THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT SOUTH AMERICA AND/OR BACKPACKING

1. This has to top the list: $3 bottles of wine. Not just any wine. Good wine. REALLY good wine tops out around $10.
2. Seeing dogs (and cats) everywhere. Sure, sometimes it’s creepy when a pack of dogs follows you down an empty street at 2am. But it’s nice to live in a culture that is full of animals. They struggle, yes, and some of them starve or get hit by cars, and they die young. It can be heartbreaking to see a young puppy limping with an injury and know he won’t get better. But they live on their own and are not rounded up and euthanized. They have their own chance. They play. They’re happy. And they are a part of the culture. I like a city park filled with dogs and cats.
3. Empanadas. They are delicious. And cheap. And everywhere. You duck into a kiosco, and bam… you’ve got a meal.
4. Fresh juices. Oh my lord. Strawberry juice, raspberry juice, peach juice, whatever you want. Fresh squeezed. Mixed with milk if you’re in the mood for a smoothie. Just like that.
5. Set lunches. Nice restaurants that cost too much for dinner run a “menu of the day” at lunchtime. You don’t get to pick what you eat (usually), but it’s tasty and there are three courses and it is cheap.
6. The feeling you get from being incredibly far from home. Exhilirating. Scary. Freeing.
7. Meeting random, lovely, fascinating people from all over the world. There’s nothing like sitting around a table with a German, a Dutchman, a Brit, an Argentine, and an Israeli, shooting the breeze because you have traveling in common, or playing a card game because you have it in common.
8. Remembering that your home country is just one out of so many. Feeling like you belong to it, but seeing it from a distance.
9. The Andes. Spec-tacular.
10. Seeing new things every single day.
11. The feeling of distance from your own life that allows you to decide things, like that you want to start drinking tea everyday or that you really have terrible sleep habits. The feeling that you get to have a fresh start when you get home.
12. Being on vacation.
13. Communicating (successfully) in another language.
14. Reading whatever I want.
15. Being un-plugged from the internet.
16. A culture of un-abashed public affection.
17. Argentine and Chilean buses. Comfortable seats, movies, meals… you ride in style.
18. The absolutely incredible gelato.
19. Street markets. All the people selling things on blankets on the street. Walking around a city and being able to shop without going inside a store.
20. Just about everything.

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT SOUTH AMERICA AND/OR BACKPACKING

1. Poop-filled streets. A downside of stray dogs.
2. Throwing my used toilet paper into a little trash can instead of the toilet. Public bathrooms with no toilet paper provided. Public bathrooms with toilet paper provided at  price.
3. Wondering if the water will make me sick in this town, in this city, in this building.
4. Logistics: Going through the following routine every three days… buying bus tickets to the next town, finding a hostel in that town, unpacking our things, finding the grocery store in the new town, finding laundry in the new town, booking a tour of the site we came to see in that town, finding the best internet cafe in the new town, re-packing our things, checking out of a hostel, and buying bus tickets to the next town.
5. A lack of food choice. Steak, chicken, pasta. This is okay. But I want Thai food.
6. Other people. Other people using the hostel kitchen. Other people using the hostel TV. Other people being loud in the bedroom when I’m asleep. I want to go back to living with just the ONE other person, please. 35 roommates is too many.
7. Having to conduct every minor exchange in Spanish.
8. All of the exchanges you just decide not to have, because they will be in Spanish. The feeling you get when you decide not to stand up for yourself (when your bus seat is broken, when someone bumps into you, when a waiter doesn’t bring you what you know the meal is supposed to look like) because it will just be too hard.
9. The feeling you get when you KNOW you’ve been treated differently because you’re a foreigner.
10. Alfajores.
11. Paying by the hour for the internet. Really terrible internet cafe keyboards that aren’t labeled correctly or where letters like E just don’t work.
12. TV stations that have no sense whatsoever for when to break a movie for commercial.
13. Wearing the same 8 shirts for 6 months
14. Toast by itself is not a breakfast!
15. Never seeing familiar faces.

Hey, look at that. The first list came out longer. Well, I’m still going to come home.

How you know life is good: Sunset, from our hostel balcony.

There’s nothing like a penthouse hostel. In fact, the hostel is probably responsible for at least 75% of our warm fuzzy feelings about Bariloche. Hostel 1004, as it’s called, has been installed in one half of the top floor of an apartment building. This gives it an entirely distinct feel from most hostels in Latin America, which are freestanding, ground-floor, sprawling backpacker lairs. 1004 had all the usual charms: throw rugs, a reading room, an elbow-rubbing shared kitchen, et al. But staying there also meant arriving and leaving through an apartment lobby, along with business-suited locals. This was new. And its major charm, of course, is that it is in the top floor of the tallest building in town, which provides ceaselessly stunning, 200-degree panoramic views over Bariloche itself and Lago Nahuel Huapi. The view, as evidenced by the free bookmarks with panoramic photos they give out, is the hostel’s main selling point. And even if the place were not lovely in other ways (which it is), the view honestly would sell it. The weather being… well, perfect, we spent most evenings sitting on the long outdoor balcony, with seating for about 10 people, watching yet another gorgeous sunset over the lake and sipping wine. Even we had to admit, our lives were pretty damn great.

Just because: another gorgeous sunset over Bariloche

In addition, the hostel also turned out a lovely crowd of people. We stayed there on the recommendation of Joe, our hiking buddy from Torres del Paine who was now traveling about a week ahead of us, and by coincidence we ran into another familiar face: Sebastian the Dutchman from Punta Arenas. He and we had gone in different directions and circled back to the same place. We also had the pleasure of sharing our time with a group of other great people, including Aussie Monica, British David, and… well, about 5 others who have now blurred together in my memory. We spent our evenings at the bars, or chatting over beers in the hostel, and we learned about 3 or 4 new card games. (We now have a new way to play Golf, taught to us by a Dutchman who learned it from an Israeli… ahhhh, backpacking.)

The only downside to the place, as far as we could tell, was that despite the 2 AM quiet hours, a group of backpackers in our 8-person dorm came back at 4 AM and blustered through the room speaking at regular volume about the merits of buttered pancakes. But they were not the hostel’s fault, and they were gone within a day.

Kevin petting the St. Bernards that Bariloche is for some reason known for

We spent most of our time enjoying the merits of the city itself, which included a rather decent Mexican restaurant called Días de Zapata, a delicious mid-priced parrillada called El Boliche de Alberto, a charming plaza surrounded by stone buildings, local franchises of Jauja ice cream (see previous post about how this is the best ice cream ever made, anywhere, ever), and various places to taste and purchase chocolate Bariloche. Oh, Bariloche chocolate. It is famous throughout the country for rivalling the world’s best chocolates, and we had ben itching to try it ever since January when a tout all the way in the northern desert of San Juan wandered through a bus station chanting a repetitive singsong of Chocolate Bar-i-LO-che! Well, it delivered. It is hard to explain what makes great chocolate great. Something to do with a sublime creaminess that feels like the first time you have actually tasted chocolate and makes you regret every franchise candybar you have ever eaten. Something to do with oozy gooey centers of piercingly clear flavors. And something to do with lovely creative combinations, like the banana split truffle. We bought two small boxes from two different stores (the inexplicably Russian-themed Mamuschka was the hands-down winner) and tried to make it last as long as possible… which turned out to be about 5 days.

View from the last hill on our bike ride around "Circuito Chico"

Bariloche is surrounded by natural splendor, but we limited ourselves to a half-day bike ride around the smaller area lakes. It seems strange to write this now, having spent the last month in cities, but at the time we were just natured-out. After two months of hiking and spectacular views, we just didn’t have the energy for major outdoorsing. So the small committment of the bike ride was just what we were looking for. We hopped a local bus to the end of town and rented bicycles to ride the 30km “Circuito Chico,” a gorgeous, hilly road that circles around the smaller lakes nestled alongside the larger Nahuel Haupi. It was a bit grueling at times (being as neither of us is a particularly fit cyclist) and the seats were bruising, but you just couldn’t beat the postcard scenery. I suspected we might get desensitized to our spectacular Andean surroundings, but it just never happens. It’s always incredible to look out and see purple-blue mountains all around you, and the sun setting over a crystal clear lake. We had a couple of nice stops at the edge of the water, and ate a packed lunch in the shadow of a 5-star hotel (where you find remote splendor, you’ll find super-rich vacationers). And as we crested the last hill we saw the sun beginning to set over a stunning view across the lakes. It was a rewarding afternoon.

One last look at the hostel balcony overlooking Bariloche

It was hard to leave Bariloche after such a great hostel experience (I just did not want to tear myself away from that balcony), perfect weather, and amazing chocolate and ice cream. How could I live knowing I was leaving behind Jauja ice cream, possibly never to have it again? But hardest of all, for me, was looking at the Andes in the rear view, wondering when I might be lucky enough to come back. There was a nearly physical separation tug as we rolled onward, out of the foothills and across the endless, flat plains toward Argentina’s more cosmopolitan, north-central cities.

Adios, Patagonia… Adios, Andes…

Hello, flatness. Sunset as we roll across central Argentina

Early morning, arriving in El Bolsón.

Rather than writing yet another long-winded narrative of what we did, what we ate, who we offended, etc., I thought I’d mix things up and offer another Valdivia-entry-style pastiche of the town. So here, for your amusement, is a brief record of The Charms of the Hippiopolis…

1. The semi-weekly street fair. Three days a week, the main avenue running around the central plaza in El Bolsón closes down and local merchants set up stalls on the sidewalk and in the street. Unlike most other street fairs throughout Argentina (or the rest of Latin America), El Bolsón’s market only sells local crafts. The usual junk–tasteless t-shirts, knick-knacks made in China, flattened beer bottles, cheaply-crafted wall hangings–is noticeably absent, and in its place is an impressive array of locally-made food and crafts. Stalls sell homemade jams, hand-carved serving trays, strange musical instruments, and lots of jewelry. Oh, and puppets. Apparently, hippies love both making and purchasing puppets–we saw no fewer than five stalls selling them. Go figure.

Apparently, hippies love puppets.

We hit a kind of perfect storm for the fair, too, as we were in town over Easter Weekend. The normally tame fair was swelled with extra stalls spilling over into the side streets and carloads of vacationing families from the towns to the north, making for a particularly festive atmosphere. We just poked through the stalls, buying food (see below) when we got hungry and sampling the huge number of local craft beers (generally too sweet to suit my palate). We watched some of the locals play strange, Eastern-sounding instruments, we sat on the lawn next to the town pond, and we enjoyed a perfect early-autumn day. I even bought a three-dimensional puzzle from a four-fingered Japanese woodworker named Toshi. Can’t beat that.

"Downtown" in El Bolsón. That's good living right there.

2. Waffles at said street fair. Far and away the best business in the fair was a cart selling Belgian waffles. After worming our way through a throng of people to get to the cart itself–it was popular for good reason–we each got a massive, heart-stopping waffle. Mine came covered with dulce de leche, raspberries, strawberries, whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and powdered sugar. That particular diabetes-bomb weighed a good five pounds on its own. Needless to say, they were outstanding. (Unfortunately, we ate our waffles before we could take pictures of them.)

3. Autumn in the mountains. Having fled inland and upward from the unseasonably warm Argentine coast, we found the Lake District in the throes of autumn. The town, which lies at the bottom of a bowl formed by two lines of tree-shrouded mountains, was ringed by trees turning deep shades of gold, orange, and crimson. Most striking of all, though, were the intermittent groves of alamos (Southern poplars, pictured below) which dotted the surrounding countryside. They’re one of the first trees to turn down here and they do so in spectacular fashion: for a couple days each year–luckily, the days we were here–they turn a rich golden-orange, their straight trunks jutting out of the drabber shades of the forest like signal fires on the mountainsides. El Bolsón is, relatively speaking, a heavily wooded area, so it was a perfect place to watch the last bits of summer slide into fall.

The alamos on the road out of town.

4. A hostel in the woods. Picking blindly out of our guidebook, we decided to stay at a hostel a little ways outside of town, an HI-affiliate called Altos del Sur. After staying in a string of, well, less-than-excellent hostels, the Altos was something of a godsend. It was new, and clean, and well-built, with hot showers and comfortable beds and an absolutely idyllic setting. Located on the lower slopes of one of the mountains that hedges in the town, it offered striking views of the countryside below. And despite the fact that we shared a dorm room with an Argentinian guy who–with no exaggeration–talked to himself constantly, we slept better than we had in weeks.

5. Dead forest mountaintop sculpture garden. If you followed the long and winding gravel road uphill from our hostel, you ended up on a trail leading to the Bosque Tallado, a mountaintop sculpture garden that’s been in the works for about ten years or so. Using a couple of acres of forest left decimated by erosion, logging, and changing weather patterns, the Bosque invites sculptors from all over Argentina to carve elaborate statues out of dead trees still clinging to the earth. Their work comprises an impressively eco-friendly, open-air gallery filled with strange, and often very good, bits of sculpture (click the picture to visit Jessie’s Flickr site, where she has photos of other statues). It made for an artistic experience unlike any other, not in the least due to the fantastic backdrop afforded to many of the works.

One of the statues in the Bosque Tallado.

6. The best ice cream in the country. Argentina is overrun with heladerías, the ubiquitous gelato/ice cream shops that are in any town of any size (and that do business almost year-round). On this trip so far, Jessie and I have probably sampled at least some dozen or so different places, so I think that qualifies us as ice cream connoisseurs. Simply put, Jauja blew the competition out of the water. With 60-something different flavors, ranging from the sublimely mundane (like their raspberry, which had bits of fresh, mountain-picked raspberries mixed in) to the spectacularly inventive (like their máte-flavored gelato blended with dulce de leche and chocolate chips), the quality and quantity of the selection offered by Jauja was simply incredible. Jessie and I worked arduously at trying to perfect the ideal three-flavor combination (you got a three-flavor min-tub for 12 pesos, or a little over $3). The winner? Chocolate profundo (deep chocolate), banana split (banana-flavored ice cream blended with chocolate chips and dulce de leche), and the divine frutas del bosque (fruits of the forest).

Pilgrims paying homage to the Jauja flavor board.

7. Stunning landscape. What finally pushed El Bolsón over the edge into greatness was not the food or the fair or the changing colors (though they all helped) but the scenery. On Easter Sunday, we hiked to the top of the mountain above our hostel and were given this sight as a reward. I’ll let it speak for itself. As an added bonus, walking back down the road to the hostel, an older Argentinian couple randomly stopped and offered to give us a ride the rest of the way down the rather dusty, unpleasant road. They were incredibly nice people (both teachers at a high school in Bariloche) and did a great deal to correct the Argentinian stereotype for arrogance.

The valley below: a view from an El Bolsón mountaintop.

And that right there is why we loved El Bolsón. If you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, I’d recommend you drop by.

Peace and love.

Driving north through vast, empty Argentina, towards warmer climates

(PENGUIN PICTURES AHEAD!)

Getting off the bus in Puerto Madryn immediately changed my whole attitude about traveling. This was due almost entirely to one fact: it was warm. 33 hours and 3 different buses had safely put something like 1200km between us and the dark, blustery “end of the world” where we hiked through snow and gritted our teeth through mad sleety dashes to get food. The deep south had disappeared in the rear view.

A note about buses: As far as South America goes, you just can’t beat Argentina. They run regularly, and always when they say they will. The seats are comfortable and tilt back enough that you can actually sleep. They show movies, admittedly of… varied… quality. And if you shell out an extra 20% for the “full cama” service, your seat has even more personal space, and your meal comes with a free drink. Furthermore, if you are one of the first to buy your tickets, you can snag the front row on the upper deck, which gives you a private TV screen and an enormous picture window out of which to watch the scenery (or in the event that a movie is not playing, to amuse yourself with an all-too-close-up view of the passing decisions the driver makes). I note this because on the final and longest leg of our trip to Puerto Madryn, we got our first taste of the good life, with free glasses of wine and all the leg-room and panoramic views you can amuse yourself with for 18 hours. Spirits were already lifting.

But back to the weather. Oh, it was glorious. We boarded a bus at 4:45 AM in a dark, cold city in Antarctic waters and we stepped off on a bright, sunny, 70-degree day in an Atlantic coast beach town. Apart from desperately needing a shower, I could have positively walked on the perfectly temperate air.

A gorgeous evening on the Puerto Madryn pier, watching the sunset

And Puerto Madryn continued to delight, amuse, and surprise. Aside from the divine weather, it also had the advantage of not being utterly consumed and Disneyfied by tourism (category: delight). It is well visited, and you certainly don’t have to look far to find a paid tour of the nearby Península Valdés (more later in this post), but there is also a population of normal people going about their lives, and a tourist can enjoy the relaxed vibe and reasonable prices of a place built for its own residents. Many places in Argentina do not feel this way. The main attraction in Puerto Madryn itself is simply the ambience of walking along the ocean-front around sunset, maybe hopping down to the beach and strolling through the sand, maybe ambling down the long pier that sticks out into the ocean and watching the fishermen, maybe popping into a shop for an ice cream to complete the experience of utter relaxation. On our first evening we found all of this to be perfectly serene and sublime.

Wind blowing sheets of sand into the city

Puerto Madryn is also capable, as we discovered (category: surprises), of apocalyptic wind. Deep in a beautiful-weather-reverie we found it hard to believe the hostel owner’s warning that the town was subject to wind. Psh! Wind! Who cares, so long as it’s warm! But on our second day we woke up in an entirely different town. Gone were the gentle breezes luffing little waves against the shore, gone the jaunty step of locals strolling the city under blue skies and the opiate of the ocean. No. We woke up on the second day to the WIND-POCALYPSE. The entire city was nearly suffocating under a yellow-gray haze that looked like smog but was actually a city-sized cloud of sand being thrown up off of the beach. The streets were empty of cars or people, and plastic bags and pieces of garbage rolled across them like tumbleweeds. The main street running along the oceanfront was a painful gauntlet of stinging sand, and it basically seemed like a bad day to do anything.

So what did we do?

We walked 3km along the oceanfront to the aquarium at the end of town. Brilliant.

Kevin leaning into the apocalyptic wind

It was a long, painful walk through the apocalypse. Huge gusts blasted sand into the sides of our faces, and only the occasional car broke the spell that the entire world had simply been abandoned due to inhospitable conditions and no one had told us. The town gave way rather quickly to a sparsely populated oceanside boulevard, with the occasional ghosttown restaurant or windsurfing outpost marking the distane, flags snapping in the gusts. We trudged, bent forward into the wind, along the deserted waterfront, sand and dirt and trash winging over the road under a yellow haze.

Look out!

An hour of this brought us, however, to the Ecocentro, inside of which the world resumed its normal activity. It was a beautiful, shall we say, aquatic science museum. You couldn’t rightly call it an aquarium, since the only actual wildlife was a bunch of starfish in a small pool. But there were great exhibits on the marine life of the region, and a giant whale skeleton. There was a crow’s-nest reading room overlooking the ocean, a children’s room with a giant stuffed octopus (which Kevin played with despite being 26), and a lovely café. It was one of the nicest, most expensive looking buildings we had thus far seen in Argentina (outside of Buenos Aires), even if most of the scientific information was attributed to research done by American biologists in California. Unfortunately, despite the unique marine biological and geographical characteristics of this region, local research is sadly under-funded.

Why should it be otherwise, you ask? I’ll explain. Puerto Madryn is neslted along the coast underneath the large arm of Península Valdés protruding out into the Atlantic. For reasons best explained by someone with any understanding of marine science (aka, not me), the peninsula is wildly attractive to marine life. Throughout the year at various times, penguins, whales, dolphins, orcas, sea lions, elephant seals, and copious waterfowl choose Península Valdés for mating, breeding, raising young, and feeding. Enormous penguin colonies live on the shores, and huge groups of sea lions lay like piles of large brown rugs (if large brown rugs could make burping sounds) by the water’s edge. And because the entire peninsula is protected, it is also a great place to see more common wildlife, like foxes, armadillos, guanacos, and choiques (little ostrich-things). Despite the fact that April is the end of the season for many of these animals, Península Valdés was our primary reason for the trip, so we eagerly booked a tour.

Here, since I know you only made it this far on the promise of penguins, I will let the pictures speak for themselves. Fore more, go here.

Sea lion colony by the shore. You'll just have to imagine the burping sounds they make.

Baby sea lions return from a swim with mom.

Close enough to penguins to touch them!

I don't think this one wants me to take it home.

Cute penguins

And then, after a couple of days of eating ice cream and catching up on emails while we waitd for our bus to the mountains, we were gone. But it is hard to overstate how much our attitude had changed. We had dipped down into the deep south, had our fill of cold and sleet, and had found the upswing, literally. Our northward movement paralleled a rising feeling of excitement and renewed interest in our trip. The warm weather, the success of our trip to the Península, and the generally relaxed feeling of being out of the Tourism Zone affected us profoundly. We found ourselves flipping through the guidebook and making excited plans for the coming weeks, and for the first time in a long while homesickness was replaced by a feeling that there was too much we wanted to do, and too little time to do it in.

So with the ocean wind in our sails, we headed westward to the mountains, and a charming hippie enclave called El Bolsón.

A view from the shore at the edge of the Earth.

We had an overwhelming sense of having crested the upper arc of our journey and, rudderless, we just drifted around Puerto Natales for a couple of days. Still exhausted and undernourished from our journey, we spent two straight days lazing about our very comfortable room in our quiet hospedaje, taking breaks from watching American movies only to venture out for food. It more than lived up to the expectations we had begun forming on Day Two of the trek, back when Jessie and I, rain-soaked and miserable, started to yearn for the simple pleasures of hot meals and soft beds. It was relaxing and rejuvenating and utterly indulgent, just what we needed. But after two days, we began to feel the itch again.

Danger! Extreme boredom ahead! Avoid Punta Arenas!

We boarded a bus to Punta Arenas, our last stop in Chile and the only city of any real size in that part of the country. Just three hours from Puerto Natales, Punta Arenas lies on the Straits of Magellan, a cold and choppy stretch of water littered with shipwrecks, some quite recent, some very, very old. While it’s not the most charming of cities, Punta Arenas nevertheless stands head and shoulders above most population centers in Patagonia. It’s a legitimate town in its own right (and not merely a tourist enclave, like so many other places), and it boasts a handful of older colonial structures and a reasonably nice downtown, complete with a colorful central plaza and a slew of shops, restaurants, and other businesses. The downside to this being, as we quickly discovered, that there is almost nothing to do in Punta Arenas. Some tour companies offered boat trips to see some scraggly penguin colonies, but otherwise the city was a dead zone for foreign tourists. You could eat some middling Chilean cuisine, or take a tour of an old mansion or two, or rent a boat to take you out on the Straits, but that was generally it. And with the weather turning colder and colder with each passing day, with the skies growing increasingly cloudy and more prone to sudden bursts of freezing rain and occasional flurries, Puntas Arenas seemed to be something of a damp and chilly dead-end.

Not that all this really mattered in the end. Because, for the first time on this trip, I got truly and horrifically sick. I had previously had my bouts with low-level head colds and minor stomach irritations, but Punta Arenas brought me to a whole new level of pain. It wasn’t quite Bolivia-sick (when I had a fever of 103 for three straight days and couldn’t even keep water down), but it was pretty close. Our second day in the city, I awoke with some kind of stomach bug and that was that. Bad things happened–I’ll spare you the details. Lucky for me, though, the hostel we were staying in was equipped with a movie lounge and a huge selection of DVD’s, so I just tucked myself under some blankets and proceeded to rot my brain while the…badness passed. In 48 hours, we managed to watch 8 movies, all of them quite good. As best I can remember, the list was: Pineapple Express, In Bruges, No Country for Old Men, Stardust, Quantum of Solace, The Producers, and two other things I’ve already forgotten.

Much of Tierra del Fuego is not big mountains but empty plains, where thousands and thousands of sheep dwell. Exciting, I know.

By the time I had gotten my strength back, Jessie was basically clawing at the walls–while I was recuperating, she and her healthy self had become terminably bored with the nothingness that was Punta Arenas–so we began planning our escape. We had a prolonged debate about the relative merits of Ushuaia, a town on the Argentinian side of Tierra del Fuego and purportedly “The Southernmost City in the World” (a half truth: Puerto Williams in Chile is actually further south, but its not quite a “city”). Back in El Chaltén, our French friend Yannick had given a scathing review of the city, so we were a bit wary of spending the time (almost a 12-hour bus trip and not remotely close to anything else worth seeing) and the money (some 500 pesos) to go there. But some fellow travelers in our Punta Arenas hostel had just come from Ushuaia and said delightful (delightful!) things about it.

In the end, we opted for the trip, not in the least because we couldn’t ignore the siren call of visiting “The Southernmost City in the World.” Tierra del Fuego, the large island on which Ushuaia resides, has always had a certain allure to both Jessie and I. It’s a place synonymous with the far ends of the world, the island where Darwin stepped ashore to marvel at the wildlife, an unforgiving wedge of land which even contemporary Argentinians and Chileans regard as a frontier territory. In the end, in spite of the often vituperative warnings we had gotten from fellow travelers, we simply couldn’t pass it up. We shelled out the money for the exorbitantly priced bus tickets, packed up our our gear again, and spent the better part of a day riding a bus and moving through glacially-paced lines at the Chile-Argentina customs points.

Ushuaia, as seen from below. Tourist shops with stunning mountains in the distance.

In case you haven’t looked at a map of Tierra del Fuego recently (you slouch, you), the international border runs down the middle of the island, with the Chileans getting the (useless) western half and the Argentinians getting the (slightly more useful) eastern bit along the Atlantic coast. Ushuaia is at the very southeastern tip of the Argentinian side, separated from the wild and pristine Isla Navarino to the south by the Beagle Channel (named after Darwin’s boat). The downtown rests on a hill that slopes down towards the Channel, while its back edge is rimmed with a jagged line of mountains dusted in snow. Rugged as this all may sound, though, Ushuaia is a bit of an overblown tourist town. It has seemingly shaken off the last of its frontier roots, with the bulk of the town occupied by ritzy restaurants, up-market hotels, and dozens and dozens of junk-filled souvenir stores that cater to the crowds pouring off the Antarctic cruise boats that dock in the city. Coupled with the cold, wet weather, all this made for a pretty not-so-great experience. Within a few hours of arriving, we realized we had made the wrong call.

Unless you’re willing to shell out excessive amounts of money for a boat tour along the rough waters of the Beagle Channel, there’s not a whole lot to do. We spent a day picking around the city, mostly occupied by trips to two fairly interesting museums about the indigenous tribes who lived in Tierra del Fuego before being driven out–or worse–by encroaching sheep estancias. Beyond the museums, though, things were pretty dull. The town always seemed half-asleep and empty, the steep streets grey and deserted, like the whole place was on the verge of collapse. Still stuck in that post-Torres ennui, Jessie and I simply felt disconnected from the place and, for the first time on our trip, more than a little bored.

We realized fairly quickly that our original plan–to spend a week in Ushuaia and the rest of Tierra del Fuego before heading back to Puerto Natales to catch a four-day ferry, through the Patagonian Channels, back up to Puerto Montt–was ill-informed. We were getting sick of the rain and cold weather and, more than that, we felt like we had seen all the best stuff that Patagonia had to offer. We had made a mistake in coming to Ushuaia after all and, rather than wallowing in the aftermath of our poor decision-making, we decided to radically alter our gameplan. We canceled our ferry tickets and booked a long (looong) bus ride halfway up the Argentine coast instead, effectively getting us out of the rugged south and into the more developed, better-connected northern half of Argentina. It felt good.

Fall colors in the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego.

With one full day left in Ushuaia, we decided to head out to the Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, a beautiful park just a few kilometers outside the city and the only budget activity available to us in that lousy city. The day was a mix of the good and the bad. The bad first: It rained all day, steadily and without ceasing. Our jackets were mostly–but not completely–waterproof, so we were soaked to the bone by the early afternoon. But the day was ultimately redeemed by a number of things (the good). For one, we had an extra companion, a Dutch grad student named Michael, who was a great person to have along. He was sharing a room with us in our hostel and, upon hearing that we planned to see the park, invited himself along. We had an excellent four-hour chat about American politics, followed by another excellent two-hour chat about Dutch politics, followed by a still more excellent chat about the ins and outs of dating in the Netherlands. (If you ever want to know how mayoral elections in Amsterdam are run, just ask me or Jessie.) But the real advantage in having Michael along, though, was that he was really into hiking. Jessie and I had had our fill of hiking in the rain and, were our Dutch friend not along, we probably would have given up after three hours. Michael, however, was keen on seeing as much as the park as possible and, miserable though we were, we just couldn’t say no.

Which turned out to be a good thing. Michael successfully cajoled us into taking the hardest trail in the park, a winding and (because of the rain) exceedingly slippery path that went straight uphill for three straight hours. As we climbed higher and higher, we had the illusion of passing through the seasons: at the base, the trees were still quite green and leafy; an hour up, they were a blend of bright reds and oranges; and, just as the treeline began to fade into the peaks above us, the trees were bare and ice-covered, while the rain turned into a steady snowstorm. After a while, the trail literally disappeared into an overgrown thicket, but we pressed onwards, over a few icy streams and a long stretch of snow-covered bog, until we came out into an open field whited out by the swirling gusts of snow and fog. It was freezing, and our feet were soaked, and our soggy jackets clung to our skin. But it was beautiful. It was dead silent, save for the whistling of the wind through the scrub brush, and we had the sense of being completely alone on that empty, barren mountaintop. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but one well worth the general misery we had to endure to get there.

Michiel and I trudging across a snowy bog. My, we are manly, aren't we?

That about rounds out our time in Ushuaia. We went back to the hostel, had a few celebratory beers, and went about drying every piece of clothing we had worn that day. And, again, we packed everything up (it really gets bothersome after a while). Then, well before dawn, we finally boarded a bus to get us out of the south, back to the warm and welcoming bosom of Argentina’s northern reaches.

Two buses and 33 hours later, we were hundreds of kilometers north of Ushuaia and well on our way to putting our ill-advised time there completely out of mind.

The summary: Torres del Paine (Paine Towers) is the name of Patagonia’s most famous national park (our Brit friend Sanjima dubbed it Torres del “Pain,” and there were hours or even days where we mentally referred to it as some combination of words unfit for civilized company). Located in southern Chile, it is a vast, wild piece of land curled around a cluster of some of the most compelling peaks and glaciers the world has to offer. It is sort of astounding that such incredible sights are literally smashed together like someone collected a “best-of Patagonia” and plopped them all in one place.

What Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine looks like as you approach

There is Grey Glacier, an enormous piece of ice that connects all the way to the massive Chilean ice fields. There are the Torres (towers) themselves, named Paine in the original native language, meaning “blue,” despite the fact that at sunrise they turn deep red. There is the Valle Francés, a gully between glaciers and mountains offering a 360-view of cliffs and snow-caps. There are sparkling teal lakes. There are enough wild, windswept Patagonian landscapes to sate a lifetime’s thirst. And there is the weather itself, coquettish and cruel, seemingly sentient, inexplicable, a force you hate and love and before which you learn to be very, very humble. It is a magical place, and it seems charged with a special energy: these heart-stopping geographies all huddled together in one place, creating their own wild weather, protected by a vast wilderness and their own impenetrability. Of the 150 km of trails in the park, we decided that, generously, 20km are flat. Torres del “Pain” punishes you for the visit; you gasp for breath on the climbs, assassinate your knees on the descents, shiver in your sleeping bag overnight, and wring out wet tents every morning. But she is well worth the Pain.

There are two major hikes to choose from. The first is the more popular “W-trek” (no, it has nothing to do with a certain ex-president whose name will not disgrace this blog) which makes, well, a W shape as it skirts into the major sights in the park. The other hike is the W plus a large loop that circles up and connects the two ends. Like the W wearing a big parachute. This is called “The Circuit,” and it allows you to see the major sights along the W as well as the back side of the park. It also takes 7 days instead of 4. You would think that two people without a lot of hiking experience, who have never done pack-hiking, would choose the more popular, less strenuous, shorter route. You would be wrong. The following will be the chronichles of Jessie And Kevin On The Circuit.

DISTANCE: By our calculations, approximately 130km. That’s about 80 miles to us metrically-challenged yanks.

TIME: 7.5 days. That is, I believe, 7.5 days no matter who you ask.

PACK WEIGHT: God only knows. Though apparently everyone (god included) except us knows that you are supposed to know this. We never calculated. OF course, this saves me having to figure out what the metric equivalent of REALLY HEAVY is.

FOOD: A sad collection of all things small and dry: rice packets, dried fruit, spaghetti, chocolate bars, nuts, soup mixes, and flavorless oatmeal (oh, flavorless oatmeal, how we came to loathe thee). At least as we ate this crap our packs got lighter.

OTHER PEOPLE: In the first 4 days we leap-frogged on the trail with about a dozen other people. A pair of Germans, a Swede, an obnoxious American, some Israelis. These and the living-3-days-from-civilization-has-made-me-weird guys who man the shelters were the only people we saw. The second half, when we met up with the W trail, we were surrounded. The campsites were FULL, with around a hundred people.

ATHLETICISM: At the beginning, near non-existent. By the end, quite adequate. We never kept up with the super-hikers who literally power-walked the whole thing, but we did manage to stay ahead of two German girls all week. (:::Jessie’s pride struggles to keep its head up at this meager accomplishment:::)

MOOD: Shall we say, varied.

Day 1: Oh Dear God We Are Going to Die in the Wilderness
The first day was humbling. The bus dropped us off at the ranger station at Laguna Amarga (Bitter Lake), an access point on our large, circular hike that we would not see again for another 7 days. Goodbye, gateway to civilization. We were both jazzed with nervous excitement. Or maybe excited nervousness. It’s hard to say which had the upper hand: the thrill of an adventure ahead, or the buzzing fear of wandering off into the wilderness for a week with just our backpacks and no system of rescue more sophisticated than horses.

Four or five buses full of tourists unload at this station every morning (more in the high season), but after the organizing of packs and visits to the bathroom, Kevin and I were the only two figures shuffling off to the east, toward The Circuit. 150 people went one direction, toward the more popular, shorter trail, and the 2 of us went the other way. We walked up the road for half an hour to meet the trail, and when we stepped off the gravel and onto the golden grasss, we felt we were walking into the wilds. Two lone, pack-laden hikers heading off through Patagonia. Terrifying.

The Tree Cemetery (the famous Torres in the background)

We trekked through beautiful, surreal country the first day. I called it the Tree Cemetery, because for miles we walked through young, golden grasses swaying at the feet of thousands and thousands of silvery-black burnt trees. We skirted around bogs and lakes, and we had the towering peaks of the park’s center always at our left (where they would remain for a week, as we walked in a counter-clockwise circle around them). But we didn’t leave the Tree Cemetery until camp that evening.

Day One was tough. We were not used to walking with huge, heavy packs, and though we only hiked 5 hours we were spent. Our shoulders and hips grumbled in places we’d never asked them to do any hard work before. I honestly wondered if we were cut out for the hike, and whether we wouldn’t hike for three days straight into the wilderness only to collapse there, unable to go forward or back. We stumbled into a mosquito-ridden campsite in the early evening, under a cloudy sky shot through with shafts of late-day sun. The air was pregnant with rain that seemed to always fall somewhere else, and a pair of rainbows followed us for the last kilometer. We camped that night with a hndful of other trekkers: two German girls we’d leapfrogged with on the trail (the only other hikers we saw all day), Hampes (our Swedish friend from Chaltén who magically appeared again at the campsite), and four Israelis. We ate a pot of mac-n-cheese and fell asleep to the rains that finally fell, and hard.

Day 2: Wet, Wet, Wet, Oh God So Much Wet
The second day was so much wet. The turbulent sky that had followed us for the second half of day 1 broke open overnight and drenched the campsite. Fortunately everything was dry inside of the tent, but though we waited as long as we could, the rains just kept coming. After a wet breakfast and wet trips to the bathroom, we had to face reality: We were going to have to pack up everything under steady rain and carry our wet things on our wet backs and go hiking. This, friends, required an exertion of will I cannot properly put into words. Everything weighed twice as much. We were still sore. It was still raining. We had 6 hours of hiking ahead of us. Morale… was low.

misty day in TdP

It rained for most of the day. The scenery was still beautiful, all the more so for the moody, misty clouds that draped over our surroundings like a cloak, casting us in a surreal other world. But it was hard to enjoy, because we were wet and hurting. Everytime it would clear up we would take a break for a bit of inspirational chocolate, and it would immediately begin to rain again. To make matters worse, the back half of the park (the lesser-visited half) is not well-signed and so we had no way to know how far the campsite was. By the last two hours the weather had improved considerably, but the trail was a series of muddy bogs and we had to institute some trivia games to keep us going.

view of the world's most beautiful place to camp

The reward was the campsite. It appeared below us out of nowhere, spectacularly set on a peninsula jutting out into a lake surrounded by glaciers and mountains. Perhaps the most beautiful place to camp, ever. Then we ran into Hampes again, who we thought for sure would push on further than us (being all fit and Swedish as he is), but who stopped for the night, equally drenched and demoralized. So we had a nice warm evening in the shelter cooking spaghetti and chatting.

Day 3: Jessie and Kevin Learn a Lesson About Eating Enough Food
Day 3 should have been easy. It was a 4-5 hour jaunt to Campamento Perros, which is the base camp before the notoriously challenging John Gardner Pass. In other words, Day 4 was supposed to be the hard day. Day 3 was just a hop, skip, and a jump through the woods. But two days of intense exercise and limited food (we tried to be economical when packing, considering anything we wanted to eat, we had to carry on our backs) caught up with us, big time. We each had a moderate portion of spaghetti the night before, and we were slow-going. Right away after leaving camp we made a big uphill climb out of the valley, which lent phenomenal views back down over our campsite by the lake. But it also took the steam out of us. For the next few hours, we stopped regularly for breaks, and never seemed to get our energy back. The woods were lovely, and we enjoyed refreshing our water bottles from ICY cold glacial streams. We also distracted ourselves by providing our own explanatory narrative for the Israeli couple who kept leap-frogging us, sometimes together, sometimes separately, and always grumpy.

But we weren’t just tired. We had mental exhaustion as well, having to do with false expectations. It didn’t take us long to learn that our map’s EASY/MEDIUM/HARD trail designations were laughably crude and inconsistent. But we were still hopeful every time that MEDIUM would equal flat, just as it had on the first day. And every time we were sorely disappointed. There’s nothing worse than telling yourself you only have another hour’s easy walking to do, and two hours later finding yourself facing a steep, loose climb. By the time we got to the beautiful glacier next to our campsite, we just wanted to fall into our tent. Which, after a dinner and card game in the shelter, we did. Hoping we had replaced enough calories to make it over the naxt day’s notorious mountain pass.

Day4: Up One Side and Down the Other; or, The Ecstasy and the Agony
This was it. The John Gardner Pass. It promised to be both our longest day and our hardest day. The JGP takes you up, up, up over a high-altitude saddle to a ridge overlooking Glacier Gray. From there you descend along the edge of the Glacier out of the steep, wild back section of the park. It is a punishing climb before you are able to head down toward civilization again. We were nervous, jittery, hoping we were up to the challenge. So far the hike had been tough on us, both mentally and physically, and we hadn’t faced anything like the JGP.

But we had a spectacular day.

We had clear skies, and though the first hour through the woods was a mud swamp, at least it wasn’t raining. After this we found ourselves hiking through a large, rocky bowl, surrounded by beautiful mountains and glaciers and nearly sauntering under a beautiful, sunny sky. There was some intense wind, and the climbing was tough. But we took it slow and steady and we never felt truly tired. Three hours of putting one foot in front of the other, and we made it to the top of the ridge, a sort of low point like a chip missing from the rim of a bowl, making it the easiest place to climb out. As we passed the congratulatory orange flag at the top of the ridge, we were greeted simultaneously by near-hurricane-force winds and the panormaic view of Glacier Gray spread out below us. It was a magical, transporting feeling.

view from the top of the pass, looking back down the way we came

Behind us we could see spread out the entire valley we had just come from, and below us an immense glacier spreading all the way out to the Chilean icefields. The icing on the cake? A perfect rainbow stretched over the glacier. It was the half-way point of the day, of the whole hike, and coincidentally, of our entire trip. Our own little solstice. All our doubts about our trekking abilities vanished on the tip of that immense parabola, and we leaned into the wind and let it hold us up, letting go of ourselves.

view from the top of the pass, looking forward over Glacier Grey

Coming down was harder. Don’t let anyone tell you that going up is the hard part. Hiking downhill punishes the knees, especially when it is so steep that you have to literally lower yourself down each step. We got to one campsite by mid-afternoon and decided to push on to another one since we still had daylight, but it was possibly the worst I felt in the whole week. I was beat. To top it off, our un-trusty map lied to us once again, promising a “medium” trail but delivering a windswept rollercoaster on exposed ridges, where we frequently had to dive into the side of the mountain to avoid being blown off our feet. Fun, when you’re wearing a pack. Moreover, the trail had to go across several deep gullys where streams ran down into the river, which in addition to demoralizing ups and downs also entailed climbing up and down long ladders, which for the sake of our parental readership I won’t describe in too much detail. But you wouldn’t see their like in an American park, I can tell you that much. By the time we got to camp we were exhilirated, jittery, and happy to be alive.

Day 5: The Stereotype About Loud Americans Needs Revision, or: Back to Civilization, or: The Wind, The Wind, The Wind
Overnight we camped at a site called Los Guardos, which is ironic since no one was there guarding the site. It was just a circle of little cleared spaces and a lean-to for cooking. Some of the campsites in Torres del Paine are provided by the park and are thus free of charge as well as sparse and unattended. Others have a beardy, strange attendant and sell overpriced, dusty powerbars and charge $5 for camping. The reason I bring this up is that there was no one at Los Guardos to intervene on our behalf and enforce The Unspoken Rules of Camping. These, I believe most people would agree, include NOT arriving in a group of 8, setting up four tents in a tight circle around a tent that is already there, and shouting back and forth between your tents (thus through and/or over the poor tent in the middle) until the wee hours of the morning. This is what happened to us. And this is the reason for the title of this section (The Stereotype About Loud Americans Needs Revision), because while it is true that many Americans are loud, obnoxious, dreadful ambassadors when they go abroad, I do believe that most American backpackers are friendly, green, and well low on the list of noise-makers. The offenders in this case, who saw nothing wrong with stomping all around our tent and shouting at each other until 3am, were Israelis. Which is not to say that Israelis are as a whole loud and obnoxious. But we have met quite a few on this trip who have been loud. And obnoxious. Mostly when they are traveling in large groups.

hiking along Lago Grey

But I digress. Tired, we stumbled forth on a sunny day, ready to meet up with the front side of the trail and new faces. We hiked along windy ridges, which was a nice change from the woods, and we had plenty of views of Glacier Grey receding into the past. We skirted its glacial lake all day, before dropping down into the front side of the park and the series of lakes there. We also ran smack into the crowds. After two hours we reached the campsite which represents as far as the W-hikers go, and it was mobbed with tents. Then all day we met people coming the other way (this had only happened once in our first 4 days), and people who were clearly doing one- or two-day hikes. They smelled nice. Their clothes were clean. Who were these people? We did enjoy meeting a very nice American, Joe, and his British hiking pal, Andy, who outpaced us terrifically but made lovely companions at the campsites for the next few days. Andy, a marathon runner, and Joe, a… well, a man capable of keeping up with a marathon runner… consistently left later than us in the mornings, passed us power-walking around lunch, and were cleaning up their dinner plates by the time we reached camp. I think they hiked the entire W in something like 20 hours of walking. They were champs.

trail shot, along windy ridges

Another feature of our 5th day was high winds. We had experienced them the previous afternoons on the same exposed ridges over Lago Grey, forcing us to dive for cover. Much in the same way the trails in Torres del Paine are either up or down, never flat, the wind is either knocking you over or eerily still. Often you can hear the wind moving toward you like a train, so you know when it’s going to hit. Other times it just appears and you barely have time to plant both feet on the ground. Then, just like that, it’s gone. Silence.

We made camp on day 5 at Italia, packed in with 100 of our closest friends. We were excited to be nestled in the cradle of the Torres again, eager to see the big-money sights over the next couple of days. And though we weren’t thrilled to be around so many other people, we knew it augured the end of our hike, which meant showers. And beer.

Day 6: If I Never See Plain Oatmeal Again It Will Be Too Soon; or, Our First Taste of Snow; or, How We Almost Quit Camping
Yep, the food is getting old. Word to the wise: if you plan to go multi-day hiking, and you’re thinking that a big old bag of plain oatmeal is a hearty, efficient way to take care of all of your breakfasts, you are not wrong. But whatever you do, pack some sugar. At this point we were developing rich fantasies about the meals we would have back in Puerto Natales in 2 days’ time.

After forcing as many spoonfuls of plain oatmeal into our mouths as we possibly could, and chugging our black instant coffee, we set off in high spirits. Today we were doing an up-and-back hike through Valle Francés, which meant WE COULD LEAVE OUR PACKS AT CAMP! This was our first day in almost a week not wearing a giant suitcase on our backs, and it felt great. We didn’t even really care that Valle Francés, one of the major destinations in the park, was mostly misted in. It added mytique. We practically bounced over wet rocks and through dripping forests. Around us the normally majestic sights like the glacier just to our left and the towers looming over our right, were ominous and silver-yellow. Deeper into the valley it began to snow lightly. And when we made it to the clearing with the best views, we had to make a mad dash through the sleet to reach cover again. Knowing how capricious the Patagonian weather is, we waited here for 20 minutes and did catch some lovely views of the peaks. But the weather didn’t really clear off until later that morning. Oh well.

gloomy day in Valle Francés

One of the things that is interesting about the weather in Torres del Paine is that it often simply stays put. A small storm system will form over a mountain or a valley and just kind of get stuck. So weather doesn’t follow you. You move in and out of it. You can look ahead and see there’s a storm 2km away, and you just walk into it and walk out the other side. Of course, other times it hunts you down and pins you under a surprise rain. So there’s not really a system.

After our day-hike we packed up camp, ate lunch, and headed down toward the lakes. We had some windy stretches along rocky beaches, where you could watch the gusts of wind move huge sheets of water across the lake surfaces. And we arrived at a rather exposed campsite catching all the winds coming up off the lakes. It was one of the privately-run sites, so there was a bar and restaurant and hotel, all overpriced, and they had placed their own rental tents in the only really viable campsites. We chose the best one we could find but the ground was all stones, and after bending 4 tent pegs Kevin was teetering very close to breaking our vow not to sleep in any of the refugios. We hated the thought of succumbing to the capitalist enterprise, and so we decided to stick it out (soothed by the thought that if it started to pour we would just run inside). However, we did augment our soup dinner by sharing one of the three-course meals in the restaurant. It was a warm room, filled with people and chatter and beers, and we gave into it happily. It was the first time we were really “indoors” in 6 days, and it felt great. Our bellies and our souls were filled.

Day 7: Can We Just Go Home Now?; or, A Beautiful Day and a Miserable, Frigid Night
Day 7 was a gorgeous day. We woke up refreshed and well-fed. The wind was gone, and the sun was already promising a warmer, cheerier day. Which indeed we had. The hike was a lovely, rolling stroll over the green lake-side hills. We always had water to our right and frequently had lovely views of the valleys below and in front of us. For the first time all week, the weather and the trail both cooperated to allow us to see the trail stretching out in front of us, thus not surprising us with nasty upward climbs there’s no way to see coming. We stripped down to T-shirts and shorts and nearly sauntered for most of the day.

what a gorgeous day in Patagonia looks like

It’s a good thing we had this weather, because day 7 was a mental hill to be climbed. We hiked right past the park exit, where we could have gone another 2km to freedom and beer. We wanted it. We could taste it. Had it been raining, well… the blog might end right here. But the weather lifted our spirits and carried us into the valley below Torres del Paine, the towers themselves.

Of course, we walked right into a storm system stubbornly hugging the Torres. The skies grew dark and windy, and by the time we made the last ascent through the woods to the campsite, it was downright raining. This was a kick in the rear. We had just climbed up for three hours to get to the base of the Torres, the namesake of the park, after 7 days of not showering and eating tasteless gruel, and here we were, setting up camp in the rain, under a storm that showed no signs of leaving. To make matters worse, our rental tent finally let go its tenuous grasp on the label “waterproof” and began to soak through thouroughly from almost all sides.

The idea is that you camp here, a mere 45-minute climb from the Torres, and go up there before sunrise the next morning. But as we went to sleep on a bed of trashbags, shivering in the lowest temperatures of the week, knowing we were supposed to wake up in a few hours and hike in the dark, we felt bleak.

Day 8: The Clouds Part, The Sun Smiles on Us All
We passed a very cold night. Somewhere in the wee hours the rain stopped, but the cold dropped into our bones. Even wearing all of my clothes (including two thermals, a vest, a jacket, and a sweater) I couldn’t sleep. Around 3am we lit the camp stove in the tent to generate some heat, but this was no match for the pervasive, black cold, and it fizzled away again almost instantly. So when we awoke at 6:20 am, having overslept our alarm clock, it took a lot to get out of the sleeping bag. Really, the only thing that did it for me was knowing from a week’s worth of experience that the only way to get warm again is to hike.

Torres del Paine in fresh snow

But, my oh my, was it worth it. When we stumbled out of the tree-covered campsite, we discovered the reason we had passed such a cold night: the rain had turned to snow. In the pre-dawn, on the side of a mountain, everything was covered in a humming, silvery glow. Somewhere between a dusting and an inch had fallen, leaving everything just covered over in a fluffy powder. Of course, this also made the hiking more difficult, as the trail was both buried and slippery.

But the hike would have been difficult anyway. Sleepless, after 7 days of hiking and poor eating, with no breakfast in our bellies, the 45-minute ascent to the Torres was easily the hardest section of the entire week. We were racing the sunrise, as we wanted to see the first light on the towers (which lights them up bright red). So we were trying to go fast on an empty tank, and I really thought I might collapse or vomit.

We missed the first first light (because we had overslept by 20 minutes), but we saw it as we were approaching, and the Towers turned bright pink. Then we arrived in time to watch golden shafts of light strike the peaks and move across the fresh snow, casting a glow over everything and reflecting off of the lake underneath. The handful of other campers who had chosen this early morning hike with us made a perfect set of 10 companions for one of the most memorable surises of my life. The skies were blue and clearing, and the snow was like a magical reward for our suffering through the previous night’s rain. It had literally transformed from something ugly to something beautiful, and we felt fortunate not only to have seen the Towers at all, but to have seen them so beautiful. It was the perfect capstone to the week.

the Torres themselves, in first morning light (see more photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizacole/sets/72157617179680075/)

the dirtiest i have ever been while drinking a beer

Then… well, then we packed up camp and made it back down to the lodge in sprinter-fashion, pushed on by a desire to make the afternoon bus and the taste of beer nearly real on our tongues. Most of the return trip was downhill, so we let our momentum carry us and watched an afternoon storm cloud over the Towers behind us. As the rains chased us to the finish line we felt grateful to have gotten so lucky, to have had a beautiful window of time up there. And well, the beer at the lodge while we waited for the bus… was divine.

The Aftermath
For days now we had had grand plans about what we would do back in the “big city” of Puerto Natales. Since Day 8 was a half-day of hiking, we had time for two dinners in civilization. It was tough to choose between eating and showering for a first option, but after we dropped off the camping gear the siren call of the churrasco was just too strong. We collapsed in front of our TV with two giant steak sandwiches covered in guacamole and aji sauce. I think… no, I know… that was the best sandwich I have EVER, ever eaten. Two showers and a couple of beers later, we were ready for round two and we went out for pizza at a terriffic place called La Mesita. We then wrapped the evening up with celebratory drinks at Puerto Natales’ Irish pub with 6 or 8 of the lovely people we had shared the trail with. Even Hampes, our Swedish friend who finished the trail a full day earlier than us, and who we hadn’t seen since day 2 (and frankly never expected to see again) happened by. It was a tame evening (the exhaustion really beginning to set in), but possibly one of the most rewarding and satisfying of my life.

the freshly showered and fed gang, out for drinks

After this high came the long monotonous low that Kevin will tell you about. Torres del Paine was a trial, a reward, a bitch, and an incredible high. We felt accomplished, and we had seen truly incredible things. It really was the apex of our parabola, literally and emotionally, and we wouldn’t come close to it for quite some while.

The right half of the Perito Moreno Glacier.

Back in El Chaltén, one of the other guests in the hostel gave us a great piece of advice for visiting the glacier. Most tour buses, he explained, leave at the same time and charge the same price, a cost which does not included the additional park entry fee. The problem with the tours is that everyone gets there at the same time, so you have to jostle for room along the viewing platforms on the hill above the glacier, elbowing elderly Korean tourists out of the way every time you want to snap a shot of the ice calving. He suggested instead to do as he and some friends had done: rent a car, leave before dawn (thus dodging the entrance fee for the park), and arrive in time to watch the sun rise over the glacier, thus beating the hordes thronging off the tour buses.

So, after spending an afternoon pounding the pavement in El Calafate in search of the cheapest rental possible, we ended up booking a Fiat hatchback with Alex and Yannick for the following day. Unfortunately for our German friend, Alex was elected driver by default: I can’t drive stick (oh, the shame!), Jessie’s driver’s license was expired, and Yannick was worried that, after driving in New Zealand for the last three years, he might drive on the wrong side of the road and kill us all. Luckily for us, Alex was a whiz with our little white car and, despite the often inpenetrable logic concerning right-of-way here in Argentina, we escaped the day unscathed. But I’m getting well ahead of myself.

We got up a little after 5:00 a.m., doing our best to tread lightly and avoid waking the very nice German couple sharing our dorm room with us. We drove through the deserted streets of the town and made our way westward along the (thankfully paved) highway under a dark, moonless night and a blanket of stars. The drive proved unexpectedly treacherous, as literally hundreds of Patagonians hares dashed back and forth along the road as we went, popping up in front of the car just as we rounded turns and scurrying off into the surrounding brush. (As far as we could tell, they slept on the asphalt during the night because it traps heat more than the barren Patagonian countryside in these parts.) Miraculously, Alex managed to only clip one of the suicidal bunnies–no small feat, relative to the dozens who sprinted across the road in front of us, but sad nonetheless. I think I saw him–the rabbit, not Alex, thank God–scamper off into the darkness behind us, so I’ll just hope for the best.

As the American guy back in El Chaltén promised, we arrived at the entrance to the National Park well before the guard station was open. There were only three other cars in front of us in the parking lot when we piled out a little after 6:30 a.m. and the park seemed otherwise deserted. Unsurprising for a park famous for the enormous chunk of ice in its center, it was quite cold, especially when the wind picked up. Donning our hats, gloves, sweaters, and jackets, we scarfed down a bit of breakfast and set off just as the sky began to lighten.

The moon setting just as the sun rises.

It’s hard to describe that first view of the glacier. For one thing, the glacier is just  vast, both widthwise and lengthwise, almost to the point of incomprehensibility. It’s wedged between two spiny, snow-covered lines of mountains and it almost vanishes into the horizon, a line obscured by low-hanging clouds and the shadows of the surrounding peaks. As you stand there pondering the millenia of small accumulations and imperceptible movements that have led to you seeing the glacier right there, right then, the scale of the thing slowly dawns on you as you watch comparably tiny (to the glacier) but massive (to you) icebergs drift lazily along the waterways below–it wasn’t until we saw a three-story tour boat approach the face of the glacier that we realized just how enormous the sheet of ice is. The whole experience was compounded by the absence of other people, save for a handful of early risers like us, and the constantly-shifting shades of light that crept slowly over the face of the glacier, eventually breaking over the mountain and lighting up the thicker ice of the glacier in luminous blues, grays, and purples.

Partial view of the glacier around 7:30 AM, just as the sun crested the mountains behind us.

The park, subsidized by the 60 peso entry fee that the government charges the hundreds of thousands of tourists who enter every year (but not us!), is more or less an elaborate series of catwalks and gangways along a hillside overlooking the glacier. We poked along in the half-light, taking literally hundreds of pictures from every possible vantage point and complaining liberally about the cold. Every now and again, a solitary condor would sweep over our heads and teeter towards the glacier in a vista fit for a Quintessential Patagonian Postcard. People began to fill the surrounding walkways in first a slow trickle and then a steady stream just as the sun finally peeked over the distant mountain ridges and through the thick clouds that speckled the sky. Then, as the full light hit the face of the glacier, Perito Moreno began creaking ominously.

The "snout" of the glacier. You can just make out a chunk of recently-calved ice in the center of the picture. (Click for enlargement)

It flirts with paradox to say so, but Perito Moreno is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world. It’s size, relative to the pitch of the mountain from which it is slowly carving its path, guarantees a slow and steady movement each and every day, inexorably inching the glacier towards the waiting grey waters below. The side-effects of this movement are largely why it has achieved such fame: Perito Moreno calves and groans and gurgles with impressive regularity, providing us gawking tourists with a loud and sublime spectacle well worth the price of admission (well, not in our case, I guess).

As the face of the glacier warmed in the first few moments of direct light, several enormous, tooth-like pieces of ice began tipping precipitously toward the water. Moments later, after giving off a series of unearthly warning sounds much like the groaning of an enormous rhinoceros, whole sheets of ice on the face of the glacier crashed into the water below, echoing through the surrounding mountains as they churned up icy swells below. Difficult as it was to watch the 2.4-km-wide glacial snout (according to Jessie, the proper terminology for the face of the glacier) all at once, we managed to catch several enormous icefalls before the first big batches of other tourists arrived. Even though we were all properly armed with cameras, it proved almost impossible to capture the full grandeur of these crashes on film. Such is the nature of physics that, by the time we could hear the glacier’s rumblings, we couldn’t hoist our cameras in time to see the thing in the act. Unfortunate.

The meringue-like surface of the glacier. Those spires are probably 150 yards high, just to give you a sense of the scale.

As the morning pressed on and the crowds became thicker, the crashes became more and more intermittent, peetering out to a series of promising but ultimately unfulfilling churnings in the water below the glacier. Alex, who was perhaps more of a photo junkie than Jessie, remained stalwart in his desire to photograph the glacier calving on a grand scale. It was then with no small effort that the three of us–Yannick, Jessie, and I–finally talked Alex down from the viewing platforms after nearly six hours at the glacier. It may come as a surprise to you, but a body can only spend so long looking at a chunk of ice wedged between a couple of mountains.

Having successfully coaxed Alex back into the driver’s seat of ye ol’ Fiat, we realized that we had a good four hours and 150 kms on our hands before we had to get the car back to the rental place. So, while Yannick, Jessie, and I all promptly blacked out, Alex diligently drove us along a winding, bumpy road to a nearby lake in the midst of the red-and-yellow tinted Patagonian countryside. It was pretty–I won’t continue to wallop you with description. But on the way back, we stopped for a couple of great photo ops: Jessie and Alex sidled up to a roadside herd of guanacos (think deer-llama hybrid); we took a group picture with our ever-more-beaten-up Fiat (the roads were unkind to it); and Alex took an obligatory Jessie-and-Kevin-joyously-jumping picture (apparently a favorite move of Germans with cameras).

We rounded off our spectacular day with some wine in the hostel, a kind of informal farewell to Alex and Yannick who were heading in very different directions from the two of us. After a few last games of Sh·thead, our staple game from our stay on the ferry to Puerto Chacabuco, we bid adieu to our erstwhile but terribly delightful European companions and settled in for some much-needed sleep. The following morning, we packed off to Puerto Natales, a last jag into Chile and the gateway to the jewel in our South America Traveler Crowns: Torres del Paine National Park. NB: Oh, and those crowns are real, not metaphorical, which is probably why we make so few friends down here.

Paz y amor.

File photo of Ugly American Guy (Note: May not depict actual U.A.G.).

And it gets better. When we arrived in the town of Perito Moreno, the bus pulled into the only bus station in town, a place that was more or less a gas station with a couple of bus company offices along one side. But when Mr. McLoudpants realized that it was two kilometers outside of town–and not in the town, like only a handful of bus stations in Argentina–he pitched a fit in a mix of very poor Spanish and curse-laden English, yelling at the bus driver from the middle of the bus and, in doing so, setting back American foreign policy in South America for dozens of years. He was finally coaxed off the bus and, still beet-red from yelling, went into the bus station to buy tickets to go south. And it gets better yet. As I waited outside with our bags, I again heard a string of invective in lousy Spanish and colorful English spew forth from one of the offices. Jessie, who had gone inside to buy our tickets, had a front row seat: apparently, Señor Jerkface was displeased with the cost of the bus ticket (the cost of transportation more or less doubles when you enter Patagonia, as most of the transport is geared almost entirely towards the tourist crowd), so he decided his best choice of action was to yell loudly at some poor bus station attendant. Then, with much hullaballoo, he bought the ticket anyways. So, yet again, we got to hear him complain for an entire bus ride–about the cost of the ticket, the lack of space, the price of food at the place we stopped to eat–though this one, at 15 hours, offered him more opportunity. Needless to say, the rest of the bus, us included, were ready to string him up from the nearest telephone pole. It was nothing short of a blessing when we got off the bus in El Chaltén and he and his wife stayed on.

The moral of the story, though, is not what you might think. Americans here–or, I should say, all the Americans that we’ve met so far–are on the opposite end of the spectrum from Captain Grumpenyeller. In our months of traveling in Latin America, both on this trip and in previous expeditions, the American caricature has not held true. I raise the specter of this entirely unfortunate encounter as the major exception to how most Americans in Latin America behave: as a rule, the North American travelers who find their way here tend to be more relaxed, intelligent, politically-informed, and culturally-knowledgeable than a good number of the other tourists that stop here as a midpoint on their around-the-world trips. Granted, the people who choose these countries as a travel destination are, I regret to say, not representative of the U.S. as a whole; nonetheless, I think that the real-life Americans who come here get a bad reputation before they even step foot on the land. (The loud ones, the ones who tend to complain the most, the ones who speak the least Spanish and do the least to fit in…well, that crowd tends to be comprised of mostly Israelis and Brits. Not that all Israelis and all British tourists go that way. But there’s certainly a trend. Sorry. I don’t mean to throw stones. And, if you’re British or Israeli and you’re reading this, know that I’m not referring to you.)

So, consider this my defense of American backpackers in South America. But on to greener pastures.

The big sky and empty landscape along Ruta 40, the long and bumpy road through Patagonia

Despite the presence of the Ugly Americans, the long and bumpy bus ride south proved a delight, not in the least because we had the good fortune of getting on the same south-bound bus as Alex and Yannick, our two delightful companions from the Ferry of Doom and Coyhaique. They had passed the intervening week traveling around the Lago General Carrerra by land, so they arrived in Chile Chico soon after us and, by a stroke of luck, were already on board the bus that stopped to pick us up in Perito Moren0.

After an interminably long, somewhat sleepless night aboard the bus–the gravel roads guaranteed that we never slept for more than a couple hours at a stretch–we finally arrived in El Chaltén a little before dawn and were promptly kicked off the bus on a cold, dark, and windy street. A fellow traveler pointed us to a hostel just a block from where we were and, sleep-deprived as we were, we found it no small hassle to tramp up the street and book a room, where we promptly fell back asleep. We ended up sharing a 4-bed dorm with Alex and Yannick who, ever more adventurous than the two of us, woke up in the late morning and dashed off to explore the adjoining national park; conversely, Jessie and I dozed until well into the afternoon.

One of the trails criss-crossing Parque Nacional Los Glaciares

A dusty, sparsely-populated town with something of a frontier feel to it, El Chaltén’s primary (and one might say sole) purpose is as a gateway to the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, the huge national park that abuts the town to the south and west. After spending our first day mostly asleep and then on a series of errands, we were more than happy to strike out early the following morning to probe the inner depths of the park, an exercise made fairly easy by a comprehensive network of trails throughout the accessible parts of the park. We started in the far northeastern corner of the park and spent a good two hours hiking along a mostly flat trail above an electric-blue river (aptly named the Río Eléctrico) and past a couple of smaller mountaintop glaciers.

The view from just above the Lago de Los Tres.

The payoff for the hike, and our main destination for the day, was the Cerro Fitz Roy, the massive granite spire at the center of the park named after the captain of one of Darwin’s boats. Though the peak itself is only accessible to serious climbers, we were able to plough through a relatively short but vertiginous uphill climb to reach the two glacial lakes at the base of mountain, a pair of crystal-clear, emerald-tinted bodies of water connected by a thundering cataract. Our luck was mixed, though: we managed to beat the huge crowds of tourists that flocked up the mountain not more than an hour after us, but the peak remained clouded in for the whole time we were up there. Ah, well.

Sunbreak over Lago Torres.

It was only early afternoon by the time we got back down to the base of the ridge and, still feeling fresh, Jessie and I decided to push and see the rest of the park. On our way back to the trailhead, we had the pleasant surprise of bumping into Sanjima and Leon again–they had flown to the south and were making their way north just as Jessie and I had been heading south ourselves. So we caught up for a bit and made dinner plans (again). Back to the hiking. We sped along the trail to the equally impressive Lago Torres, traversing the trail in a good hour-and-a-half under what the park map predicted and passing through a series of strange and constantly-changing landscapes (cloud forest, marsh plain, dry scrub, open scree slopes, etc.) on our way. Again, the high peaks on either side of the lake remained clouded in, but we managed to snap a few stunning pictures before a mix of strong winds and light rain hustled us back towards El Chaltén.

On our way back to town, the wind became increasingly strong with each kilometer we hiked, becoming so strong on our last descent down the ridge into town that we could hardly take a step forward without the wind pushing us back. We had been warned about the ferocity of the winds in Patagonia, but this was simply…unbelievable. Needless to say, it was a brutal way to cap off an almost 11-hour day of hiking (most people do the park in two or three days, whereas we did the whole kit and kaboodle in one). As night set in, the wind became mixed with a steady, frigid rain, making our walk out to the restaurant to meet Sanjima and Leon a less than pleasant experience. But the beer was great and it was wonderful to get in another evening with our British counterparts.

Dusk falling over El Chaltén.

Having squished the highlights of the Parque Nacional into one long but brilliant day, we decided it was best to skip town the following morning, heading still further south to the tourist town of El Calafate. And, again, we found ourselves on the same bus as Alex and Yannick. But since this post is growing a bit unwieldly, I’ll leave the delights of that place–and the most beautiful glacier in South America–to the next post.

Ciao.

Villa Cerro Castillo is nothing more than one street. The remote southern Carretera Austral winds up and around the mountains in the wilderness of Chile, and at an unsuspecting moment it branches off into a lonely avenue lined with a handful of houses, calling themselves Villa Cerro Castillo. This avenue then simply peters to a stop after half a mile, having done its work of giving a postal address to 30 families. The kind of place where a child kicks a soccer ball in the dust and a stray dog wanders up and down the road before the sun sets and all living things hibernate in the dark.

Our colectivo driver (the last one in Coyhaique with gas) dropped us off in the village at his sister’s house , who had two spare rooms. We spent a lovely evening watching the last rays of sun punch through the clouds and spotlight the surrounding peaks and rivers. The hazy low clouds and the silvery river snaking off through the valley, all gave everything that quintessential Carretera Austral feel: otherworldly. For 10 minutes a ray of sun shot right into the bowl of Cerro Castillo (the park’s namesake mountain). Then the light dropped out of the sky behind the mountains and Villa Cerro Castillo went to sleep.

sun rays falling into the bowl of Cerro Castillo, which we climbed the next day

We also had the good fortune of running into Alex and Yannick, who had escaped Coyhaique on the power of their thumbs. They reported that Energizer Bunny Guy (the Aussie on the move) had already packed up and headed on. They were leaving the next morning, but Kevin and I planned to stay and squeeze in a good hike. Alex and Yannick were going south around the lake to Chile Chico, and we were planning to take the ferry across, so we knew we would see them again (and again, as it turned out).

the always-beautiful countryside in the region of the Carretera Austral, as seen the morning of our hike

In the morning we arose to yet another magically beautiful morning in the Carretera Austral. The sun lit up the clouds over golden Patagonian landscapes, and we packed up our typical hiking lunch–salami and cheese sandwiches, two apples, and a pack of Oreos–and headed off.

There is a trail that wends through Parque Nacional Cerro Castillo for 2-3 days, past some beautiful sights. But we weren’t equipped for camping nor ready to devote that much time to it, so we followed a tip that the best part of the trail can be accessed via a shortcut through a local farmer’s land. Sure enough, after waiting for a few minutes at his front gate, a lovely grizzled cowhand showed us they way across his farm and pointed us uphill toward the national park trail. The shortcut, it should be noted, is like any good shortcut: it cuts out over half of the distance, at the expense of doubling the difficulty. For four hours we hiked straight uphill, leaving the valley below us at a dizzying pace. The village became a scattering of toy houses, and Chile spread out below us in all directions.

view from halfway up the hike, with the village below

It was a breath-catchingly beautiful area. After an hour’s climbing through the forest we caught a close-up glimpse of one of the park’s glaciers. Another hour took us up to constant panoramic views as we hiked through waist-high scrub. And then we crested the treeline and scrambled breathless up a rocky ridge to the top of our climb.

The top of the farmer’s trail intersects perpendicularly with the national park trail, which arrives at its height over the course of a much more gradual ascent. We hurled ourselves upward and were rewarded with a stunning sight of Cerro Castillo right in front of us, its glacier-covered, craggy peaks melting off in gushing waterfalls into an azure lake. In turn this lake ran off in a river through a valley between snow-capped peaks that was nothing short of Swiss-Alp-ean. We sat listening to the falling water, watching the sandcastle crags of Cerro Castillo flirt with the clouds above, and taking everything in. It was awesome and inspiring to be that high, seeing a gorgeous lake hidden from the valley below. There’s nothing like climbing a mountain all day, staring it down like an opponent, sizing it up, feeling you know it… and then cresting it to see a view you never expected, to see a geography hidden from even your imagination.

the lake underneath the craggy peakd of Cerro Castillo, the reward for our hike

We scrambled down to the lake’s edge over piles of boulders and stuck our feet in the freezing water, and then fumbled our way back up to the ridge. 3 hours of pounding downhill hiking later, we were back in the valley amongst the houses as though we had never left, as though we hadn’t just seen it from the height of a low-flying plane. We ate the best-tasting lomitos (steak sandwiches) I had yet had on the trip, smothered in guacamole, and passed out asleep.

Not knowing whether the buses would be running (a taxi driver told us that the fisherman’s strike was not being negotiated because the regional politician was on vacation), we got up early and packed our stuff anyway, hoping for the best. Fortunately a mini-bus came rolling through town right on schedule, and despite the rather typically uncommunicative attitude we got from the driver–who looked at our confused, hopeful faces and left us sitting on the curb for half an hour without so much as a hello–we were schlepped to the next town, Puerto Ibáñez.

You may be losing track of where we were going, in the larger scheme of things, and with reason. In the big picture, we were heading toward Argentina and then south, to the beaten-track tourist destinations surrounding the famous Perito Moreno glacier. It was just a bit complicated getting there. After Coyhaique and Cerro Castillo, we had to get to Puerto Ibáñez and then take a ferry across Lago General Carrera to a town called Chile Chico. From there a bus would take us across the border to the Argentine town of Perito Moreno (which has nothing to do with the glacier except in name), from where we could get a bus south. That was the long goal, but like all things, we had to take it one leg at a time.

the sea-glass color of Lago General Carrera alongside the town of Puerto Ibáñez; the surrounding countryside

 Our logistical circumstances meant spending the night in the rather small, empty Puerto Ibáñez. It really was laughably deserted. Despite being easily 5 or 6 times the size of Cerro Castillo, we saw only 10 human faces in 24 hours. Places billing themselves as restaurants were utterly shut up. There wasn’t much to do besides watch TV and walk along the shore of the lake–the lake we were to be ferried across in the morning–which was, like all bodies of water in the glacial regions of Patagonia, a stunning sea-glass green color. (This has something to do with the presence of sediment in the water that gets ground up by the movement, albeit slow, of glaciers. I’m not totally sure; ask a geologist.)

So we milled about. We also, as the title of this blog post brazenly gives away, got engaged. You can ask me (or Kevin) for the details, because I won’t turn a very romantic experience into a blog post; this somehow seems wrong. But it involved a lovely and unexpected full moon, a silly dinner in the house of a woman I believe calls herself Muffy, and the most unlikely bottle of sparkling cider you could ever hope to come across in all the world. It was, truly, romantic and unforgettable.the site ouf our engagement! (taken the next morning)

Then, giddy and energized, we boarded the ferry the next morning to cross Lago General Carrera. The two hour crossing gave us a new and spectacular vista of the region, over a lake whose colors you could watch shifting between sea-green and deep azure blue. The water rippled softly like rolls of velvet, and purple peaks surrounded us on all sides. Though we would disembark and head directly for civilization in Argentina (a tantalizing thought after our week of adventures in remote, logistically-challenged southern Chile) we would feel a tug at leaving behind this truly indescribable, magically vivid country. The Carretera Austral was devastating and devastatingly gorgeous.

Our recent posts have alluded to the difficulties inherent in traveling through–or anywhere near–the Carretera Austral in Chile. On any given day you are already facing the vast infrastructural obstacles on the largely unpaved, remote, disconnected stretch of “highway” that represents the end of the road, literally, in this country. It’s Last Chance Junction, before the road simply stops and Chile fragments into islands. It is a seductive challenge for beauty-seekers and mountain bikers alike.

But if you are us, and thus unlucky, or if you are simply a tourist in Latin America for more than a few weeks, you are likely to run into additional… geo/political headaches. The first problem was the erupting volcano in Chaitén. I wrote about that in the Puerto Montt post. So we went around the whole northern section of the Carretera, via Isla Chiloe, which was the subject of Kevin’s last post. This meant boarding a 27-hour ferry from the southern end of Isla Chiloé back to the mainland port of Puerto Chacabuco, a remote shipping stopover in the southern Carretera Austral. Seemed simple enough. Relatively speaking, of course.

We spent an extra pair of days on Isla Chiloé because the ferry (hereafter referred to by its name, the Naviera) was delayed by vague transportation-related problems at the destination port, Chacabuco. We assumed this was due to the erupting volcano to the north in Chaitén, since troubles along any one section of the Carretera Austral can have a domino effect on the rest of the region. Well, we were wrong, as you will soon see.

The Naviera departed from Quellón, an ugly industrial port at the southern end of Isla Chiloé, on a breezy, moody evening. The sun skirted through layers of steely clouds, lighting up the water like a sheet of silver and highlighting snow-covered mountains on the horizon. We were amongst the first passengers to board, so we stood on deck watching the ferry workers direct cars and trucks into the loading bay, and passengers with suitcases swarming toward the ramp.

People boarding the ferry

Maybe because some elderly Chileans wear fedoras and overcoats, the whole thing put me in mind of the throngs that would board transatlantic crossings in bygone eras. Our voyage would not be as long or as harrowing as those, but there were certain omens in the air.

We also, while we waited for our zarpe (launch), got re-acquainted with a German named Alex who we had met at our hostel in Castro and an Aussie named Guy who we had met at the Chiloé National Park. These two very cool guys, along with a very cool Frenchman named Yannick, were our partners in joy and suffering for the next week and a half.

Most of the Naviera ride was uneventful. We played copious rounds of Shithead (a card game) with our new friends, tried not to get seasick, ate food from our bag of unrefrigerated groceries, and whiled the time away.

German, American, French and Aussie, all bored on the ferry

Yannick taught us a maddening and addictive solitaire game, which the five of us now know only as Yannick. We made several stops, unloaded cargo, re-loaded passengers, watched movies, and were rocked to sleep in rather comfortable bunk beds.

Sample scenery from the fog-bound Reloncaví Sound

The scenery was both constant and ever-shifting. The thick, changeable clouds that hung over the landscape stayed with us for the entire voyage, giving everything a surreal fog-bound feeling. Ferries in this area are known for their beauty, because they pass in and out of the fjords along the Chilean coast. I don’t know that we saw anything near the spectacular sights normally glimpsed here, but what we saw was beautiful in its own right–silvery, otherworldy, ephemeral. It was like gliding through a dream.

Then that dream turned into something of a nightmare.

We docked in Puerto Chacabuco after dark on the second day hoping to get immediately onto a bus for the next town, since Chacabuco is a characterless speck of a place. But as we drifted into port the captain took to the intercom and delivered Unexpected News Part I: angry local fishermen were striking outside of town and had erected a roadblock, meaning that once we had arrived in Puerto Chacabuco by water, we would be unable to leave it again by car. Not wanting to strand us immediately after dumping us onshore, the boat crew kindly offered to let us spend another night on the ship as it made its rounds through the local harbor, to let us wait out the strike until morning.

Ferry docked in Puerto Chacabuco, where we both disembarked and re-boarded

This resulted in a mad scramble by the 5 of us through the dark, sleepy town looking for dinner in the hour’s shore leave we’d been given. The regular ferry rules didn’t seem to apply to this extra evening on board, so we grabbed several packs of beer as well. We then passed a rather surreal evening eating steak sandwiches and playing cards on an empty ferry going nowhere.

In the morning we stumbled, groggy and greasy, out into Puerto Chacabuco, after 42 hours on board the ship. In the daylight we could see  for the first time just how small was the town and how majestic the surrounding scenery. P.C. services long-distance cruise ships, which is why it has one 5-star hotel, and it also services regional shipping, which is why it has almost nothing else at all. It is a bend in the road next to the Chilean waterways, a bend that has collected a handful of practical, ugly buildings dwarfed amongst towering mountains. We of course hoped to discover the strike was a thing of the past, and we of course discovered that it was not. Locals told us that no buses or cars were going through and that we would have to hitchhike to the strike site and walk around. This seemed an appealing solution if only because we could get the hell out of Puerto Chacabuco, but the 5 of us had barely got our thumbs out when another local warned us away with a rather terrifyingly serious stare, telling us in Spanish: Don’t go toward the strike. It’s dangerous. They have bombs.

Well, this created a division in our little group. Our 3 friends decided to press ahead and see what happened. Kevin and I, wary of bombs, decided to hang around town a bit and gather information. So we parted ways with our friends, expecting to see them again before long. We wandered around the empty town street, dragging all of our belongings and wondering what to do. After speaking with a string of locals we were provided with Misleading Information Part I: Strikes of this nature are apparently common and last only a day or two at the most. Everyone expected it would lift within the day. So, we figured we’d wait awhile until the buses were running again, signalling the opening of the road. We rented a cheap motel room for the afternoon, showered, played cards, and jumped at the sound of every passing car, like a dog waiting for his master to come home. Five hours of this was as much as we could take. No buses were coming, and spending the night in this dead zone was unappealing at best, so we paid the hostel owner’s brother about $7 to drive us to the strike so we could see what was going on.

(The fishermen, all local, were protesting for this reason: Fishing is one of the major industries in Chile, but in the south the waters are intermittently plagued by the marea roja (red tide), an algae that is quite fatal to humans. Because of this, the government puts frequent bans on fishing, which of course stunts the livelihoods of the fishermen. The government attempts to make up for this by giving them a subsidy on which to live, but it is in reality a pittance that doesn’t come close to supporting these workers. So they protest. Rightly so, even if they caused us some trouble.)

I would love to have pictures of the fishermen’s strike, because it was truly incredible in a lot of ways. A gaggle of drunk and sober fishermen, fishermen’s friends, fishermen’s wives, and curious townspeople were milling around an otherwise unsuspecting intersection at the edge of the next town. One two-lane road through the mountains met another one at the outer fringes of a one-stoplight town in the remote mountains of Chile. A rather unassuming place to set up a blockade, one might think. This ragtag gathering had placed piles of fishing net in the road, and these were robustly aflame. A barrel with something in it was also flaming. A flipped car, also flaming, blocked the middle of the intersection. And amongst strewn rocks and beer bottles, a Chilean flag snapped in the smoke-filled breeze. This was the scene. Our hired driver pulled to a stop 100 yards from the action and told us he could go no further but that it was perfectly safe for us to go on foot. We believed him, but let’s just say I left my camera tucked safely away. So you’ll have to imagine all of this.

The strikers, partially drunk, partially bored, partially on siesta, left us alone. We walked slowly, silently, and without incident around the intersection and headed into the flat, straight roads of Puerto Aisen, which was going about its business as usual. Puerto Aisen not being much bigger than its neighbor Puerto Chacabuco, it only took us about 5 minutes to cross town on foot.

Police, with riot truck, protecting the bridge

On the way we had to cross over a rather major suspension bridge, which is a national monument and thus protected from falling victim to demonstrations. It is not entirely clear to me why people are allowed to blockade a road for days on end but not allowed to so much as march across a bridge that is designated as a national monument, but the Chilean police were there in force, guarding the bridge with trucks and riot gear. When we met up with Alex and Yannick again later they told us that as they passed by in the morning, the police were throwing tear gas at the strikers, who had begun to menace bridge pedestrians with rocks. Messy stuff.

With our hearts a bit in our throats, however, we made it to the bus office on the other side of town and got ourselves on a transfer to the next town, an actual real city and major stop on the Carretera Austral, Coyhaique. Considering that Coyhaique has things like a bus terminal, a tourism office, and a population of 50,000, we thought we’d left the small-town woes of the strike in Puerto Chacabuco behind us.

downtown Coyhaique, with mountains

But while Coyhaique is a quasi-metropolis, it is still just an urban island in the middle of a wild Chilean wilderness, cut off from much of the rest of the region and the country. It is neslted in a gorgeous setting, surrounded on all sides by rugged peaks in a rolling, sun-dappled valley. It is hard to explain why, but the region through which the Carretera Austral runs really is some magically beautiful country. It almost glows. So you are never far from an awareness that, though Coyhaique is a small city, you are tucked away in some of the remotest land in Chile. Just look at all we went through to get there.

Sample scenery, driving around the Carretera Austral south of Coyhaique

We checked into charming forest hostel called Las Salamandras, a 2-kilometer’s hike from town, where we had a happy reunion with Alex, Yannick, and Guy. Things were looking up. We had plans to go north to a national park and south to another national park, possibly to rent a car and drive around the western side of Lago General Carrera… we were excited. So, on our first full day in Coyhaique, we hiked up into town to make plans. This was when we realized that the problems in Puerto Chacabuco were not gone at all, but had slinked into the big city after us on the networks of back-country infrastructure. In one day we met up with:

Misleading Information Part II:  All the buses going anywhere outside of Coyhaique were booked.

Unexpected News Part II:  The strike in Chacabuco, that small gathering of half-sober men milling about in the intersection of two country roads at the edge of a small village, was actually having a massive impact on the whole region. Chacabuco is the shipping port for much of the Carretera Austral, and one of the things they ship through there is… gasoline! Thanks to Misleading Information Part I, everyone thought the strike would end in matter of days. But it didn’t. And Coyhaique was about to run out of petrol. So it wasn’t that the buses were booked up, a la Misleading Information Part II. It was that the companies weren’t even bothering to make reservations, because they knew the gas stations were about to shut their doors. This also meant, of course, that no car rental was in our future.

Misleading Information Part III:  The border crossing to Argentina, where we eventually hoped to go after Coyhaique (since you can’t continue south overland in Chile), was closed for construction. When would it re-open? Hard to say. This turned out to be utterly untrue, or perhaps referred to a different border crossing than the one we thought, or perhaps was outdated news. But we operated under the assumption that it was true for about a week.

Unexpected News Part III:  The road going south to Villa O’Higgins was washed out by rain, so even if you could get on a bus, you couldn’t go there to cross the border.

So. We were boxed in on all sides: striking fishermen to our west, road construction to our east, flooding to our south, and an erupting volcano to our north. And no gasoline in the city anyway, even if you could go somewhere. Things looked grim. After an entire day wandering around and gathering this pile of crap-tastic information, we stumbled back to Las Salamandras and cracked open some beers.

To cut the story short, we did make it out of Coyhaique, by an incredible stroke of luck. Wandering around the next day we stumbled across one colectivo (mini-bus) driver who still had gas in his tank, and we got our names on the list to go south to the national park. We figured if life gives you lemons, wait out the gas shortage by going hiking. Or something like that.

After this, things started to go much better. Which you will hear about in the next post.

Ahhh, the Carretera Austral: Beauty and Disaster.