Christmas. As our holidays progress we seem to sleep longer and longer and today it was 9 am before we even moved. We had a look on Facebook to see what our friends and family were doing and most of them seemed to be settling down for Xmas lunch! We had a very festive breakfast of bread, cheese, tomato and avocado with hand squeezed juice and peanut M&Ms! Then we headed 150 kms north to Torres del Paine. In many ways the pictures speak for themselves. The lan...

Mainly a travel day today. Before leaving Punta Arenas we did a shop for Xmas. It was a bit random as we didn't know what cooking equipment we would have. The shop was busy and the car park was a mare! Then onwards north, over blank steppe with relatively empty roads. Eventually the mountains began to rise, snow capped, in front of us. There were plenty of bright lupins growing wild on the roadside. We descended down to Puerto Natales, which is on the very pretty...

Up on the Argentinian border lies the rarely visited PN Pali Aike. It was about a two and a half drive along the coast of the Magellen straits. The winds were so strong they were making odd noises round the car. We past nodding donkeys in the oil fields and the turn off to the ferry at Punto Delgado. We also past the road off to the park and ended up about to cross the border into Argentina. By the border there were volcanic cones. Joan video'd them but with her ...

Today we picked up the car. We caught a taxi out to the airport and took possession of a Toyota HiLux. Grim experience has taught us that when you go to Chile, Peru or Argentina, you can't save pennies on personal transport. The biggest 4X4 is a must to tackle the rough roads. They're not cheap so we delay as long as possible needing to hire one. (We hired a terrano last year without 4WD and ended up digging the car out of a sand road a long way from town.) We d...

Originally when we planned this holiday we had allocated today for a boat trip to see penguins. However as we had already done that on Tuesday, and given the boat journey was six hours there and six hours back, we decided to pass and walk down to the port and promenade. Having been chilled to the bone yesterday, we togged up warmly and walked down a few block to the sea front. Given it was the longest day, a Sunday too, there wasn't exactly hundreds on the prom. ...