After a successful tour through the Torres, I headed back ot Puerto Natales for a good night´s sleep, and to buy a ticket for the 3-day 4-night boat trip to Puerto Montt, a trip through the fjords and Andes of Chilean Patagonia which delivers you significantly farther north in the country. This was good news to me as the south of the country was mighty darn cold. The trip doesn´t have the luxury or facilities of a cruise, contrary to what the ad campaign promotes, but it has the hefty price of $250!! This is a huge expense in South America, but since I´d anticipated taking this trip from the get-go, I was prepared to pry the money from my unwilling fingers.

Boarding the boat occurred at 9:00 PM Thursday evening, and we were scheduled to get underway somewhere around 4:00 AM Friday. Everyone (around 100 people) got on board by manuevering around huge containers of cattle headed north. A misty sea breeze made the slime inherent to cattle transport especially slick, but we managed to get onto the freight elevator and made it up to the living quarters. I´d spoken to a few people in Puerto Natales who had made the journey south, so I knew what to expect. I was crammed in a little cabin with three other folks with just enough room for one person to slide sideways to the door with our backpacks stacked along the wall. The beds, as ship beds often are, would be considered short for most normal people but were adequate to accomodate my torso fairly well. My legs would have to sleep during the day. After a quick briefing about the rules of sea travel (i.e. don´t jump overboard until told to) and a movie we headed off to sleep.

Upon awaking, we were making our way through some extremely narrow passes amidst rolling hills on either side. Well, at least that´s what they told us. A healthy dose of fog, mist, and cold wind prevented anyone from actually verifying this. As a result, pretty much everyone was packed into the dining room all-day waiting for some source of entertainment. A couple of movies were played, and a few talks were offered on the wildlife and culture of the area, but other than that it was time to catch up on any reading you needed to do. The demographics of the travelers were pretty starkly split between the 30-and-under backpackers and the 55-and-over retirees. Everyone seemed to get along well enough though.

Our second night also passed uneventfully and we awoke ready for some happening good times on the second day. What we got was more cold wind and rain. The wind had gained pretty significant strength, and was difficult to walk into and dangerous to walk with. The slick decks made stopping tricky and opening and closing doors became a major source of amusement. By this time, we were starting to get used to the routine though, so it was no big deal. Same people, same room, same books. Around 6:00 PM, we were scheduled to make our way into the open sea section. This section is reknowned among travellers who do the trip as a bigtime stomach turner, and most folks end up losing a meal or two to the 14-hour crossing. Good thing we were supposed to start in right at dinner time. Just as we were preparing for this transition, we were informed that the ship was in a holding pattern due to 100-km/hr winds in the open sea. No one seemed overly upset by this news, and we were able to head to bed the third night with a smooth sea.

Sometime in the evening, the captain decided we´d waited long enough. I was awakened when my head slammed into the aptly named headboard of my bunk, followed by my entire body being smashed into the footboard. This continued with almost predictable regularity for the remainder of the night, though the worst of the waves lasted only a few hours. The following morning, there was almost no one at breakfast and the dining room remained empty most of the day. The sea was very rough for the crossing, and we learned that we´d been cruising through winds that topped out with gusts near 100 km/h and wave heights over 20 feet. It was my first trip on the open ocean, and as the son and son of a son of a sailor, I felt it my duty to give it this one shot. It was really interesting to watch the horizon shift so dramatically from side to side and visible to invisible as the ship pitched and rolled in the waves. It was great fun. Luckily, I was wearing a scopolamine patch and my typically fragile stomach held up like a champ until we pulled into smoother seas around dinner time. Our final night, we had a party of sorts with karaoke that failed miserably, and open dancing which had a bit more success. I tried my hand at salsa with one of the retired Chilean women, but she didn´t want to do much spinning so I was fairly reserved. Probably for the best since I could barely remember the basic step (sorry Filipa). The following day we had five or six more hours of bad weather before pulling into Puerto Montt. All in all, not the best $250 I´ve ever spent, but it was definitely interesting to give sea travel a shot.

Puerto Montt is a reasonably unattractive harbor town which would serve as my jumping off point for the road trip through Chile. I found a nice Residencial (a room in someone´s house) and looked around the city a bit. I don´t have much nice to say about it, though a Columbian stripper did try to pick me up on the street. That was nice of her. The following day I was still a bit cooked from my trip, so I set out to walk to a local park that was supposed to have the stump of one of the largest trees in Chile. It was a long, reasonably unattractive walk through the Chilean countryside, but after four days of captivity it was nice to stretch the legs a bit. Unfortunately, my two-and-a-half hour walk delivered me to the entrance of a park that had closed two hours earlier. I didn´t really want the day to be a total waste, so I walked around in the swamps and lowlands surrounding the park for an hour or so, and headed back upset but a bit wiser.

Having spent more time and money in Puerto Montt than I was ready for, I decided to head off to Valdivia the following morning. This was good news, as it is home to the only person I know in South America. Only good can come from that, right??