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Pretty flowers of the Prickly Heath, or chaura, on the trail to the Serrano glacier  Tomorrow we leave Puerto Natales for Puerto Montt, the southern gateway to the Lakes District.  From there we will have a foray into northern Patagonia but our time in the south is coming to an end.  We have had a lovely stay here.  Organising activities on the fly, and dates not always being available, we have somewhat end-loaded our schedule but it's all worked out.  This was our final itinerary, with a little chat here and there: Saturday, February 12th - Arrive from Santiago. Sunday - Rest day, scouting out the play structures, braving the wind. Monday - Another rest day.  Accidentally booked the Torres del Paine National Park tour for Tuesday but this was a fortuitous mistake as the weather improved and we appreciated the extra day around town, especially as we were able to celebrate Valentine's with jello and chocolate. Tuesday - TdP NP full day tour (see previous po...

February 15th - Gonna go easy on the words today.  This park needs no introduction.  We learnt a bunch of interesting stuff and we saw those iconic towers. But more than that we spent the day enveloped in Patagonia, its landscape, its weather, its flora, and a little of its fauna. We breathed its air, we felt the sting of its horizontal rain flailing our skin, we tasted its dust, and our eyes swam in its endless expanses of steppe, lakes, and granite.  Here are some pictures. Our guide, Boris, was an enthusiastic and able photographer Hmmm Above average picnic spot These two Boy, wind, improbably blue water North, Central, and South towers, visible at the back of the Torres del Paine massif Windy, everywhere Guanacas, reminsicent of deer but related to camels. You will see them all over the place The dusty road through the rolling Patogonian plains This was the windiest point on the trip. Our guide recommended holding onto the kids. He was not being overly dramatic Boris,...

Part of Toby's street dog photography project in Puerto Natales February 16th - I have been guilty of over-curating my blogs.  I guess we have always cherry picked what we choose to save as memories, but today we have so many ways to filter our lives it is easy for us all to end up thinking that everyone else is having a GREAT TIME!  So by way of a little redress here are some notes from the front lines of the day-to-day.   Buying butter, safe hands goalie gloves I have already at times laboured the minutiae of trip planning in the age of covid, detailing the endless form filling, testing and vaccination proof requirements, but there is the other side of life too. The age old need to feed and cloth ourselves, find shelter, and exercise our young (I'm sure that once happened unaided). These folk are all over town Take today for example.  Today was a moving day.  We had been unable to book one Airbnb for the whole of our time in Puerto Natales, so we found tw...