Puerto Natales - January 11th

We decided to give ourselves a day off after our two days of trekking, so today is just a hang out day in Puerto Natales.  So we had a nice lazy morning hanging around the hostel doing very little (except organising laundry – one of the tedious tasks that has to be done on the road periodically).

We didn’t see daylight until after midday when we left for lunch in the diner we went to on our first day here.  This time Dorota went for the crab salad, as locally caught King Crabs are a speciality around here.  I went for salmon a la pobre, which means poor man’s salmon.  In this case, as with all pobre dishes in Chile, it means with onion and two fired eggs on top.  I wasn’t sure about it, but egg actually went ok with the salmon.  Dorota’s crab salad was very good as well.

After that all we did was hang out in a coffee shop blogging and reading about upcoming destinations in both Argentina and Brazil.  There really is nothing else to do here.  There are a few day trips other than Torres del Paine, but they sort of pale in comparison, so we didn’t do any of them.  Anyway we need a time out now and again.  Sitting on buses for long periods isn’t actually as relaxing as it could be.

In the evening we went to a restaurant called Afrigona.  This is a Zambian-Chilean fusion restaurant, which sounds strange, but it was actually really good.  Although it cost about twice what our budget allowed.  But we enjoyed it, and as they were playing African music during the dinner we even got to hear the Kilimanjaro song which we had both heard so many times when we did our treks there in 2010.  Of course this encouraged us to get the Kilimanjaro chocolate cake desert, so there may have been an ulterior motive for them playing it.