Cabo Froward

From Puerto Natales I headed further south to Punta Arenas where I spent a few days before starting another 5 day hike. It´s the most sotherly town on mainland South America and it´s an incredibly windy place. Sometimes they put up ropes on the corners of the main square to stop people getting blown away. Stayed in an interesting hostel, run by a Chilean Rastafarian who played Bob Marley 24 hours a day. The town had a couple of interesting museums and a big, very elaborate cemetry that was interesting to visit. Also went to see a penguin colony on Isla Magdelena. There are about 120,000 of them nesting on the island and we were able to walk around the island. Some of them were very curious and would come right up to you and even pecked at my shoes. We spent about an hour there watching them going in and out of the water, waddling about, climbing up and down the cliffs etc. They are really comical the way they jump down little steps on the cliffs and slip and regain their balance.

On Sunday the other people going on the hike arrived at the hostal and we got everything organized ready to leave on Monday. We had planned to do a 5 day trek to Cabo Froward, the most southerly point on mainland South America. We caught a bus to start of the trek at about 7.30am and were walking shortly after 9. Initially we walked on a gravel track between the beach and some woods, along the Straits of Magellan. We could see across to Tierra del Fuego and occasionally dolphins broke the surface of the water. In the afternoon we walked along more beaches and through the woods to our first campsite by a disused house, which provided a good shelter for cooking and a fire. We had a late start the next day (about 12pm) because we had to arrive at a major river crossing at low tide to make sure the water was at its lowest point. We crossed a smaller river straight after leaving the camp and then after more beach walking we entered the turbal. I don´t know what the English translation of this would be but it was a dense extremely muddy woodland followed by a long stretch of bog. After this it was time for the river crossing. We all stripped down to our undies and held our rucksacks over our heads and waded across. It was nearly chest deep and very cold, but luckily not too fast flowing. After that we had to scramble arouind a headland to reach the 2nd campsite. It rained hard all night and we got up early at about 6.30am in order to cross the nearby river at low tide. But after all the rain the water level had risen and was very fast flowing so we decided we wouldn´t be able to get across and returned back to the camp. We built a fire to get warm and dry out all our wet things from the previous day. There had been fresh snow on the hills in the night and as that melted during the day it became obvious that the river was not going to go down. So we had no choice but to head back. So in the afternoon we headed back to our first campsite. The first river we had crossed was much lower than it had been, probably because of a lower tide, so we were able to get across just rolling up our trouser legs. But after all the rain we had a further 2 rivers to cross. On the way there we were able to just step avross them, but on the way back it was more knee deep paddleing, made a bit more difficult as we had to do it in the dark this time. The extra rain also made crossing the turbal even more intyeresting. But eventually we all made it back to the hut, soaked and covered in mud.

The next day was sunny and quite warm (for Patagonia) and we stayed at the campsite until about lunchtime before heading back to near the bus stop, where we camped in the woods. Early the next morning we caught the bus back to Punta Arenas. Despite not making it to the end of the walk it was still a really good trip as we got to a very remote part of the country and experianced some true Patagonian weather.