Now already 3 days passed since Robert, Franz and I, together with 185 kg of lug­gage have been picked up from home by a private shuttle ser­vice, and brought to the main sta­tion in Dresden. It was Janu­ary 5^th. On track 2 the IC (inter city) drove of towards Frank­furt Airport.

While sit­ting in the train I came up with the rhet­oric ques­tion: Does every­body has his pass­port with him? Within an instant the face of Franz froze — nobody thought it pos­sible but he truly for­got his pass­port on is last visit in Munich. After some moments of being para­lysed with shock we star­ted fever­ish to search for the way out of this dodgy situ­ation. At the end it turned out that the author­it­ies can be fast and flex­ible if the worst comes to the worst. The regis­tra­tion office in Frank­furt agreed to issue a pre­lim­in­ary pass­port and after a short photo shoot­ing at the train­station in Naum­burg and a couple of phone calls we ful­filled all require­ments. Hence, when we arrived in Frank­furt Franz was hur­ry­ing in a taxi towards the regis­tra­tion office and after­wards we met in time at the air­port — to pass the bor­ders without any problems.

In Frank­furt we met Knox and after some labor­i­ouse re-​packing none of the pieces of lug­gage exceeded 23 kg. When we reached San­ti­ago de Chile the day after, we met with Micha and burned our­self quite good at the sun ter­race. Not so long after this we had our the next moment of shock: The flight to Punta Arenas was deferred for an unknown period of time. Half the way to Punta Arenas one of the numer­ous Chilean vol­canos wanted to get rid of some lava. We already feared the air­crafts groun­ded for sev­eral days’ dur­a­tion and have been look­ing for altern­at­ive goals in the Andes, but again the luck was with us. After only one hour the flight was depart­ing, the vol­cano obvi­ously did not mean so much.

Arrival in Punta Arenas after approx. 40 hours travel time: at 8 pm local time — we finally made it. Two big taxi took us and about 270 kg equip­ment to our hostel. The lat­ter might be best described as “col­our­ful”. After the last couple of hours aboard of air­planes and hav­ing there food and deli­cious Stollen, made by the mother of Franz the boys looked hap­pily for­ward to have a good steak.While the oth­ers ordered their steaks I was search­ing for the only veget­arian dish: spa­ghetti with white mush­rooms. Maybe I will reas­sess my principles…