We got onboard our flight bound for Punta Arenas with no problems. I was lucky enough to get a window seat for what turned out to be the most scenic flight I have ever been on. I got some great aerial views of the Andes, seas, lakes and islands.
Upon landing, the star wars nerd in me couldn't help but saying, this is like landing in Hoth (the snow planet where Luke Skywalker sleeps in animal guts to survive). So if I was visiting planets in Star Wars I would have visited 3 by now: Endor (The Amazon), Tatooine (Trujillo) and Hoth (Punta Arenas).
Anyway I digress. We got our bags and I decided to try and activate my HCBC ATM card over the phone. After waiting on the phone for 5 minutes i got through to someone who told me I needed to go to a HSBC ATM to activate my card, I told her I was pretty close to the edge of the world and that I didnt think there was one very close to Punta Arenas, not convinced she decided to spend the next 5 minutes looking up Punta Arenas in the HSBC ATM directory, she then proceeded to tell me that there was one in Santiago (about 4.5 hours flight away) needless to say this phone call turned out to be a total waste of time and money ($20 USD). Sweating, partly due to the heating in the airport and partly due to the anger of having just wasted $20 USD for nothing, I headed out into the sub zero temperatures of Hoth (Punta Arenas) in nothing but my Tshirt (and pants). After about 5 minutes i put on about 3 more layers of clothing and a beanie, and waited for a cab, we waited for about 45 minutes, for some reason a few cabs were driving past but not picking anyone up, with only 2 hours to get to the Ferry Office and pay for our tickets we got a little nervous. We nearly hired a car before spotting a bus which we quickly jumped on and headed into town. After succefully finding the ferry ticket office, paying for our tickets, dropping our bags off all by 6pm we felt like we had won the amazing race so we headed into the main drag of Punta Arenas to celebrate.
We got stuck into some delicious steaks, beers, red wine, whisky and Pisco Sour. We all got pretty smashed and ended up running down the icy streets slipping and sliding all the way back to our Hotel, we had all nearly made it back unscathed then Scratcher ran across the last icy street and neary did a backflip, except instead of landiing on his feet he landed square on his back. It was pretty funny, so funny it would no doubt have made won us a home entertainment system on funniest home videos if only Yasmin had taped for 5 seconds longer.
Anyway we woke up explored Punta Arenas, the most memorable moment of which was seeing a stray dog licking his own turd (im kidding, its a very nice town but thats the only thing that stood out about it that day). We then bought some alcohol (1 Litre of Whisky, 1 Litre of Vodka, 4 bottles of PIsco, 2 bottles of Baileys, 2 Cartons of Goon, and a dozen beers and boarded the Ferry bound for the end of the world, Puerto Williams, 308 or so nautical miles away.
The night was going really well with hotly contested games of celebrity head and Uno until the Captain appeared and warned us in broken English that we were not allowed to drink alochol on the boat. He then clarified this with a "well, you can drink, but i dont want to see any drunk people." given the amount of alcohol we had just brought onto the ship and the fact that this ship was the only way back from Puerto Williams I thought that this might present a problem. But it didn't really, we handled our alcohol like pros (sort of like underager drinkers at a blue light disco, but with less vomiting).
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