In Patagonia

We spent the day at home today, in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.  We arrived yesterday in bluebird weather from the lovely town of Puerto Natales.  In the campground in town, we met a sweet couple from BC on their honeymoon.  They were on a two month bike ride that started in Punta Arenas, and had recently been here in the park.  Tomorrow we hope to follow their path on the first part of the "w", a 5 day hike that many people do by hiking from refugio to refugio.  They also had great suggestions for motorcycle routes from California to Alaska, which Luc is considering doing when I head back to school in August.

Luc and Werner

 Yesterday afternoon, we did chores (hand washing laundry, haircut, removing road tar from rugs and shoes) to the magnificent backdrop of the Torres del Paine.  We met Werner, a fellow BMW rider, from Lucerne, Switzerland.   He is on the open-ended travel plan.  Luc learned later that he had been a builder of tunnels, which no one told him was bad for his lungs.  To me he looked young and fit, but one of his lungs has collapsed three times (no report on the tunnels).  His doctors advised him to not to take this journey, but they couldn't keep him home.  He is considering hopping a boat once he gets to Alaska and driving home across Siberia.

Kevin and Roland

Roland and his bike

The day before yesterday, we had a roadside tea party of Horchata (a delicious tea-like infusion from Ecuador) with Roland, a frenchman from near Geneva who was riding a three-wheeled solar powered recumbent bike.  Both the panels and his pedals charge the battery, which in turn helps him up the hills and against the fierce winds that were blowing us all sideways when we came upon him outside of Punta Arenas.  As we were visiting, a two wheeled biker, Kevin, from Maine (via NYC and California, and most recently Ushuaia) pulled up and joined us for tea and shelter and the last of our biscuits from Tolhuin's La Union bakery.  Then the gendarmes, seeing the bikes at the side of the road, stopped by to be sure everyone was fine.  I hope both riders got some mileage yesterday from the clear and quiet skies, they certainly used up their reserves fighting the wind the day before.

Since Ushuaia, we have met so many people.  Everyone has a journey and a story to tell, or a journey that is a story in itself.

Fellow French Canadians on the trail

This morning we woke up early to another beautiful clear, summer sky.  By 6 AM we were standing on the trail above the campground, waiting for the sun to strike the towers.  Luckily for me, we had left the still camera battery back in the van, so Luc carried on taking both stills and video with the video camera.  I was liberated from the duty to document our experience and could just experience it. I hiked up to the Mirador Condor for the view and the exercise.    The sun was rising behind me as I arrived.  What a way to start a quiet day at home - exercise with a view.  Luc followed a bit later, and got some great shots from up top.

The Paine towers are covered with snow, and with just a little more elevation than our campsite, you can also see both the Grey glacier and a good part of Lake Pehoe.  The Cuernos, or horns, are to viewer's right of the towers, and are made of separate, slipping, spooned out layers of three kinds of rock:  igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic.  They are always dramatic, but also dramatically different in different light.  At mid-morning, summer ended as high clouds blew in.  They say you experience all four seasons every day in this park.  By noon it was winter.

I settled into the back of the van with In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin.  I have read it twice before, and was lukewarm about it each time, though Songlines is one of my favorite books and On the Black Hill one of my favorite short fictions.  This time, it is more than just the bookish thrill of reading In Patagonia in Patagonia, it is magic.

One of my problems with the book on previous readings was that Chatwin seemed only to meet Europeans: Welshmen, Boers, English men and French women, Germans and Russians.  Oh, and several Arabs. Where were the natives, I wondered?  There are walk-on roles in the book for Araucanian Indians, as subjects of His Royal Highness Prince Philippe of Araucania and Patagonia (a frenchman), but they are few and have less to say than his Highness' imaginary companions.

Our Patagonia is similarly peopled by exiles and travelers.  Their stories are the stories of our journey.  We see few native people, and those we see say little to us.  The Yamana, who built the fires that most versions say are the origin of the name Tierra del Fuego, all died of white men's diseases and "inability to adapt" which I came to understand meant from their conversions to christianity and to a dietary staple of mutton (from sea lion meat).

Windy tree photo

Another one of my previous issues with the book was its obsession with the Robert Leroy Parker (Butch Cassidy) story.  How many chapters of this book follow yet another thread of that story?

The first people we met after crossing into Argentina from Chile, Raul and Malena, introduced us to yerba mate, and showed us (as we passed the strange mug and straw from one person to the next like a joint), where we could go to see Butch Cassidy's ranch in Cholila, near Esquel.  In my mind, the Hole-in-the-wall gang was a story of our West, peopled by American bandits who all looked like Robert Redford.  In Argentina, it is a documentation that their pampa is a living descendant of the extinct American west.  A validation of the bloodline of the gaucho.  Outside of towns here, you are just as likely to see a horse at a hitching bar as a car in a driveway.  Every guy with a nice smile has white crinkles outside his eyes.

My third issue (perhaps the only one that is genuinely my own, the others belonging to the collective memory of my book group), was that I was unable to conjure a picture in my mind of the country he was describing.  Now I have spent a night in Sarmiento, ("It was another dusty grid of metal buildings, lying on a strip of arable land between the fizzling turquoise Lake Musters and the slime-green Lake Colhue-Huapi.") I realize it was my own deficit of imagination and not the writing.  We have camped at the edge of the fizzling lake.  He captured Sarmiento exactly.

Luc and I are currently reading a book (in Spanish!) we bought at the prison-museum in Ushuaia called Navigators, Prisoners and Pioneers of Tierra del Fuego.  It has short little chapters, the first of which suggests that the name Tierra del Fuego actually comes from a map of the world presented to the vatican by a German in 1480.  In one of the three known versions of the map, where the area appears like the spade at the end of a dragon's tail, it says, "si no es Tierra del Fuego, se le parece mucho."  Magellan went through his straits and saw the Yamacas' smoky fires in the 1520s.  Another variation of an origin myth.

In South America before the Europeans arrived, there were no written records except knotted strings and cave paintings.  Creation myths woven of varying color threads is a constant theme here, perfected by the the Incas (who certainly didn't invent it) whose own recounting of their creation myth varied depending on the culture being subsumed or seduced.  For Chatwin, it was clear where Parker came from, so he followed the threads of different versions of Parker's demise.

From the van window

So this morning, fed and exercised, I nested in the back of the van, happily surrounded by books, ipad, maps, guidebooks, journal and keyboard.  Out one window, the clouds licked the towers as they blew by.  Out the other window a truck pulled up and a group of tan young locals, all with nice smiles, went from campsite to campsite collecting picnic tables they rustled into a line, then covered with red-checked cloths and wine glasses.  (I was too far away to see the white of their eyes.)  They built an asado (roast) and prepared a meal for 15 or so well-outfitted  hikers who arrived by bus a few hours later.  These tourists enjoyed some nice chilean wine and a lovely meal in a place Luc says must be one of the natural wonders of the world.  I think they are not so different from us.  They have the luxury of money, and can afford to travel a great distance to spend a few hours in this incredible spot, eating good, simple food prepared by others.  We have the luxury of time, and can afford to travel a great distance to spend a few days here in this incredible spot, eating good, simple food that we prepare ourselves. Perhaps our clothes are not so new, nor our wine so old, but it doesn't matter. This is a place to experience, whether the variable is money or time.  If you have neither, it is a place to dream about.  The towers will be here when you're ready, though the glaciers are receding fast.

Tomorrow, the park service forecast says we'll have another bluebird day.  We'll drive a bumpy 25K to the start of a trail in early morning, hike up to the Base de las Torres and then back with only our day packs.  We'll sleep in the van, travel with Chatwin further south in Patagonia, and in the morning go looking for another turquoise lake.

What is he filming?

Yup.

A signs that friends have been to the first refugio.  Lauren and Geoff?

Top of the hike - Base de las Torres

Racing the time delay

Last campsite in the park

End of the Road

Arriving at the end of the road

End of the Road, Bahia Lapataia, Tierra del Fuego National Park, National Route 3, Argentina.   The most southerly point you can drive to.  The most austral I will ever be.

We didn't really plan to come here, but we didn't rule it out either.  In July last year, when I set up our blog, Luc and I talked about what to call it.  This was about the closest we came to goal setting.  We considered names that included Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, but decided that even Patagonia wasn't a goal we wanted in our blog name because we weren't committed to a particular destination other than to see our friends in Chile.  We were in Vermont.  We were certainly going to Chile.  We were coming home.  Round Trip.  That's enough.  Vermont Chile Round Trip.

Everyone we meet is on his own journey.  Luc is often asked if his bike ride is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.  At the Tierra del Fuego national park, we met a man at our campground, Jonathan, who wore a brand new, over-sized, bright orange Ushuaia tee shirt over his long johns.  He said he had been traveling for 20 months, from Switzerland to Germany, by boat to Baltimore, to Alaska and finally to Ushuaia.  Despite the tee shirt, he was not what I think of as a "been there, done that, got the tee shirt" kind of guy, but he got me thinking.  He was traveling alone.  I asked him what that was like.  "Everything has two sides," he said.   He didn't have much English or much Spanish, he said.  When I decide to go home, he told me, it will be for the conversation.  I was glad to learn that his daughter would join him soon in Mendoza where she had been an exchange student.  He will certainly have some good conversation there.  The next morning we saw his van parked at the base of the hike we were doing.  We veered off to follow the lake.  He must have taken the "dificultad: alta" route to the top of Cerro Guanaco. I'm sorry we missed him, I hope we talk to him again.

Arriving in Tierra del Fuego

Lago Roca, Ushuaia

Lago Roca

 We ended up staying a day longer than we had planned in Ushuaia.  Though we didn't say it aloud, it was hard to take the first step in the other direction.  There was snow in the pass yesterday morning - we look up from the edge of the Beagle Channel (less than 1 foot above sea level, surely) and wondered whether it was a good day for Luc to ride the bike above the visible snow line. We went into town for propane, visited a strange 5-in-1 museum in a prison, then ended up going shopping for some end of the road stickers.  Suddenly it was 6 PM (and a cup of coffee, a fleece, and a pair of hiking boots later), and we were sitting in a parking lot playing cards while waiting for the battery to recharge on a trickle charger.

Grele in Rio Grande

This morning, we were getting our last blast of wood stove and internet before finally starting (starting out? starting home?  starting back?  starting the narrow road to the deep north (my current book)?). A number of groups had come through our close-to-town campground: a few days of hot showers and woodstove, a few days of National Park camping.  I overheard a conversation, pulled up a website from my favorites, and confirmed that the authors of Seventeenbysix, one of my favorites travel blogs, were sitting at the next table.  Paula and Jeremy Dear have been traveling in South/Central America for more than two years.  I have quoted them in previous blogs.  They were my best (and at one point, only) source of camping information until I heard about iOverlander from Astrid in Peru.  The Dears were on their way this morning to the end of the road. We gave them some tips, they gave some to us.  It was so nice to finally meet them and realize that, well, we have become travelers just like them.  They were as interested in our stories as we were in theirs (or did an excellent imitation). We had waved to each other a few days before in Tolhuin. We waved to each other again on the way out of Ushuaia.  I hope we see them again too.

The Dears

This got me thinking today as I drove that we we are all on separate journeys.  We meet a lot of guys (and a much smaller number of women) on motorcycles.  Some have 3 days off, some have been traveling for more than 3 years.  There are all sizes and shapes of camper vans with license plates that may or may not be where they are from.  (Martin, a german, driving a van with CZ plates he had bought in Buenos Aires, told me this morning that they had received a message written in Czeck on the dust of their rear window.  It apparently said hello and wished them well).

This is how bikers lean into the wind

Brazilian bikers at a border crossing

Luc, on his bike, sees different things than I do in the van.  In Ushuaia, he saw a lot of memories of the time he was here with a group of kids and coaches that he particularly enjoyed.  "Here is where we skied, let me take a picture for Marty.  Here is the bar we played music in - Jim played percussion with the forks on the table.  Here is where Zach Barkan went swimming."  I saw other kinds of things: Here are the Andes lined up, west to east.  Here must be the most southerly rugby club, wouldn't my boys enjoy this.  Here is a grocery store where I will not see old friends in the aisles.  But where I found a bottle of wine whose label reminds me of a dear friend we have recently lost.  He brought it to our house for a Christmas dinner, and Luc had coincidentally bought one from the same vineyard.  They concurred on many things, including the perfect temperature for those bottles.

The last Rugby Club on earth

Zach's spot

We overlay the places we go with the people we meet, and with the people we think about as we are traveling.

Lake Fagnano at sunset

Yesterday, we were at the end of the road.  Today we are heading home.

Heading home

Loading the ferry across the Straights of Magellan

Laguna Azul

Roadside Guanaco

Roadside flamingos

Isla Pinguino

Rockhopper Penguin

     50 mph with 50 mph cross winds.  I am probably over rating my speed and under rating the wind.  It was enough to push the bike over standing still (but not while Luc was on it) and to push the van around all day long.

    What could make it worse?  Never ask yourself this question when you are behind the wheel.

    First, allergies - what is there to be allergic to in the desert?   Whatever it was, I can now sneeze at the same time as battling high winds and oncoming vehicles in a "reduced shoulder" zone.  I don't know how long one shuts ones eyes when sneezing, but it feels like a really long time.

    Not enough? Bring on the variegated pavement.

    Or a little rain.

    I was happy to have better things to think about, like the stand-out day we spent yesterday at Puerto Deseado's Penguin Island.  We took an incredible tour with a great group and an amazing guide, Roxana.

   Hopefully my sleep tonight will be filled with penguins and sea lions rather than oncoming Argentinians on vacation!  I had no free hands for photos today, but here are some highlights from Isla Pinguino.

Commerson's Dolphin

Rockhoper penguins

Rockhopper penguins go for a swim

Commerson's Dolphins - the smallest

Sea Lion Colony - one big male for many females

Magellanic Penguins

Just the boys - juvenile colony of male sea lions

Fuzzy Magellanic Penguin Babies

Luc and Roxana

Pinch me moments

Near the Mamuil Malal border crossing.

We have been on the road about five months, including the trip from Vermont to Florida and 4 weeks in Cartagena before the vehicles arrived. Today we crossed from Chile into Argentina via the Paso Mamuil Malal.  Rather than taking the highway road from Osorno, we tried a different pass.  Fifteen k of gravel road, much of it being "improved" (under construction).  Border crossing didn't phase us (we knew to pay the reciprocity fee online and print our receipt before coming).  Roads didn't phase us (dusty and bumpy, but great scenery).  Last night we were parked by a lake near Pucon, Chile.  Tonight we are parked by a volcano in Argentina, smack in the middle of a national park.

Pinch me.

Villarica, near Pucon, Chile

Ripio

Lanin

As the new year is a time for reflection, we have done a little reflecting.  We are trying to get more exercise.  I just had a great run up the path to the volcano.  One of these days we may buy some bikes.  I am working on the zen of driving.  We bought a book in Spanish and are reading the paper more often.  Minor adjustments.

Moon rise over lake Villarica

Friends with mate.

7 Lakes drive

Moonlight over campsite, 7 lakes

Bariloche

If we had to do this again, well, we would in a minute.  We'd leave the TV at home (Luc watched a grainy religious service once when we were stuck overnight at the border between Colombia and Ecuador, but otherwise it is just taking up space).  We would buy good paper maps and download all the GPS maps before leaving.  Luc says we'd leave the generator at home too - I didn't even know we had one.  Oh, and I'd pack another tank top.  As though they don't sell them in the southern hemisphere.

The only thing missing is family and friends.  There are unconfirmed rumors that some of our kids are planning to come down.  No rumors of friends, but we are still hoping.

Not every day is like this.  Carpe diem.