On arriving in Calafate I said goodbye to my 'friends' from the park trip and set off to find a hostel. Unfortunately this was a case where I forgot that someone (Petra) had recomended me a good hostel in the town and just wandered around until I found one, which was new and clean but impersonal and not so great (although I did me three English girls travelling together who had just made a trip on the Carretera Austral which is the road which runs through the southern part of Chile. They had travelled by bus, donkey, tractor and army truck but had somehow made it in one piece!). I spent two nights there and visited the Perito Moreno glacier (interesting because it is actually moving relatively quickly, although melting about the same rate so neither advancing nor receding, and so regularly has large chunks falling off it into the lake at its foot. However it is extremely touristy and compared to the glacier I had seen in Torres del Paine just didn't have the same feel of latent power but tranquility).
I then moved on to Chalten a much less touristy and more relaxed kind of town with some beautiful mountains close by (the famous one being called Fitzroy). I met an Irish girl there and we spent the afternoon of the first day and the whole second day walking on the mountain in perfect weather. I stayed at a hostel called Desierto del Lago which was a great place with a group of crazy guys working there. While I was there they had got hold of surround sound system and were busy banging holes in the ceiling to hang the speaks from! However on the third day it just rained and the forecast indicated it would be the same for most of the rest of the week. I decided to leave that day and headed back to Calafate, this time to the recomended hostel which was a great improvement and then caught a bus out to Punto Arenas.
Punto Arenas is in the very south of the Chilean mainland and I had decided to go there to see penguins but also to try and buy a car, as I had heard that it was a good place to find one for various reasons (I want to buy a Toyota Hi-Lux, a 4x4 apparently built like a tank and with spares available in every country in the world). However it turned out after a few days (for some reason I stayed in the cheapest place in Punto Arenas but it was an experience!) that this really wasn't a good place to buy a car at all. I did go to see the penguins however which was good. It was not at all as I expected. It turns out they actually have burrows for their young, who when not in the burrow just stand nearby waiting to grow up! There were only a few hundred penguins left, the slow developers - the young have to wait for their feathers to change before they can go in the sea. Then they become autonomous from their parents and all head up to warmer climes, such a Brazil. Apparently penguins can live in hot climates quite happily and even prefer it; they only come down to these cold places to raise their young, because they normally cool down in hot places by swimming in the sea, but until their feathers change the young penguins are unable to go in the sea, hence they must live somewhere cold!
I then got a bus to Ushuaia, having ummed and ahhed about whether to bother at all; ultimately I decided that I was so close it was silly not to, although I was expecting poor weather, bitterly cold, rainy, windy. In reality the weather here is amazingly good, with lots of bright sunshiney days and there is loads to do here. I've now spent a week here and there's still more left. I'm planning some more days here before heading to Buenos Aires.
Until then... suerte.