City hike and fetching our cargo

Jetlag always delivers: we were both fully woken up already at 4 am. So we spent the next hours on social media and storing important documents and contact numbers to our communications devices.

ALE had scheduled the second Antarctic flight for today, so we agreed we will be fetching our cargo after that flight at the noon. So we spent our morning walking around the Punta Arenas centrum. The city turned out to be way hillier than we had initially thought. Also, Punta Arenas is a mixture of beautiful and ugly: A really beautiful house might be accompanied by half destroyed garage and electric wires in a huge mess hanging from the wall. Nice change for our ever-so-boring nordic clean city architecture.

The most prominent part of Punta Arenas is its beach: there are miles and miles of it and it has been nicely designed to be a long outdoor area. Tourism in various forms is the most important revenue source for Punta Arenas. From the beach, one can see the cruise ships going to the Antarctic shores, and the nearby national park is a really popular tourist attraction.

In the afternoon we walked to the ALE office to open our cargo boxes. There we learned, that the planned flight had been delayed due to way too heavy winds in the Union Glacier area. This means that the flights are packed up, which might affect our flight, too.

After unpacking our cargo boxes into our duffel bags ALE personnel drove us and our gear to our hotel. Now our hotel room is full of stuff. We won't complain as now we have everything in one place except some food fulfillments which we will do next. After that and some food packing, we are ready for the next step on this journey.