Let's Get Outta Here

I finished writing a song a little while back that tried to capture the mindset that we were in before we went on this trip. I've been going through a lot of these pictures and videos, and am definitely going to be picking this up where we left off, since it's leaving out about half of our trip. I guess that doesn't quite count as travel blogging, since it's been almost two years, but I'm only going to forget more and more of it, so I figure now's as good of a time to pick it back up as any!

Also, I don't usually swear in songs, but sometimes it just feels good to do it a whole lot. Here's the song:

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine: Day 2

Hiking in Southern Patagonia during summer allows for long, leisurely days, with little stress concerning daylight. (Weather is a different story) An average day, around 15 hours of light, allows one to hike whatever time of day seems fit. Several walks during our 6 day trek were long, but none over 8 hours. We often chose to sleep in, especially as the week went on, dragging our sore bodies out of the tent well after nine.
To begin the second day of our trek we hiked from Los Torres campsite to Los Cuernos Refugio/ campsite.

It's about a 5 hour hike, with ups and downs, nothing too backbreaking. You can find delicious cold water along the entire trail, (like most of the W) so we never had to worry about carrying water.

The trail mostly followed a large glacier lake to our left, with occasional streams coming from the mountains to our right. We were lucky and had great weather, but it was a typical windy Patagonian day.
As we wound over a rocky ridge into the Cuernos private site / property, we could hear waterfalls, horses, strong winds over Nordenskjöld lake, hikers eating and taking hot showers.

Approaching Cuernos; Tiny Private Cabanas Line the Valley

Cuernos has the most diverse lodging we saw on the trail, private bungaloos with hot tubs, dorms with bunks, some sort of weird domes, platform camping, and rocky hill- dirt camping. (We took the latter) The site is still on private land, so it's not free to camp. We actaually made a reservation in advance for a site, but they had given it away by the time we got there. Reservations don't really make sense, since people back out, or timetables change. Anyway, we were a result of this loose reservation system, but they found us a spot. We saw people circling the site for hours looking for a place to pitch a tent. Also to mention: this was Christmas eve. After setting up camp, and throwing on sandals, we bought two Torres del Paine beers, which we were already familiar with, from visiting the brewery a few days earlier, HERE.

The camp was by far a favorite of the trip, people singing, drinking box after box of wine, everyone genuinely enjoying themselves. The crowd was also one that wasn't on a day trek, but multiple day journeys. This usually made a difference. We were all tired and sore, and excited to get our heavy packs off our backs. You make quick friends when you all smell the same.

We paid the extra (too many) pesos to have Christmas eve dinner at the restaurant, complete with a 5 peso (0.60 USD) box of wine.

This was probably the best meal we had in our entire lives. We slept real well that night.

Cervecería Austral tour, Punta Arenas

I had certain expectations of the things that we'd be seeing on our adventure through Patagonia, beautiful landscapes, leaping guanaco, lots of trail mix, but a brewery tour was not among them. With a bit of luck, we were able to snag a tour of the Austral brewery in Punta Arenas, Chile.

This was taken 3 minutes before it began to rain, then hail, then return to sunshine. Pretty normal around these parts.

We hadn't done too much planning on what we'd be doing once we got to Punta Arenas, really all we knew was that the city is physically on the way between Ushuaia and Puerto Natales (the closest city to Torres del Paine). We did notice that all the restaurants served Austral beer, and the bottles actually invited us to come visit. The Internet was surprisingly unhelpful in providing any useful information on how to actually book a tour, all of the blogs we found merely confirmed its existence, and that it was located in Punta Arenas. We even found a couple phone numbers, both of which didn't work.

With some help from the woman at the front desk, we tracked down an account of someone successfully booking a tour... in Spanish. I knew enough to be able to tell that it said we couldn't just stroll in. For anyone that might stumble upon this in hopes of finding a way into the brewery, you came to the right place. Here's what we did:

Go to the Servicio Nacional de Turismo office.
Ignore what Google says, it's located on Pedro Montt and Lautaro Navarro streets.
Have some flexibility for dates, unless you are in a group of 6, or are just really lucky. There are two potential times for tours on weekdays, 10am and 3pm.
They will call a lovely gentleman named James, who will later be your tour guide.
If there are enough people for a tour, then they'll let you know that you're all set!
Show up to the brewery 15 minutes early (it's about a 15-20 minute walk), and bring 4,000 Chilean pesos per person.
Have an awesome tour and drink beer!

We managed to just get incredibly lucky, as we showed up at 2pm and there was enough room for us to join in on a tour group that was starting at 3. We walked up to the brewery, and after waiting for just a few minutes, were met by our incredibly friendly and awesome tour guide, James. I was expecting the tour to be in Spanish, but he also spoke great English, and the other people that were on the tour happened to be English speakers, so another point for good luck.

If you've been on a brewery tour before, you probably know the drill. We walked by the warehouse...

You might have caught some non-Austral beer in this picture, they also distribute a bunch of imports, as well as some chocolate.

... a barley silo ...

... their canning machinery...

Empty cans in the back, full cans in the front.

.. we tested out the old capping machine...

... saw an old, out of use kettle...

This was originally from Germany, and was last used as recently as 2010.

... and of course, we got a quick lesson of the basics of how beer is made.

The last two jars are both hops, the first is concentrate, and the second is full of hops pellets. They don't grow hops down here, so this is the only way they can get it.

But what tour would be complete without actually getting to sample the wonderful products being made?

Lager, Imperial (also a lager, but different branding), Pale Ale, Dark Ale, Calafate (local fruit) Ale. Our tour guide, James, is on the left.

We got to try 6 different beers, all of the 5 pictured above, as well as their Torres del Paine brew, which was probably my favorite of the bunch. They tasted notably better at the brewery than they did in town, which I might attribute to the restaurants either serving us old beer, or not doing a good job at storing them properly, because the beer we had here was straight from the same bottles they'd be getting. Either way, definitely worth the trip just to try their complete selection in one sitting.

We were told that this was the southernmost brewery in the world, but I do remember getting some beer that was brewed in Ushuaia, so I'm not totally sure how accurate that information is. Regardless, this is the southernmost brewery that you can actually visit, and I highly recommend doing so!