Our luck with buses ran dry when we got back to El Calafate town after the glacier. We hoped to get a bus out of there for the following morning, Thursday, but there was nothing available. So Thursday became an admin day; a day for Skyping home, writing journals, chilling out and eating giant Argentinian chocolate flakes.

Puerto Natales is only five hours south of El Calafate, but it's in Chile, so another border crossing. Chile is the strictest of countries to get into, as they have a ban on fruit, veg and animals, but they actually enforce it. Plus they scan all your bags which can mean a lot of waiting around.

The first thing we did in Natales was book our bus out of there. No, the town wasn't that bad, but we had flights to catch soon and couldn't afford anymore admin days.

Our hostel was The Singing Lamb and it's probably one of the top hostels we've stayed in. The owner can be a bit over bearing, but the dorms are spotless, the lockers are giant, the kitchen is well stocked, there's a tv and the breakfast is cooked right in front of you - fresh porridge, eggs, toast and homemade jams. It was also full of Americans who annoyingly spoke much better Spanish than us.

The town is the closest to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. That's pronounced pie-ney not "pain". An ideal amount of time would have had us hiking into the park, doing the famous W trek over the space of a few days, but we didn't have an ideal amount of time. So we opted for the day trip, being driven around for ten hours on a bus.

But ten hours on a bus is nothing new to us. And the scenery was impressive. The weather wasn't great, lots of dark cloud and some showers. But we were in our bus, the youngest of the group by about 15 years. Thankfully there were plenty of opportunities to stretch our legs, although we didn't bother at the first stop.

The Milodon cave was the first stop, but isn't actually in the national park. The cave is the site where, in 1895, a farmer found the well preserved remains of a milodon, a giant sloth that was twice the height of a human but is now extinct. But seeing as the remains are just bones and skin, it was about 830AM and the entrance fee wasn't included in our voucher, we decided a small nap on the bus was more important.

For a continent with a reputation for corruption, there is one constant that exists through all the countries and acts as your golden ticket. It's something like how I imagine the US dollar was used back when these countries had less stable economies. The voucher. You are going nowhere in South America without your voucher. You want to go to on a tour, do you have your voucher? You want to get this bus, do you have a voucher?

But we had only one voucher for that day, for TDP, and we spent some time getting there but when we did, it was a good day.

We came in from the east, stopping by Lago Sarmiento for our first view of the Paine Massif mountains, a spur of the Andes. Our second stop was at a waterfall called Salto Grande which connects two other lakes. We got some good photos here and continued onto our lunch stop at Campamento Las Carretas. We passed a couple of cool looking hostels and hotels, mostly because of the setting; one hostel in particular occupying an entire small island, with it's bridge only big enough for walking across.

When we stopped for lunch, we got to see that the level of camping in TDP isn't quite the same as where we did it, in Los Glaciares. For starters, there are actual flushing toilets; not just showers, but hot showers; toilet paper; a BBQ pit, with wood supplied; if you pay for it, someone can put up your tent; and a curious little sign above the sink that read "Dont wash your dishes in the toilet."

The two highlights of our trip through the park were yet to come. Glacier Grey lies at one end of Lago Grey, with mountains flanking each side. That means that unless you take a three hour boat trip, the closest you get to see the glacier is from the other side of the lake, a distance of about 15km. It was a wet rainy crossing to the stony beach on the southern side of the lake and I was well equipped in flip flops. The lake has a few icebergs floating around in it, which make it the perfect temperature for swimming in. Or not.

The highlight of the park though is definitely the Torres del Paine themselves, or Towers of Paine. They are over 2000m tall near vertical granite peaks that have been shaped by glacial ice. We didn't get to see them until the end of the day, when the sun decided to shine and the rain went away.