Punta Arenas - January 7th

Before we ate the previous night we investigated renting bikes for today.  Dorota got the idea from the bus journey into town where it seemed like the whole town was out cycling.  It turned out to be fairly easy, with a bike shop only a few blocks away being reasonably cheap.  So after buying a picnic lunch in the local supermarket, we got our bikes and headed off for the local forest park.

The park turned out to be situated on a hill above the town, near the ski slopes.  Though we had become better cyclists in Vietnam, we were still not good enough for this climb, especially as it was on gravel roads.  After about 45 minutes going up we decided to skip the forest and head back down for a more gentle cycle along the coast.  We decided to go south, and we were rewarded with a nice paved road along a scenic stretch of coast dotted with little fishing villages. We cycled for a while until we came to a stretch of beach we could access and sit down at for our picnic, which were our usual cheese and ham sandwiches with some peppers, and an apple.

After lunch we cycled back toward town and north, to see what that side of the coast looked like, stopping to take a few photos in the centre.  It didn’t look like much, after a while it began to get quite industrialised, so we stopped and headed back to town.  As we had the bikes we went to an edge of town shopping centre to see how it looked compared to the centre of town.  This was much more modern and had all the usual stores.  Being on bikes we couldn’t really buy anything.  So all we could do is continue cycling around the town taking photos of the sights.

After giving back the bikes we rested for a while at our hostel, and then we went out for dinner with a Polish girl that we had met the previous day on the bus across the border.  We went to a Chilean diner, where I had a national dish, a Barros Luco (which is basically a steak and cheese sandwich) and Dorota had another national dish, the Lomito Pobre (which is basically a steak with an egg on it).  Not very adventurous dishes, but very nice, especially with pints of local lager.