Pavement. Ripio. Pavement. Ripio. Ripio. Ripio. Mind-numbing flatness, the horizon a pure line. Breathtaking sweeping grand vistas of mountains and mesas and canyons. Sunny. Overcast. Cold. Cool. Windy. Calm. Guanacos. Guanacos. Guanacos.
How boring – Just another day driving across Patagonia.
As I write this Bobbie and I have just finished a dinner that she made in the camper that included a fresh salad of carrots and sliced tomatoes and boiled eggs. There was no lettuce in the salad because it was confiscated at the Chilean border today, along with the fresh whole tomatoes and some packaged lunch meat that was one day beyond expiration. To be fair, the border guards did let us eat as much as we wanted of our prohibited food at the crossing point; so there we were, chomping down quickly made sandwiches at the border of Chile and Argentina, high up on a pass in the Andes.
We are now in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, and just from the views we’ve seen in a few hours everyone should put this place on their “see it before you die” list – not just because of the rocky towers for which the park is named (“torres” means “towers” in Spanish), but also the outstanding glacial lakes and smaller mountains one sees while driving around in the park.
While we were paying admission at the park entrance, the three rangers there heard a funny sound nearby and they all suddenly ran out of the room for a nearby hill, indicating that we should come along as they had spotted a puma, a rare event. We went with them, and sure enough there was a puma sitting behind an old fence, probably interested in all the guanacos in the area. After watching us for a while the puma got up and walked away, and we headed back to the Ranger station across an area littered with big bones and torn up hide – remains of a guanaco – and in perfect English one of the rangers said to me: “For the pumas, this place is Applebee’s.”
Puma.
Guanacos in Torres del Paine NP
We left Ruta 40 a few miles short of its southern termination today when we crossed into Chile at the Don Guillermo pass. We are now camping in the Lake Pehoe area in Torres del Paine NP.
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