On My Way to Chile!

I'm starting this post from seat 18C on the 3:28p flight to Panama City, Panama, my layover enroute to Santiago. For months I had been worried that the typical DC winter weather could result in flight delay and had been kicking myself for not having left a day earlier so I would still meet up with my brother in Santiago without issues. I don't know if it's because of global warming or because it's an La Niña year but when I left home today, it was a picture perfect sunny day with the temperature hovering around 50 degrees. If there were to be a flight delay today, it would not be because of weather.

The King of Tierra del Fuego.

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)
(Photo by Samuel Blanc. Licensed under  CC BY-SA 3.0  via Wikimedia Commons.)

From the Atacama Desert, our trip through Chile will take us next to Patagonia.  We fly into Punta Arenas where we'll spend a couple of days before heading north towards the heart of Patagonia. While in Punta Arenas, I took the opportunity to book us on a full day tour of Tierra del Fuego which includes a visit to Parque Pingüino Rey (King Penguin Park) where we'll get to see penguins.   Neither Bro nor I have ever seen these charming creatures in the wild so we're both very much looking forward to doing this.

The Surreal Landscape of the Atacama Desert.

Salar de Atacama. Licancabur volcano in the background.
(Photo by Francesco Mocellin.  Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0  via Wikimedia Commons.)

Desierto de Atacama aka the Atacama Desert is a plateau in South America, covering a 1,000 km (600 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes, sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes. It is the driest non-polar desert in the world.

Packing List. Chile, Argentina, & Uruguay.

From Disney

I was looking for a graphic image to open up this post and I found the gif of Mickey packing.  I laughed when I saw it because I had also just spoken with Bro who was complaining of how much stuff he will have to pack along for this trip.  Mind you Bro barely brings anything with him but his suitcase looks stuffed because he literally just throws his clothes into it....just as Mickey is doing in the gif.  Bro says he does fold his clothes but I don't think so because the contents of his suitcase are always in a mess. Thankfully, while it looks like a filled suitcase, it always weighs light as a feather.

We're just a few short weeks away from leaving for South America so I'm already beginning to think about my packing list for the trip.

Clothing wise, we are going to three climate areas. Our first destination is Santiago where daytime temps will average around 20.2 °C (68.36 °F) - very comfortable.  However this is a La Niña year so temps in the southern hemisphere could be warmer. Overnight temperatures are generally quite mild with an average low of 12 °C (53.6 °F).