Puerto Natales

After eventually making it off the Navimag at about eight pm, we walked up through the small town of Puerto Natales to find our hostel.  Our stalkers were staying in another place nearby, so we arranged to meet them shortly afterwards for dinner.  As the walk up from the docks hadn't looked promising, we headed towards the main square in search of a place to eat.  Of course most of the other passengers from the Navimag were doing the same thing and wherever we went we would see a familiar face.  This was to continue over the next week as everyone from the boat was heading off to the same few places on the Patagonian tourist trail.


Puerto Natales



The main square had a fountain in the middle and was still decorated in its christmas lights, so it looked quite a pleasant place to be.  We did wonder about the rather strange ten foot wooden sculpture of something that looked like a cross between a bear and an anteater, but food was our bigger priority at this stage.  We soon found a suitable looking parilla which, although it was a bit too warm inside due to the indoor asado, turned out to be an excellent choice.

Hunger satisfied, the four of us figured we could find somewhere to have a few drinks.  After a bit of wandering around, with nowhere seeming at all promising, we came across a place called Ruperto's.  From the sign outside and the various decorative touches inside, it was apparent that Ruperto is a reindeer.  Don't ask me why.  Inside it looked like the kind of place that would be full of old locals who would all stare at you when you walked in, but in fact it wasn't all that bad.  I figure that in a place like Puerto Natales they know when the Navimag is due in and fully expect a hoard of strangers to turn up.  Indeed, when we arrived, there were already a number of our fellow passengers in place and a few of the crew too.
Shortly after we arrived, the dj started up.   I say dj, but that is something of an overstatement.  He clearly had a pre prepared list of songs set up on his computer, and really just sat there nodding along to the music.  Now having grown up in the eighties, I am always quite happy to listen to a bit of that music, and that was just as well.  It wasn't absolutely all from the eighties though, there was a little bit of seventies thrown in, together with a few spanish songs and a couple of terrible country songs from who knows when!

But the really sad thing about the playlist was his complete lack of imagination in putting it together.  He started at A and played a couple of songs by artists from each letter of the alphabet.  Surely even if that is how he put it together he could at least have pressed the shuffle button!  However this dire piece of dj-ing did in fact provide us with some unintended entertainment as we sat trying to guess which songs he would come up with for each letter.  It didn't take a genius to work out that Queen would figure, but we were a bit disappointed at H when our guess of Human League didn't appear.  We hadn't expected Joan Jet and the Blackhearts, but we were right with Limahl and some others.   

We did get a bit confused when he suddenly jumped to Z and started working his way backwards through the alphabet instead! But we were quite pleased when we got to T, and some of our missing artists appeared such as The Human League.  We left at about 3am, not quite asking it through every letter, but not far off. Overall it was a good evening.

The next day, with little to do here anyway, we took the chance of a sleep in and a lazy day.  Having got a few practical tasks done, we met with our stalkers again for dinner and this time went to a nice little microbrewery.  The challenge of a plate of megachips proved irresistable, and we did eventually work our way through most of the kilo of chips topped with cheese, breaded chicken pieces and bacon!  We also established that we and our stalkers had solved the puzzle of the part bear part anteater thing, but I will reveal the answer to that in a later posting - bet you can't wait!

Early night tonight though as we all had early starts in the morning.