Day 16. Puerto Montt. Still undecided about Patagonia.

The first thing I do is buy a ticket with Sky Airlines from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas. My preferred option would be to bus it in 32 hours at less than half the price, but am too pressed for time.

Catch a minibus to Puerto Montt or ‘Muerto Montt’ (‘Dead Montt’) as some locals call it. I wouldn’t want to stay there because it’s pretty grotty and a bit rough at night, but I don’t dislike it. Whenever I come here, the weather is always stunning, and today’s no exception: the water in the bay is crystal-clear in spite of this being a major port, and you can see the snow-tipped volcanoes in the distance.

I stop by the coastal shopping mall to look for a better rain jacket and am aghast at the prices; I’ll take my chances with the one I’ve got. Since I’ll be popping over to the island of Chiloé before heading south to Patagonia, I check the cinema timetables for the night I’ll be staying in Puerto Montt before my flight. Am torn between “Men Who Stare At Goats” and “Clash of the Titans”.

While pottering about near the plaza, checking the tourist office opening hours and marking banks, money exchanges, laundries and internet cafes on my map, I stumble across a little hole-in-the-wall which does Columbian food, which is manned by the first black man I’ve seen since coming to Chile (Chile’s a bit homogenous). The place does oh-my-Gaad-awesome deep-fried empanadillas filled with meat and potatoes with spicy homemade salsa which is most welcome since bog-standard Chilean cuisine tends to err on the bland side. Am very pleased with my discovery.

My editor told me to find more places to eat, so that’s exactly what I’m doing. I then have my first plate of crudos (raw beef on toast, accompanied by minced onions, lemon juice and some sort of creamy sauce) at Café Haussmann – a popular chain in German Chile. I’ve liked raw meat ever since I’ve had my first lot in Odessa, Ukraine, where it was topped with raw egg yolk for that extra bit of will-I-won’t-I-get-severe-food-poisoning excitement. Crudos are supposed to be a German thing, but since I’ve last been to Germany at the age of fifteen, I couldn’t tell you for sure.

Go pester the guy at the bus station who sold me the ticket to Futaleufú. Explain my complicated travel plans, get a refund, get a ticket from Coyhaique (further down south) back to Puerto Montt.

Catch one of the numerous little route taxis along the coastal road to the port area, where I check out the fish/produce market and note which little eateries seem to be the most popular. Glad to see that the one I ate in two years ago is still doing well. Some fishmongers are feeding two enormous sea lions who have waddled up the steps to the market in search of food.

Check timetables for the Navimag cruise ships. I use the term ‘cruise ships’ loosely here – two years ago, I took the Navimag south to Puerto Natales in Patagonia, and the conditions are pretty basic: unless you pay over $1000 for the four days, you get a bunk bed with curtains and a locker, unexciting food and on-board entertainment consisting of a bizarre choice of DVDs and a bingo night (though that was really raucous and when I won a map of Chile, they made me dance for it. I did a raunchy dance to Tom Jones’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On” and though the only thing I removed was my fleece, ever since I’ve been dubbed the ‘Navimag stripper’ by my fellow passengers into whom I kept running into all over Patagonia). We were extremely lucky with the weather: the boat staff kept taking photos of each other next to landmarks that had always been shrouded in mist before, and even the bit in the open ocean was relatively calm. You won’t get me on the Navimag again, though; it's not so much a fear of rough seas, but more a fear of capsizing. For some reason, I find the idea of drowning in cold water more objectionable than simply the idea of drowning.

Back to the bus station. Find out which bus companies serve which destinations and get the phone number for each. Trying to find out which buses go to and from Futaleufu made me realise just how important it is to have as many contact numbers in the guidebook as possible.

Finish checking out hostels in Puerto Varas. At a book exchange, swap “Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea” for “All My Sins Remembered”, with a positive blurb by Cosmo magazine. Hmm. My reading matter is deteriorating rapidly.

The clouds have lifted and the volcanoes across the bay are bathed in the reddish sunset glow – the perfect cone of the Osorno volcano and the less pleasing, rumpled looking Calbuco. Spend a few minutes resting by the lake with my new canine friend at my feet – a massive part-Alsatian beast known to me only as ‘good boy’ who’s taller than me when he puts his front paws on my shoulders.

Go in search of the best steak in Puerto Varas for dinner. ‘La Parilla’, along the coastal road, was recommended to me but the steak snob in me is disappointed: the sweetbreads are too salty and the steak is not seasoned properly. Humbug.

Still agonising over what to do about the rest of my time in Chile. I have three options: I can stick to my current plan, which consists of doing Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine national park in Patagonia, then doing a little detour to El Chaltén, Argentina, to visit my friend Zoe, before bussing it to Argentina’s Comodoro Rivadavia to catch a bus to Coyhaique back in Chile, and then catching a bus from Coyhaique back to Puerto Montt. However, that would mean missing out the north section of the Carretera Austral, to do which I’d have to get to Coyhaique earlier – either by flying from Punta Arenas or by catching an earlier bus (which would mean missing Zoe). What do I do???