Travelling from DTW -> PNT #
After staying up all night getting in the last bits of time with my family, I boarded my flight to Miami Sunday morning. Miami was a drag, I had to lug my checked luggage around until I got a day room at the airport hotel. After I meandered my way through security, I pounded two Burger King sandwiches (which were not very good) and hopped on my flight to Santiago at 7pm. A bumpy plane ride meant a lack of sleep, so arriving in Santiago at around 6am, I had finally made it to the last leg of my downward trip. The 3 hour flight to Puerto Natales was bumpy but quite beautiful, as the Andes were on full display thanks to the clear(ish) weather.
The Puerto Natales airport is a small wooden building with a tarmac. It can handle one plane at a time, and has nothing more than a fuel truck and two staircases! After finding my ride to the center I’ll be staying at for the time I am here, we drove into town. Puerto Natales is a small city, but relatively vibrant and busy. It is tourist season (the season flip means it’s summer here), so there were plenty of hostels, hotels, and resturaunts open for business. The city feels similar to a sub-arctic city in, say, Iceland - however, a little rougher around the edges. It feels extremely safe, but there are not the same level of resources available for stuff like street cleaning and trash collection, both due to it being a smaller economy and its remoteness. Still, it is a very nice city to stay in! After arriving at the center, we got settled in, had some dinner, and went to bed.
January 28th #
Breakfast is served prompty at 9am, and is fantastic - a good spread of fruit, eggs, and sausage. We all eat together at the same time (staff included). The rest of the day was orientation, which involved getting familiar with the staff, the center, and the town nearby, being sent to explore some key locations. While I initially was questioning classes 6 days a week, there isn’t a significant amount of stuff to do in the town, so I don’t think I will be missing the extra day. It is 26 students in total, so it doesn’t take long to get the hang of names. Besides orientation, a few of us went to a bouldering gym nearby - it was pretty fun, and met some cool guys, but we had to communicate with plenty of hand gestures.
January 29th #
More orientation. This was largely sitting through presentations about the academic side of the semester, with introduction to classes and overview of syllibi. That’s all we did that day. The meals were similar to the first day, but the food is tremendously good here.
January 30th #
Today we finally got to go on our first hike. We went to an area around Laguna Sofia, a lake about 1/2 hour north of Puerto Natales. It was very beautiful. We spent some time doing basic intros for the classes, connecting the different things we could see, both the plants and the geology, to the classwork we will be doing.
More photos to come of the rest of the hike - phone was in the backpack most of the time
As we got a bit higher up, we were able to see Andean condors. They are (one of) the largest flying birds in the world, and the largest bird of prey. They are similar to our vultures in Michigan. However, with a maximum wingspan of 10 feet, they are much larger than a vulture. They got pretty close to the cliff face, so it was easy to see their size. Multiple flew past every few minutes (photo to come).
After the hike, we came back for dinner (ribs and rice).
The Rest of the Week #
After, it was classes for the rest of the week. We mostly went over basic stuff, nothing hard. Overall, I have been settling in very well over the first week. It is gorgeous here!