

Back onto the main highway we went. Our original crossing had been via the Rio Turbio border station. The way back first led us through the Argentinian coal mining town of Veintiocho de Noviembre (a reference to the date the town was founded, 28 November 1959. Interestingly, we passed through on the 27th of November.) This was definitely a different side of Argentina; rows of small houses and buses full of miners in bright orange work suits headed for the mine. Sylvia was aghast to see horses grazing on the median strip amidst dumped trash.

At any rate, after 28 November we turned off onto a very sketchy dirt road, with many gaping pot holes, washed out sections and grade level stream crossings. Maybe a bit much for a large bus to tackle but…again, our driver proved he knew what he was about. A lot of travel through this washed our landscape finally brought us to the Argentinian Border Crossing. There was no line of buses here, just a few old pickup trucks and mud splattered cars.

Sylvia was by now quite concerned that we would miss our connecting bus, which was scheduled to leave one hour after this one arrived…but this one was barely a half hour from being overdue, and we weren’t even in Chile yet.

The driver and conductor brought in their paperwork, and then the passengers shuttled through. As with the previous border station, this one — and perhaps all Argentinian points of entry — comes equipped with a very large sign which states “Malvines Argentinas!” just in case any wayward British subject might arrive with the idea that the whole Faulkands business might be settled.

Back on the bus we went, passports stamped. More miles of bad road and then, ahead, a highway appears and a cluster of buildings. This HAD to be Chilean Route 9. This turned out to be the case; the border station was only a few yards from this highway and a sign told us it was only 15 kilometers to Puerto Natales…Perhaps ten minutes drive away. We were running out of time, but we were SO close, and most buses tend to leave a few minutes late. If we could just get through the customs/immigration process quickly, we still might catch our bus!

Well. It turns out the Chileans are very thorough. We we told to leave the bus. Then, all our luggage was removed, and we were told to bring it with us. A winding line formed into the tiny lobby, which might have generously fit twenty people, tops (there were fifty on the bus at least, all with backpacks or suitcases or both.) The line stretched iut the door. Each person was processed at one window, then sent to another desk where the luggage was searched. A staff of perhaps three people handled all this; while this was ongoing, a border control officer with rubber gloves was painstakingly searching the bus for contraband. The border control staff was very polite and professional, it should be noted.

This whole process took perhaps sixty minutes. By the time we were back in the bus and leaving, we knew we had missed our bus. In fact, we arrived in Puerto Natales just in time to see it pass by on the road. Drat.

Well, we’d suspect this might happen. After some time spent trying to convince the bus company this really was their doing we had missed the connection, which proved fruitless, we finally gave in and booked a ticket on the next available bus out. We had a wait of nearly two hours, which we spent in the cafe of the Puerto Natales bus terminal, which was by now so familiar it felt almost like home. We even said hello to a few of our familiar stray dog buddies.

There’s not much else to tell. We made it to Punta Arenas, found our hotel after a short bit of monkeyshines that involved taking a wrong turn and then losing the earpiece to Sylvia’s sunglasses frame. This detour caused us to walk right into a protest march that was passing in front of our hotel. (Entirely peaceful, we hastily add…there were small children walking with the marchers.)

We had neither the time nor energy left to explore Punta Arenas, and so we had a quiet dinner, went to bed and had an equally quiet breakfast before wrapping up our packs and departing the next morning. We had no serious issues with our flight connections, apart from the fact that the Airline once again refused to print our boarding passes through to the end of the trip, causing us some hassel in DFW; and again insisted on placing us in different seats in different areas of the cabin. We will be hesitant to fly LanTam again.

It was a long long way back to our place; cousin Miky was there to pick us up, and when we came through the door of our house at last (where a few bright leaves still clung to the Japanese Maple) to our long awaited reunion with Fitz Roy!

Boy was he glad to see us…almost as glad as we were to see him. We were home. Travel, hiking, trip…it was all over. Patagonia was now part of our history, and already the great things we did were turning into memories. The W, Fitz Roy, El Chaltèn…all of it going over from the immediate to the abstract. It is entirely possible — almost certain in fact — that many of the things we saw on this trip we will never see again.

But that is the nature of world travel, and the reason we go so far. To see and experience…that is what it’s all about. The memories we have may fade, but they will never entirely leave us as long as we live. Patagonia will live on inside us, as a part of us. It’s become a part of our life now.

And will we ever return? We certainly would like to. But not anytime soon, we think. We have too many other things to see. Things that our out there, crying to be experienced, and turned into memories.

Patagonia 2019 — Torres del Paine and Fitz Roy — are now completed Bucket List adventures! The only question now is what to do next?