Patagonia Blues

After experiencing the vast wonders of Antarctica, we are now facing the Patagonia Blues. We left the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia in Argentina at 5 am and arrived into Puerto Natales at 11 pm the same day. We had a 16 hour long bus ride which was made even worse by the 3 hour immigration we had to deal on the Argentine/Chilean border! It was bureaucracy gone mad! Just to get a little stamp in our passport, we had to wait over 2 hrs on the Chilean side to see an immigration official. This was after being told to wait on the bus for the customs check. Three guards enter our bus, search through everyone´s belongings, and leave with 2 offending sticks of carrots! It would have been very funny except we were just very exhausted and knew we still had more than 8 hrs of our bus ride to go. In fact, this land border crossing made the Nepal/India crossing look high tech! We´re just recovering here in Puerto Natales for the day before we move on to Torres del Paine national park. We have loads more of Antarctica photos to upload but Banda Acha (Broadband) has not yet arrived into this little town. Oh, and for anyone who thinks the bus ride would be full of interesting things to see...Patagonia is bleak and flat...it´s the peaks and lakes of the Andes that provide the beauty here but the roads (of course) don´t really go through the Andes.