12-Apr-2003 -- We started our South American Journey in Punta Arenas after 44 hours in transit from Anchorage, Alaska. A little tired and disoriented we headed North for Torres Del Paine national park and decided to try and find 53S 71W. We crossed almost all the way over the penguin colony road and got no nearer than 6 or 7 miles. So we continued onward to our main destination of Torres del Paine.

From our maps we didn't think that we would drive nearly directly over 52S 72W. But we decided to travel with our gps on hoping that by chance we'd be close enough to encounter it. As we got within less than 1K of the point we decided we better slow up and find it.

We parked on the east side of the road across from the entrance to Estancia Berta. We hopped the small fence, only to encounter a fairly deep excavation for what appeared to be the installation of a water transmission line. After carefully picking a place to jump over we found the confluence with little problem. We took a series of panoramic photos and the obligatory GPS photo. However, in our excitement we forgot to take a picture of ourselves, so we revisited the confluence again on April 18th enroute to Ushuiaia, Argentina. We're not certain if we crossed over into Argentina or if the confluence was still in Chile. The local maps for the region are not too clear about the confluence location.

We congratulate our German confluencers for submitting their visit to 52S72W first. However we are proud to know we were most likely the first to have actually located the confluence. We were just a little lazy in submitting our visit. Lesson learned, we will never be too busy again to submit a confluence. One down 5 more to submit!