Planner Part 3: Getting to Torres…

…and other details

This is my column. It is paired with my daughters column. She just wanted to write one blog, but we’ve morphed it into a series that we alternately write. Two people, two perspectives, narrated in acts, like a play’s script, describing an epic journey that we took as a family to the Torres.

By: Samya Ghosh.
February 21, 2020

Once our bookings at Fantastico and Vertice were done, we had to book the rest of the journey. This was relatively easier. I used Kayak and Booking.com for most of the travel bookings.

Our plan was to travel from NYC to Santiago (stop-over in Houston) and we landed in Santiago early morning. We planned to stay one night in Santiago. Two reasons:

• We wanted to sight see and get rested. Also, the flights to Punta Arenas for the same day, available later in the evening, were only available on LATAM, which was quite a bit more expensive than SKY
• We had plans for Atacama after Torres, so we had luggage outside our backpacks. So we stayed at a Marriott the day we landed in Santiago and had the same Marriott booked for the day we got back to Santiago after Torres (and before flying to Calama, the closest airport to Atacama). This gave us the flexibility to leave most of our non-backpacking luggage at the Marriott. If there are locker services in Santiago, I didn’t have to hunt for those or pay for baggage fees on the airlines to lug, bags that we’d not be using all the way to Punta Arenas.

Getting to Torres, you fly from Santiago to Punta Arenas (you can land at an equidistant airport in Argentina as well, but there’s the border hassle crossing Argentina and Chile, so we chose not to).

From Punta Arenas you can take a bus to Puerto Natales or book a car. As an individual there is no contest. The bus is way cheaper, but since we were 4 of us, even at the cost of having the car parked for 5 days at Torres while paying for it, the difference was not that drastic, so we chose a compact car (another reason to exclude extra baggage). Our booking was on Avis, but Kayak will give you options if you don’t have a loyalty benefit. Two other notes:

• You can get a one way booking on the car from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales. The one way will cost you and was not convenient for us, because it meant getting bus tickets from Puerto Natales to Laguna and then cabs to Torres. Also, per our original plan we were landing on a Sunday and the Avis Puerto Natales location was closed. Too much hassle
• Specify automatic if you’ve never driven a stick. Sometimes the default is a stick shift. A lot of fun to learn, but scary for the passengers! Luckily Ritika had learnt driving on stick shift in India, so it was breeze for her. I learnt in the backroads of Torres where traffic is few and far in between, but even then I am sure Ishani and Shubhangi had lumps on their throats a couple of times. I can however, boast of having learnt to drive a stick shift in Patagonia…beat that travel veterans!

The car gave us options – if you read Ishani’s blog you would have read that SKY did not deliver our backpacks on the same flight as us. Inconvenient as hell, but the car gave us the option to drive 200 miles to Laguna Amarga, buy tickets, get some information and details and come back. What were we going to do, twiddle our thumbs in Punta Arenas? It’s a town, but we live close to New York…

SKY is cheaper and for the first flight out of Santiago (at least for our timeframe) was better suited for us. We landed in Punta Arenas early and could have driven to Laguna and started the same day (if our luggage had arrived with us). LATAM has more flights and therefore more options in case the travel plans go sideways. Also, SKY charges you for everything separately – reserved seats, cancellable tickets, bags, early booking, food etc. Even then they are cheaper than LATAM. Their service however sucks as we found out after landing at Punta Arenas. Once our luggage did not come through (we had company from a few other families), we had to wait for 90 minutes, before we had anybody in the booking counter to help us. Their dial in numbers are useless. A specific word of advice, use SKY, but pay attention when checking in at Santiago. For us, we checked in on one of the first flights and we were sleepy after the flight in the day before so arrived at the counter right after the peak check in period. There was only 1 lady at the check in counter and 1 family checking in before us with regular luggage. When we checked in – smoothly enough, we noticed (this is in retrospect) that our bags had not been put on the baggage belt. As backpacks, it might have been the fact that they required oversize handling, it may have been that there wasn’t a baggage handler along with the check-in lady. Whatever the cause, if we had hung around to make sure that the baggage was put on the belt, I think we might have been okay. Plenty of other hikers got their backpacks at Punta Arenas coming in on the same flight as us, so it wasn’t the backpacks per se that caused the missed luggage snafu.

From Punta Arenas you can either go to Puerto Natales (not required – even though plenty of blogs will advice you to stop by and take the free informational sessions) or to Laguna Amarga directly (if you are on a short schedule).

Once you’re past the park ticket buying stage, get to Los Torres and park your car there. If you traveled by bus, Puerto Natales has to be your first stop and then another bus to Laguna Amarga and a shared cab/van from their to Los Torres.

The Los Torres park entry building is beautiful, spend 10 minutes there, get a coffee, stretch out and get a lay of the land. They have a 3D model of the park hung on one of their walls. It’s very useful. We spent 30 minutes their on our way back, buying (it’s a cheat buy since we did not complete the O) some O circuit t-shirts.

If you have a car, the parking in Los Torres (next to the park entrance building) has space. There was no parking fee and we could not get any published literature that advised us about whether multi-day parkings are allowed. We did it (with a partially unlocked car) and had no issues.

Spanish helps. Luckily Ishani had taken enough years of Spanish to actually follow along. The locals will make an effort to use broken English (most heavy tourist facing staff at Vertice, Fantastico, the park entrance speak English well enough to clearly communicate with you), but most park officials switch to Spanish. They were mostly delighted that Ishani was making an effort with their language. I think we got a friendlier reception because of this. Lacking an Ishani clone in your party (or a more fluent Spanish speaking version of the same), get used to Google translator. Configure it for offline use as well.

We got and lost our Garmin satellite communicator, but for the first 3 days it was with us, this was of help to let folks back in the States and in India know where we were. There is an interesting feature that lets them track where you are on a map (you have to invite them, so its secure). Also use Alltrails and/or Earthmate apps as GPS for the trail. This will require membership and for Earthmate some pre-configuration before you get on the trail, but its very useful. We had landed in Santiago and taken two local SIMs (Santiago airport has a store, so that’s easy), but on the trail there was no connectivity. Kind of the point, though Garmin let us and folks back home worried about a bunch of novices undertaking a 6 day backpack trip, have some peace of mind.

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