Un poco de Patagonia

Some pictures from our trip this weekend.  I'll probably write more in the next few days, but I have a paper due so I can't spend too much time here at the moment.  

This weekend a bunch of my friends from the CIEE group and I went to Punta Arenas, one of the southernmost cities in the world.  We spent about three days there; we flew in Friday morning early (read: ~4 AM), and flew out Sunday way late (technically Monday morning at 2:30 AM).  We took two tours because we didn't have too much time to spend (trust me, I could've spent two weeks in Torres del Paine alone.  It is gorgeous; a nature-lover's paradise).  The first tour we took showed us around Punta Arenas and the surrounding areas  (Punta Santa Ana, Puerto del Hambre, Fuerte Bulnes).  It was really awesome being right on the Strait of Magellan; we arrived right at dawn so we got to see the icy islands across the Strait right as the sun hit them first thing in the morning.  Some obligatory God-this-beach-is-gorgeous photos (as always, click to make them bigger): 

 Group shot (kids in the CIEE exchange group and me):

After the tour, we took a bus to a town slightly to the north of Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales and stayed the night in a hostel.  The next day (Saturday), we took a tour through Torres del Paine National Park.  It was INCREDIBLE.  Every view could've been a postcard.  I was blown away.  I only wish I could've spent more time there, hiking, camping, canoeing, ice climbing, etc. (as I said, this place was a nature-lover's paradise).  I would've paid big money to canoe or kayak all around the glaciers in the park (or climb the glaciers themselves), if I had only had the time.  See how beautiful it is for yourself:

This lake is 3x as salty as the sea.  Incredible, right?

Fresh glacier run-off.  I can't even describe the color and clarity of this water.  I wanted to bend over and drink it.

 

Would you ever imagine that glaciers would be that blue?  I didn't.  It's like Chihuly glass.

Gorgeous, right? And finally, yours truly on the way to the park:

There are so many more photos (as I said, every view was like a postcard; I couldn't help but take tons of pictures), but I'm not going to post them here for lack of space.  I've put them on my Photobucket account: click here for the rest.  Hopefully that link should work.  Let me know if there are any problems with it.

♥