Travel With Phie

Today was an early morning as mentioned yesterday. We woke up around 6:30am, got ready, and headed to breakfast. We ate fairly quickly as we had to be at the bus station no later than 7:30 for our 8am bus. We finished breakfast, checked out, and headed to the bus station.

Once we got to the bus station, we heard someone say “bus to el calafate”and lined up in that line. Put our bags on and got in line to board. We when we got to the front they told us wrong place. We were like no we are going to El Calafate. They meant wrong company bus, so we had to grab our stuff and move to a couple buses over. Thankfully, our bags were right on top which made it easier to transfer.

We got on the proper bus and took our seats. This bus ride was fairly short (3 hours). About 30 minutes into the trip were all dead asleep and woke up to a loud thud and an instant slam of the breaks. Everyone was super confused, but apparently the bus had hit a Guananco in street. Oops! The second memorable experience on this bus was that Ashley was freaking about losing her passport for a good 30 seconds, but turns out I just had it in my bag from the bar the previous night – oops.#neverfreakoutalone. Those were truly the only 2 memorable pieces of this first bus ride as the rest of the time we just slept.

Once we arrived in El Calafate, we had around 40 minute before our next bus. The empanadas place that we loved in town was around 1 mile away. We decided to have Ashley do a little jog to grab us the empanadas for our next long journey (6 hour bus). Katherine wrote a little script in Spanish for Ashley to show the worker and she went on her merry way. She grabbed us the empanadas and made it back just in time to load up on the bus.

When we got on the bus there was a man in our seats, so we decided to take seats in toward the back of the bus. We ate our empanadas and then most of us just slept the start of the bus ride. The bus stopped after around 3 hours for a quick bathroom break. We ran to the bathroom and when we got back on we had apparently picked up a couple more passengers, so we had to move seats again. Katherine and I went to our original seats and Ashley went to the man’s seat.

Again, I pretty much just slept the entire way. Once we got to the town near the boarder crossing we had to do a little detour because there were protestors in the street. This would be no issue, but the detour road had a power line that had fallen. We expected this to be an hour or so of an issue, but it was fixed probably within 30 minutes which was amazing.

We then got to the boarder and had to do customs in Argentina drive a bit further and go through customs in Chile. Everything went smoothly. After the boarder crossing, we had around a 20 minute drive until we arrived in Puerto Natales our final stop for the night.

We arrived at the bus station in Puerto Natales and were starving. We grabbed some cash from the ATM and went into town to find dinner. We ended up at a pizza place, to be completely honest dinner was just okay. The drinks, however, were unbelievably good. Ashley and I got our first Piesco Sours of the trip and instantly fell in love. We finished up dinner and decided to find dessert.

This is where we made the best move because we ended up a fantastic little crepe place. Katherine & Ashley split one, but I was so excited I got an entire one for myself. They were so good! After we finished dessert we decided to try and grab an Uber to take us back to the lodge since it was now raining.

There were Ubers, so we were able to take it to the lodge. Once we arrived, we checked in and asked about the weather for the next day. It was not looking good… 100% chance of rain starting at 9am (right when we were planning on starting). We thought ehhh whatever it will still be a blast, so headed to our rooms to plan outfits and head to bed. Tomorrow would be another early morning.

We all picked out our outfits to prepare for the rain and then repacked and headed to bed.

Buenas Noches!