It turned out not to be a good night’s sleep! Cars were racing along the seafront road and other noisy guests made for a broken night’s sleep, but I’m sure it was better than sitting up in an airport!

We would be making a delayed start to the day to give the other two couples a chance at a short sleep and get a shower before heading off at 10am. However, as we went down for breakfast at 7, the hotel’s electricity supply went off! It came back on around 9am, we were ready so rather than risk it going off again and forcing us to carry our luggage down 8 flights of stairs we went down to the lobby early. We met up with the other couples shortly after, loaded our bags onto the mini-bus, met Cesar our driver and headed off north towards Torres del Paine National Park just before 10am.

We made a few stops along the way for rhea, southern crested caracara and black-chested buzzard eagle and a bathroom break where we saw our first grey fox of the trip.

The next stop was Puerto Natales where we walked the sea front while Cesar refuelled the bus and filled up his fuel containers (there is no fuel supply in the national park). There were many birds feeding and resting along the seafront including crested ducks, coscoroba swans, black-necked swans, rock cormorants and imperial cormorants (amongst others!)

Back on the road and another 20 minutes to Cueva del Milodón Natural Monument - the monument includes a cave which is 200 metres (660 ft) long. It was discovered in 1895 by a German explorer. He found, what seemed like a fresh piece of skin of an unidentified animal. Later it was discovered that the skin belonged to Mylodon - an extinct animal which died 10,200 - 13,560 years ago!

Onwards towards the national park, we stopped for a few grey foxes, guanaco and views before we called into our tracker’s quarters to discuss our next day’s activities. Our tracker would be Jorge Cardenas – his job was to sit up on a high point and scan the area for signs of puma, listening to the warning calls of the guanaco and then direct us to where we could view a puma doing puma things. Through his dedicated work, Jorge had gotten to know the local cats and was aware of which ones had been habituated to humans and which ones were still nervous of us. His tracking and guidance in approaching the cats was essential to successful viewings, where the cat’s wellbeing always came first. 

Arrangements for the next day made we continued on to our hotel for the next 6 nights Hosteria Pehoé Torres del Paine.

We had to be ready to leave at 6:30am this morning. It was still dark when we greeted Cesar and settled ourselves into the mini-van. As we drove towards the east park entrance the sun started to rise along with our expectations of our first puma sighting. With each adventure I expect our luck to finally run out, could we really keep up the excellent run of sightings and manage to see a puma on our first drive out?

Jorge was out before us and already looking for signs of puma, listening for the guanaco warning calls and scanning the horizon from the top of one of the hills. Sebastian kept us informed of the messages from Jorge, letting us know that Jorge was hearing warning calls. We headed to the location and sure enough on the top of a hill, at 8am, we had our first puma sighting! We grabbed a few shots through the open door of the vehicle from the road before Cesar parked up off the road about 200 metres from where it was.

We walked to the bank across the road from the puma and took a few more distant shots before the puma decided to get up and walk out of view. We made our way back to the vehicle and started on our packed breakfast. The puma came back into view so we abandoned our breakfast and walked up one of the hills on the same side of the road as the puma. We watched it from a good distance for a few minutes before it stood and walked off out of sight again. What we didn’t know was it was walking around us and appeared at the same level as us on our little hill! It continued down the hill to the same level as our vehicle sat for a few minutes and then walked right towards us and around us again.

Wow! Our first sighting was corker, like our jaguar trip & polar bear trip those first few shots had made the trip all worthwhile and if we didn’t see any more pumas we wouldn’t go home disappointed. Puma number one was likely one of three grown up cubs that had been seen in the area with their mother.

Very happy we headed back to the hotel arriving around 11am. We had a prepared packed lunch which we took back to our room. While I transferred our photos to the laptop and attempted to upload one of our puma shots to our Facebook page (unsuccessfully due to the painfully slow WiFi) Alan went for a walk up to a camp site where Sebastian had told us we might see a hairy armadillo.

Alan’s stroll was super successful, at first he couldn’t spot the hairy armadillo but he did have a much rarer sighting of the endangered South Andean Deer (Hippocamelus bisulcus), also known as the Chilean guemal or huemul. The huemul is part of Chile's national coat of arms and in 2006 it was declared a National Natural Monument. They are thought to have only a population of 1,000 to 1,500 across Chile & Argentina! Alan was about to give up on the armadillo when we started to head back down the road towards the hotel and out of a burrow at the side of the road a surprisingly cute face appeared.

Deer & armadillo shots captured, Alan started to head back down the hill towards the hotel as the wind started to get stronger. From the comfort of the room, I watched the wind blow across the lake, picking up the water and creating waves crashing against the rocks like a tide coming in. The wind swirled and move up across the road now turning into dust devils. I was thinking, “I hope Alan’s not on the road”… and he was! Fortunately he had a dry bag with him so he was able to protect the cameras from the dust and then the spray from the lake as he crossed the bridge back to the hotel. It started to rain heavily as he got back to the room.

By 3pm the wind had blown away the clouds again and it was warm enough to strip down to t-shirts as we drove up the campsite to see if the deer & armadillo were still around. Sadly they weren’t, so we headed back down the hill again, stopping at the road view point of the falls that enter Pehoe Lake.

Onwards and back out of the east park entrance to the estancia buildings that Jorge has his accommodation in. A puma had been spotted at distance that you could just about see through the scope. Jorge suggested we attempt to walk up the steep hill side to see if we could get closer. We were up for that, little did we know the wind was going to get stronger and by the time we reached a point where the puma could be seen the dust and grit on the hill side was blowing at us so hard it was difficult to see anything let alone risk pointing a camera into it!

We carefully moved around on top of a rocky area, sitting for a while spitting out dust as our wind-blown eyes streamed with tears (good for getting the dust back out again). Sebastian tried to convince us that the wind was going to calm down in 20 minutes, but I’d seen the forecast which showed the next day was going to be a windy one (and this looked like to build up to it). We couldn’t see anything and it was no fun trying to move around without getting blown off our feet, so we decided to head back down the hill and left the two youngsters with Jorge to battle it out.

It took us awhile to get back down the hill side as we walked slowly with the oldest member of the group. When we were back at the Estancia the puma had sat up so Alan managed to get a distance shot with his camera. We got back in the vehicle and the wind worsened and it started to rain. So glad we had given up when we did. The youngsters manged to get a face shot of the puma in the bushes before they set off back (their return back had prompted the puma to sit up for our shot) and they got back just as the rain came in. Puma number 2 was male.

Rain the one side of us and a rainbow the other, we all got back into the vehicle and returned to the hotel at 7:45pm and had dinner at 8pm.