Writings By Date| Towers of Pain: The Challenge of Torres del Paine | 1 | 2 | 3 |
We walked back the rest of the way, and by now, my chest ache (which turned out to just be sore muscles) and stomach pains were pretty much gone. In fact, I felt almost entirely rejuvenated — so much so that the towering hills we'd climbed this morning seemed like no problem at all to me now.
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| Happy Returns |
Back at the hotel, we showered for what seemed an eternity, then went and had the folks in the lobby make some reservations for us in Punta Arenas the next day, and verify our flight and transfer. Unfortunately, we can't take a later ride back, which unfortunately means we need to leave without seeing some 90% of the rest of the park. We'll definitely have to come back here some day...hopefully there'll be a working commercial airport at Puerto Natales then (about an hour and a half away), so we don't have to ride on a bus for five hours just to get here. (Ed.: It turns out that they didn't really confirm our flight after all, because the flight time changed to be three hours later. That means we didn't have to ride back to Punta Arenas a day early, and could have left the next day after all. Seems there were actually many ways we could have squeezed in an extra day, but the few paths that we tried to follow ended in failure, causing us to give up too easily!)
We ended the night by having dinner at our hotel again. Sure, the buffet sucked, but when the next nearest restaurant is about 50 miles away and you don't have a car, alternatives tend to be slim. At least now that I was feeling better, I felt compelled to get my damn money's worth out of it. We brought a spark of interest to our night by asking our new friend Kerrilyn to join us. Kerrilyn is a businesswoman from the Bay Area who has been living in Santiago for the last several months in a video production company that specializes in Spanish-language features. (I'd mentioned the night before that I worked for Oracle, and she laughed at how she'd previously, she had done a few production jobs for Oracle, and learned just what a "character" (I'm paraphrasing) Larry Ellison could be.) We had a good time talking about what it was like to live in South America, and all the great American TV shows that aren't available here (and the frightening selection of ones that are). At the end of the night, she gave us her number in Santiago and told us to call her when we got to town. I said we'd be happy to come visit. Just as long as she doesn't live on the top of any hills.
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