Punta Arenas: gateway to the Antarctic
After a four hour flight from Santiago – travelling almost the length of Chile and over vast swathes of the Andes – arriving in Punta Arenas is something of a relief. Santiago is chaos and noise, but when you step off the plane into tiny Punta airport, it is quiet and empty. A few taxi drivers wait by arrivals to take you the 15 minutes to the centre of town.
Along the way, low wooden houses dot the sides of the road on one side, with the ocean on the other. Eventually this give way to more port and naval areas along the coast. Punta itself is an old colonial outpost, and it still has that feeling today. Ornate turn-of-the- century buildings sit side-by-side with more modern ones, with the centre of town laid out in an orderly grid system.
The history of Chile is mixed but now Punta feels like a gentle place, with faded charm. The Chileans are some of the warmest people in the world, and can’t do enough to help the hapless English visitor who knows no Spanish, but most Punta residents find it hard to understand why you’d travel half way round the world to go there.
And you probably wouldn’t, without Antarctica. The town has long been associated with voyages to high latitudes, and Darwin visited here aboard The Beagle in the 1830s. Journeys to Antarctica, and exploration of the interior of the continent in the late 1800s and early 1900s, often started in Punta. Shackleton and Amundsen came here to add the last remaining supplies for their journeys South.
And so it remains today. Most expeditions to Antarctica begin here. The main logistics company responsible for getting expeditioners in and out of the continent – Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions – has its own, more modern, outpost here. You can still visit the British School, where Shackleton signed the ledger, or the house where he accidentally shot a hole in the wall (it’s now a newspaper office), or the old British Club off the main square, now the Bank of Chile.
The time in Punta is usually spent prepping food and buying last-minute supplies, or running along the endless beach. It’s a special place, not only for its historical connections, but also for that sense of adventure that hangs in the air; the sea borders one side of the town, and just another four hours south from there, lies Antarctica.
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A live map will be available when the expedition starts.