Quick update cos I don’t particularly enjoy mobile blogging, but we’ve left Santiago de Chile about a month ago now to start the Greater Patagonian Trail, and thought I should perhaps update a bit since I can.
We’re currently sitting in a quaint cafe in Villa Cerro Castillo called Puesto Huemul (a huemul is an endangered native deer, the South Andean deer Hippocamelus bisulcus) which has wifi, really nice coffee and food (more about Chilean coffee and food in another post). A fair number of cafes and places we’ve been to now have wifi, which is apparently a change from even just 4 years ago when there wasn’t that much connectivity in these parts, according to a German guy who picked us up when we were hitching rides and who’s been coming to Patagonia for the past few years.
Pretty obvious our plans have changed a fair amount from what we had planned to do. For one, we’re a lot closer to our intended final destination, Puerto Ibañez (~30+km as the crow flies/by road). For another, we’ve actually spent time in places with wifi, when we originally thought we’d just be unconnected till we finished the walk. I’ll write in more detail in other posts about this trip when I’m reunited with my laptop eventually. In brief though, we’ve skipped several sections of our trail. Some cos they’re rather impassable with overgrown or non-existent trails, but overall what we realised was that we were moving a lot slower than we hoped to as the terrain was rougher and because it was hard to procure food, we had to carry food for 6 days and that made our packs quite heavy. As such, we decided to skip out a huge chunk of the middle section as we were all keen on seeing more of Patagonia (we started out north of Patagonia), and hitched our way to Coyhaique, the biggest city in Chilean Patagonia.
We will probably keep hiking on a bit more past our original intended destination, but plans are always just that I guess, and we’ll just keep making changes. Patagonia is distinctly different to the north though, much windier and colder with mountainous snow-covered peaks and glaciers. Also more expensive; if there’s one thing to note before planning a trip here, always bring/have more money than budgeted.
Till the next update, have a blessed Christmas, feliz navidad!
Nature rambles. 