Chile Part 1: Getting Your Bag to the Bottom of the World

Ask me what I think the hardest part of travel is and I'd answer "logistics". My brother Thomas and I went on a 2 week journey to the southern tip of South America (not quite the bottom of the world, but it makes the title sound so much more dramatic), and logistics were probably our biggest hold-up/concern along the way. That and food. And mosquitoes. But mainly logistics.

Ironically, my brother was a logistics major in college and now works in the transportation industry. As much of a pro as he is at moving things from Point A to Point B, things never go quite as you'd expect when you're traveling in a foreign land. But at the same time, they always seem to find a way of working themselves out just fine.

Saturday, February 22 Thomas and I set out for the Knoxville airport to start our two day journey to Torres del Paine National Park at the bottom of Chile. It is 4,900 miles as the crow flies from Knoxville, TN to Santiago, Chile, our first stop, and another 1,300 miles from Santiago to Punta Arenas up to Torres del Paine. It took us all of 15 miles from our home to the McGhee Tyson airport to encounter our first "logistical" problem. That's 0.12% of the entire trip. You see, I booked our trip as a 3 flight option - flight 1 from Knoxville to Santiago; flight 2, a full 30 hours after arriving in Santiago, from Santiago to Punta Arenas (PA); flight 3 two weeks later from Punta Arenas to Knoxville, TN. However, US Airways viewed this as 2 flights and checked our bags all the way through to PA for our "first flight". They refused to change the destination on the checked baggage tickets, despite acknowledging that we had not booked our flights all the way through to PA. They told us we'd have to spend the day in Santiago with the clothes on our back and hope that our bags were waiting for us a full day + 1/2 later in PA. We could have survived a day with just the clothes on our back, but our biggest concern was "would we have bags waiting on us at our final destination?". After all, it's kind of hard to do a backpacking trip without backpacks.
Well, we've both traveled enough internationally to know that you usually have to take your checked bags through customs upon arriving in a country. So we crossed our fingers and hoped to beat US Airway's oversight by prematurely "stealing" our own bags from customs in Santiago, then checking them again the next day. That and I prayed. Man I prayed for those bags.

Our flights to Santiago were uneventful but that didn't make us any less concerned about our baggage situation. It kind of sucked spending 20+ hours wondering the whole time if you were going to have your gear for the next 2 weeks. But sure enough we get to Santiago, "steal" our bags, and get to our hotel with almost no problems. We both felt rich when we pulled out thousands of Chilean pesos (exchange rate about 550:1), then subsequently felt robbed when we spent over 5,000 on a meal.

Santiago was nice for a day. We left wintry North America and arrived in 90 degree South America in the dead of their summer. My only experience with Latin America being Mexico, where they do NOT wear shorts, I told Thomas we should probably wear our pants. We felt like idiots when every single Chilean we saw had shorts on. It was blazing hot after all. They probably think Americans are strange. But we explored downtown Santiago and climbed a hill that overlooked the entire city.

Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile. This was their main square and unfortunately was covered in construction.

We got a chance to walk through a fish market in central Santiago and ate some fresh salmon. One of the best meals I've had in a while.

We took the subway to their business district and felt like we had somehow made it back to America. Very groomed, very modern, not how I had stereo-typed South American at all.

It was a pretty tiring day and we zonked out by 9:30, then slept till about 10 the next day. For me, that's a miracle. Getting 8 hours out of me is a minor miracle in itself, much less 12+. Well we got on our 1:00 flight for Punta Arenas, saw some awesome mountains from our plane ride, and arrived in PA.

Logistical problem #2. They don't speak much English in Chile. Between Thomas and I, we almost make one barely comprehensible idiot in Spanish. That's not a good combo. 

We walk out of the airport and find a taxi that will take us to Punta Arenas city center where we are going to catch a bus to Puerto Natales. Somehow the driver gets the impression we are going to spend the night there (it's about 5:30) and go to Puerto Natales the next day. That's unfortunate because we have no hotel reservation in PA, but do have a hostel reservation that night in PN, which is 3 hours away. Somehow we keep talking to the guy in weak Spanish and he eventually learns that we are trying to get to PN that night. So he starts calling a few different bus lines to figure out which ones still have available seats that night to take us to our destination. Really nice guy. From him we learn that 2 hikers have died in Torres del Paine this year - 1 from a puma attack, another they just couldn't find. The wind is very very strong there, like over 100 KM/hour at times. And that it is very pretty. At least 1 of those 3 is good.

Logistical problem #3. Taxi drops us off at the bus station and I'm pretty sure we got the last 2 tickets of the day to Puerto Natales. We didn't care that the bus was 2 hours later, we were just glad to have a ride to get to our beds for the night. So we dropped our bags off and walked around the city for a few hours. They gave us claim tickets for our bags, so it's all good, right? When we got back to the station, we tried to make sure our bags got onto the bus. We saw 3 of our 4 bags get on, so we assumed the 4th had made it. There was no possible way they could've gotten 3 of our bags, but somehow messed up the 4th. 

You must know where this is going...it was the most stressful 3 hour bus ride ever. We tried to pretend like we weren't concerned and tried joking around with each other. But every conversation had an undertone of concern. I could sense it in my brother, and I think he could sense it in me. 

Sure enough, we arrive around 11:00 at night in Puerto Natales, they unload every single bag from under the bus, and we have 3 of our 4 bags. Thomas just looks at me with his jaw dropped. The missing bag has our tent, our cooking gear, Thomas's sleeping bag and all his clothes. Our 10 days of backpacking are not possible without that bag. 

Thomas immediately grabs the bag boy and hands him our claim ticket. There was no Spanish translation needed to know that we were in trouble and a little frustrated. So he takes us to the bus office inside the station and of course it's locked; it's 11:00 at night after all. About as soon as we think we've watched this trip go down the drain, some guy inside the office opens the door and Thomas's bag is just sitting in the middle of the room, all by itself. I wish this scene could have been video-taped. Our frowns flipped and Thomas rushed in. He told the guy in the office "te amo". He told the guy he loved him. I think it only caused more confusion.

Somehow that bag had made it onto the earlier bus leaving from Punta Arenas (don't get me started on how the other 3 bags made it onto the correct bus but not that one - it made it there, that's all I can ask for) and they just laid it aside when no one claimed it in Puerto Natales. 

So here we are at 11:00 at night, 60 hours after leaving Knoxville, 6,200 miles away and 2 minor freak-outs later, all set to start our trek. I prayed a lot during those 60 hours. I prayed that our bags would get to where they needed to be. Part of me really trusted God that they would get there alright, even when it looked pretty grim. But unfortunately the very human part of me spent a lot of time worrying when I couldn't control every second of our bags' journey when they were not physically attached to us. O ye of little faith.

To talk about these 2 weeks in Chile, I'm going to have to break this up into 3 parts. But I'll leave you with a few cool pictures of the town of Puerto Natales, the "base camp" town for Torres. All the transportation to the park and a ton of gear shops in this little windswept town. It was in the middle of their summer, when it is almost unbearably hot here in Tennessee, and I couldn't walk down the street without a winter jacket on. Even when the sun came out, wind gusts would come along and make it chilly all of a sudden. Don't know how the residents do it, but glad they are there to make this trip possible for everyone else.