Vacation Blog: Terremoto, Stuck in Punta Arenas, and the Journey Back to Santiago

After breakfast at our hostel in El Calafate, we boarded another 6 hour bus to Puerto Natales with 2 more stops at the borders and a funny experience about gum with an Argentine border patrol officer. We returned to our Puerto Natales hostel for the third, last, and worst time with a new Dutch friend we made on the bus. We then walked to a desert store called Patagonai Dulce that no one in Puerto Natales seemed to know existed, and then to a giant statue of a Land Sloth to take pictures in some crazy wind. I bought a Patagonia t-shirt and then we had dinner at a pizza place called Mesita Grande with dessert pizzastrudel yummm! Then, we went back to the hostel and were super tired and played some uno (yess I taught my friends and our dutch friend Combat Uno!!) and our Dutch friend brought us some mroe pizzastrudel! Then we repacked and went to bed, which involved bed bugs (which i am allergic to) and sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag.

This was the night that the earthquake hit, and although we didn't feel it at all since we were so far south, i awoke to our Dutch friend shoving his iPhone in my face with a news article about it. I quickly realize how big 8.8 is, and went down to the computer to email my parents before they even found out about the quake letting them know we were fine. We didn;t really realize how big a deal it really was and headed out to Punta Arenas, thinking we were still going to fly out back to Santiago that night at 2am. Upon arrival in Punta Arenas, we quickly realized that was not going to happen and that no one actually knew when that would be able to happen, with the airport being closed at least 72 hours from what we heard.

We ended up returning to the same hostel we had been at in Punta Arenas at the beginning of our trip, which was actually pretty lucky since it was our favorite hostel of the trip. We met up with Seth and Eric again, and eventually a lot of people of our program were at our hostel. The next 3 days were involved with lots of confusion and frustration in regards to figuring out when and how we were going to get back to Santiago, with everyone telling us different information. We ate a lot, hung out a lot, went to a free museum on sunday, learned to play bridge, went for a run, found a magical flight back to Santiago, and finally returned on March 2nd, never entering the Santiago airport.

Definitely and adventure and experience I will never forget, for more reasons than 1!