Vermont Chile Round Trip: 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.