With so much travel time on the ship, we were going to plan the next leg while struggling through the Drake Passage. Since we didn’t end up having any internet, that became impossible. So upon docking back in Ushuaia, we set about finding a rental car that Michael and I could potentially drive from Ushuaia, throughout Chile and western Argentina, through Patagonia, into Santiago to pick up Phil and Krystal at the end of December before going to Valparaiso for New Years, Mendoza for wine tasting and then drop off the car. I had read online that we could do this, however, the interwebs didn’t give me a ton of information about HOW to do it. So we started pounding pavement. Very soon we found out a few things:
1. Everyone either doesn’t want to rent us a car for this type of trip, or they don’t have cars.
2. Our backup plans are going to be just as hard to execute.
Backup plans:
#1: rent a car to drive only to Punta Arenas where we can drop it off and get our schedule back on track. No.
#2: take a bus to Punta Arenas and get our schedule back on track. No bus availability until Wednesday. No.
#3: fly to Punta Arenas and get our schedule back on track. No flights until early next week and they were expensive! No.
#4: fly to Puerto Natales – No
#5 fly to El Calafate, rent a car to drive down to Puerto Natales where we can then explore Torres del Paine. After that, figure next steps out again. OK – this one might work.
So we were at least able to get the four of us out of Ushuaia on Monday morning to El Calafate. We booked those tickets and looked into transportation once arriving in the new city. The issue I was running into was the fact that no rental companies online would commit to letting me drive the rental car from El Calafate, in Argentina, to Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine in Chile. I knew you could, once again, I just couldn’t figure out how. So I sent out a bunch of emails to try to get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, Michael booked a place to stay in Calafate and investigated taking buses from Calafate to Puerto Natales, and from Puerto Natales to the National Park. He got a handle on a few buses we could take and I couldn’t sort through the rental car, so Michael booked us some bus tickets. Thirty seconds later, I got confirmation from Hertz that there was a way to take the rental car into Argentina, for a small fee.
New game: try to get the bus tickets canceled.
Michael got to work on this, but we were trying to reach them on Sunday while their offices were closed. So we went back to waiting. Monday morning, we headed to the Ushuaia airport, for our flight out. FINALLY! Upon checking in, we were informed that although we had reserved our tickets, we hadn’t paid and we were not on the flight. We had definitely entered credit card info, so this was hard to believe, but nothing to do but work with them. We dealt with a few people who mostly just told us to wait. 5 minutes. Wait more. 25 minutes. And then, finally, with just thirty minutes to the take off of our flight (note, take off, not boarding), they let us go through. No additional payments necessary. Not sure how they fixed the glitch, but we got through.
Michael also had received an email from the bus company that didn’t respond to his question about canceling the tickets, but instead informed him that there wasn’t any room on the bus for us. Problem solved! While waiting to board, I jumped on my phone and booked the Hertz rental car. Problems solved! We were finally cooking with gas.
The flight was easy into El Calafate. While we waited for baggage, Michael went over to get the rental car settled. No surprise, the didn’t have a car for us. Haha. No one had extra cars in the entire airport. So we took a taxi to our AirBNB, dropped off our stuff and went back into town to try to solve this new problem. It was smack dab in the afternoon, when most stores in Argentina are closed, so we walked around, got a feel for the town and emailed/texted a few inquiries to car rental companies. Once we hit 3:30/4 and stores began opening again, we found two cars in town. Just two. And settled on the cheaper option. So we are back on track, again.
This was definitely a warning that Patagonia requires much more advanced planning than the internet led us to believe. Online there are tons of romantic stories about people just arriving at hotels and being able to find a place to stay or being picked up by the perfect bus going right to their final destination by chance. Bully for those people. For us, travel in Patagonia is hard.
I have zero appropriate pictures for this probably boring post… so here’s a street sign where our hotel shuttle dropped us in town. Does it add any value to this post? Probably not, but here it is anyway. It shows latitude and longitude so that’s interesting. It also reminds us that we were still in Ushuaia, trying to get out!
