
After Easter Island, Dani and I met up with the rest of the group (there were 7 of us total) and headed to Chilean Patagonia. Patagonia is a massive park that spans a huge area in South America across Chile and Argentina. To give you an idea of how far south it is, check out the second destination on the arrivals board in the Punta Arenas airport. From Punta Arenas we made the two hour drive north to Puerto Natales.


The next day we left Puerto Natales on a boat (right) up the fjord. I think everyone except Ian and I suffered from sea sickness. For most of the trip Dani compared the boat ride to the Deadliest Catch. While it was rough in spots, the guys spent most of the time on deck taking pictures and getting drenched. Lots of fun.

One of the coolest things was all the water. There are glaciers and packed snow everywhere which in the summer turns into runoff. Everywhere you looked you could see huge waterfalls and crystal clear water. Very cold water as we would find out later.

The boat makes it way up the fjord to a huge glacier. It's amazing to see how these sheets of ice have carved the mountains and left nothing behind. The ice is also pure blue.

The boat then docks and you hike about a mile to another glacier that runs into a lake. This is the end of the boat ride and the beginning of the raft trip up the river.

At this point we were only about half way to our cabins. To make it the rest of the way we got in rafts and went up the river for about another hour and half to our final destination. Apparently, this ride was a lot more smooth because half of the raft was caught sleeping during various points of the trip. We also got to wear these really cool coats to stay warm and dry. Dani is in there somewhere under all that stuff.

We were dropped off at our cabins just outside Torres del Paine. The peaks on the right that are very rigid are Los Torres.
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