Mountains, glaciers, and wind

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Happy 2010 everybody! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays! It´s been a while since writing because I´ve been on the go since leaving Estancia Valle Chacabuco. Just to jog your memory, an estancia is an enormous cattle or sheep ranch, this one was bought by a conservation group and will link two existing national parks to become Patagonia National Park in about 10 years. Many mountain ranges are protected in Chile but not so for valleys, so this land is important for connectivity of habitat for the endangered Huemul deer and others including the puma. The second week of volunteering on the estancia we set up a new campsite in an area with plenty of wire fencing to disassemble and a few new volunteers filtered in. Way too many interesting volunteers to go into depth on all of them but they ranged from 18 to 33 years old, high school graduates to business school graduates, hippies to businessmen. It was a light atmosphere and we all enjoyed ourselves. The next week we were based the estancia headquarters removing invasive lamb´s ear, thistle, and rose. On the weekends we could go horseback riding, track puma kills with Mark the biologist, or just sleep. Mark has radiocollars on a number of pumas and whenever they stay in one spot a while he knows that it is probably a kill site. So we would go out and find the remains of guanacos and record various information for his study. Nights at the estancia usually involved a game of soccer (volunteers v workers), ping pong, and cards. We still had to camp at the estancia so pranks were still a concern - who put a cow skull in whos sleeping bag or who filled whos torta with salt. Whenever a group leaves the estancia there´s an asado, basically a sheep cut in two hanging over an open fire.

Leaving the estancia on a 20 hour bus to El Chalten in Argentina, one of the workers was wearing a sweatshirt with pictures of pine trees, camping, and fishing and said MOOSEHEAD LAKE, Maine. He said he bought it in Coyhaique. Just over the border, Argentina is completely flat with no trees. The pampa as it´s called stretches as far from the border to the Atlantic and the big highway, Ruta 40, is unpaved. I was actually excited when a piece of apple got stuck in my teeth so that I would have something to do. I did see a rhea (an ostridge-like bird) for the first time though as well as carcasses of guanacos that get caught on the endless barbed wire fences mid-jump.

El Chalten was basically built by backpackers. A tiny town packed with hostels, pizzerias, panerias, cervezarias, waflerias, and chocolaterias. All the things hikers crave. The town is at the base of the Fitz Roy mountain range, which Sarah will recognise as the Patagonia logo. Its catered to dayhikers because most of the hikes start from town and head 3 or 4 hours to a mirador, or viewpoint. Unfortunately, there are no more free campsitesites in town, so I would use the free campsites near the miradors as my base and make forays into town for supplies - this was the opposite of most people, so I would cross the same crowd in the morning and the evening. The power of Fitz Roy draws serious climbers but because of its accessabilty, you see people clearly just off the bus wearing street clothes, flip flops, and headphones. The trails are crowded like Acadia in midsummer and you hear all kinds of languages. Because of the traffic the trail were quite eroded in places and I was glad that at my next destination, Torres del Paine Nat. Park, I would be helping rather than contributing to the problem. Back at the estancia I had applied to do trailwork in Torres del Paine. Christmas day, I wanted to see some snow, so I hiked up to the highest mirador and sure enough, it was snowing. An Italian couple had the same idea and lent me their Santa hat for a photo. The day before I left El Chatlen after a week of hiking, I decided to treat myself to the first bed in a month and a half. I also hit up the wafleria and tried the local microbrew at the cervezaria - a great pilsner which after a 30km day, hit me pretty hard.

The tourist route is very well defined from El Chalten to Puerto Natales, Chile. At the stopover in El Calafate I spent New Year´s Eve tearing up the town with some Americans, an Israeli, and an Italian. It was wild, great fireworks - all of which were just fired from the street by kids. The next day on the bus, I saw Samantha and Tom, who I met on the trail and we all found a campsite in P. Natales. Sam is from Scotland and Tom from France. They decided to buy tickets for the ferry up to Puerto Montt with me for after their 8 day hike through Torres del Paine. At the campsite, there were a couple groups of cyclists going from Ushuaia to Puerto Montt along the Carretera Austral. I´ve met at least 10 people doing it and it sounds rough - washboard dirtroads and winds that make horses lean sideways. When it´s really blowing, you can´t hear someone yelling 20 feet from you, it rips the waterproof raincovers off backpacks, renders ponchos useless, and throws water at you from streams. On the trail, you can hear it coming in the trees, it sounds like a truck approaching, you hear someone yell ¨GET DOWN!¨and then it hits you, sometimes from all sides so that you feel like a joystick. Every year people die in Torres del Paine getting blown off the trail down the mountain.

Affer two days in Natales, I felt that I was finally stepping off the tourist tract when I hopped on the workers´bus to Torres del Paine. In the park, I worked with AMA Torres del Paine painting the orange trail markers, fixing trails, making signs, and helping spot Andean Condors for a study. I would not have liked Torres del Paine if I were visiting as a hiker because it is more crowded than Fitz Roy and every few miles on the trail there are hostels with restaurants so that it is possible to do the 10 day ¨wilderness¨circuit without even carrying a backpack. I had it very easy volunteering, I had a bed, I ate in the cafeteria with the workers, and the work sometimes took me to very beautiful parts of the park. Throughout Chile I´ve noticed that when people enter a cafeteria or small restaurant they say ¨provecho,¨ and when they get up to leave as well. I guess it´s like saying ¨eat well¨ or ¨enjoy your meal.¨ Here are some more little cultural tidbits. Whenever someone asked ´Que pasa?´I would reply ¨nada mucho¨until someone informed me that I was saying that means ¨I swim a lot,¨ thats why they would chuckle! Whenever you meet a woman they expect a kiss on the cheek as well as every time you see them henceforth if you forget they´ll stick their cheek out and motion for it. The John Doe equivalent is Juan Perez. Dinner is very late so around 5pm you have ¨once¨which is usually bread and maté. Once means eleven and apparently it came about by husbands going out to drink after work and not wanting their wives to know so once became the code because the name of the liquor had 11 letters.

The Andean Condor is the biggest flying bird. Picture the biggest turkey you can imagine with a 10 foot wingspan. Spotting them with Gladys, Riki, and Vivi was always exciting because they seem to appear out of nowhere. They can soar over 100km an hour so it was very difficult to catch them in photos as they glided past our clifftop lookout. Riki joked that his conclusion of the study may be that the condors are using wormholes due to how they come out of nowhere. Other wildlife in the park included flamingos, parakeets, rhea, huemul, and foxes. One night I ran into 4 friends from Colby who are seniors and taking Janplan to hike around patagonia. It felt so strange to see people that I knew from home way down here. We got to share stories around the fire before they embarked on the 10 day trek. So after 10 days at Torres del Paine, it was time to catch the 4 day ferry up to Puerto Montt with Sam and Tom. It was actually quite calm for most of the journey because we travelled the chanels protected by the archipeligo, except for when we crossed the Gulf of Pain. Unfortunately, we didn´t see any blue whales despite sailing through their territory but we did have over 100 dolphins surround the ship at one point. I´ve never played so much chess, on regular boards and the giant board on the deck. We stopped at the tiny isolated fishing town of Puerto Eden with which the only contact with the outside world is this ferry. The last remaining indigenous person lives here or lived here I´m not sure. There were many seperate cultures inhabiting the different regions of patagonia, finding separate niches in fishing or hunting guanacos. All killed off by sheep farming colonists.

From Puerto Montt, Sam, Tom, and I took a busferry combo to Ancud on the large island of Chiloe. On the 20 minute ferry we saw dolphins, sea lions, annndddd Penguins! Not sure if they were Megallanic or Humbolt but it was awesome to see them swimming along the surface and bolt under leaving a small whirlpool of bubbles. From Ancud I opted not to do the very touristy tour out to the penguin island since I had already seen them and we just walked along the coastline on what could have been the only sunny day on Chiloe all year. Chiloe has great culture. I tried the famous dish called curanto which is shellfish, ribs, chicken, sausage, potato, grean beans, and pea pods cooked over a fire in a hole covered with gigantic leaves. They also have a strange mythology, you see pictures and sculptures everywhere of Trauco, the ugly dwarf that women see as a handsome man and seduces women. Many an unplanned pregnancy has been attributed to Trauco without any questions asked. There is also a mystical ghost ship always hiden by fog that you can sometimes hear because there are always parties. Pincoya is a mermaid that will save stranded sailors but she delivers them to the ghost ship were they are tortured. There are many more unique and sometimes gruesome tales from Chiloe that you can check out online. With the curanto, we had Kunstmann, a fine German style beer from nearby Valdivia. I tried just about all of the beers of southern Chile thanks to the cerveza fund. Most of the touristy towns have a microbrewery which are usually excellent but can be hit or miss depending on the batch. Baguales in Natales made a solid blonde. Kunstmann and Patagonia were both great, especially the bock but a little more expensive. Escudo and Cristal were the most popular from Santiago. My favorite was Austral from Punta Arenas and luck for me it was on the ferry.

Back in Puerto Montt now resting up for a bus to Santiago, 3 planes to LA then 2 planes to New Zealand. It will be nice to speak english again and to get away from a diet of white bread, potatoes, and meat.

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Photos

A real live guacho
This guys in the Chounard documentary 180 degrees

Fitz Roy
Patagonia Logo