Weeks paraphrased and a diary entry.

Soundtrack: internal and external:
Chilean cueco
Charlie Parker
Beethoven
Radiohead (old albums)
Bob Dylan

It is difficult to talk about such a long full period of time when much of it has already faded into obsurity in my own head... but as before I shall try. After the earthquake I left Futaleufu with a few dollars in my pocket (the quake messed up communication lines all around the country). I was able to get on the twelve hour bus on confidence that upon arriving in Coihaique I would find a bank and pay the steep $40 charge. And I did.
The girl I was travelling with, a belgian, was to my amazement a professional sailor. She trained (but eventually fell short on funding) for the Volvo Ocean Race and the mini Transat (round the world crewed and transatlantic single handed races). She got into this by simply responding to an add posted by a charter yacht looking for a chef - and then for ten years she sailed, chartered and raced professionally...WOW!

I spent two days in Coihaique sorting my self out and then on a windy afternoon I packed up and walked to the highway to hitch as far south as I could. On the way I met a german couple Eva and Christian and a french girl Olivia. I am still with them and we are now back in Coihaique!
We spent some tranquil nights camping in a deserted mountain town called Puerto Bertrand where we met a raft guide who we hung out with. We camped, hitched and bussed all the way south to a town called Caleta Tortel - a town sustained by the extraction of Cypress trees (given their extremely slow growth they are absolutely an unrenewable resource.) Until very recently this town was only accessible by boat, and still you ahve to park your car at the top of the hill and climb along wooden boardwalks to access the town - there are no roads or paths, just boardwalks of cypress.

Diary March 12

Now I am alone. I cannot begin to explain what I have experienced in the last week but I shall try. Here and there the sound of the roaring river is broken by the immense rumbling of thousands of tons of ice and snow tumbling down mountain sides or into rivers. At night in Valle Exploradores the stars eat up the earth in clouds until the edgte of the giant mountains draw a line past which you cannot see. Yesterday night before getting into Eva and Christians tent I went out to the gravel rad and lay in the middle where there are no trees and I travellid in space, everything was 3D. I just lay there on the gravel lost in the stars and the sound of water rushing by (water that hours ago was ice).
Shortly after the sun rose yesterday Olivia and I woke up, packed up our stuff and went to the refugio at the end of the road. there we met Mauricio our guid and we began the trek up the frontal moraine of the glacier up up, and down down the other side into what looks from afar like a gravel pit or a martian battle field. It is the dirty ice. From afar the glacier and and the residual rocks from its recession look like rolling hills - ripples, waves. But we entered the dirty ice to find mounds stories high of invisible ice topped with cottage size boulders, scree, rocks, pebbles... But the landscape changes every day - 10cm per day the glacier receeds. As we walked along scrambling over boulders and loose stones up up, down down... great holes opened up at our feet where you could see piles of rockes and evidence of ice. Over another 5 story hump past the meltoff river where turquise-white cliffs of pure ice rise in sheets from the murky water to dirty rocks, we reached clean ice, white ice blue ice.
There were blue lagoons on the glacier, blue blue, deep clear blue that you can see through and crevasses and cracks that disappear into the glacier, cleaving it in two massive parts - 20, 30, 40 metres down.
We reached a massive cave forced from the sun, from the water from the melting ice and there we dropped our gear. It was like a valley with little ice mountains and an ice bridge over our heads, as well as a windy cave that lead deep into the ice. Walls of ice, a little bridge liable to crash on our heads, a cave and the other side...? the black, white, blue mountains rising to the sky. We picked a spot and walked out of the valley arriving 20m above the valley we had been in - it looks higher from up here. We drove our ice screws into the ice, set up a top rope and rappelled into the "valley". Climbing the face a few times until the screws were loose from the sun, we picked up and began our search for a bigger wall. Across ice dunes, precipices that dropped 40m to more ice, along spines, over humps until we found a huge hole in the ice, almost 30m to the bottom where a river flowed blue over ice. Now it was midday and the ice at 200m above sea level melts and becomes soft and almost slushie so we had a few climbs no more and we had to halck half a foot of pourous ice before we could get to hard ice to drive the screws in. This time we dropped in over a precipice of overhung ice nearly 90feet above the ground. We all climbed it and then to get out we needed to set up a belay from above. As we only had one set of ice axes I was left in the pit alone, 20 to 30m of sheer ice on all sides 50 to 110degrees to the ground, nobody in view, just sun illuminating the edge of the ice and (was it a trick of the light?) an almost pink sky. The last one, I took out the protection tied myself in and climbed out. As you reach the top, flicking your axes into the soft ice and kicking double holes for your feet,(ice climbing on a glacier is very easy) slowly but surely the massive peaks that surround the valley and the glacier start to appear: they start to poke up almost shyly, avove your horizon of ice. More black, more blue, more white hanging glaciers from the steep peak of Monte San Valentin (Patagonias highest peak at slightly over 4000m). After packing up our stuff we headed back (Olivia stayed to camp on the glacier with my tent...a summer tent...it was cold!) The ice had now loosened rocks that had been locked in over night and so the descents of mounds of dirty ice were dangerous and slippery. I fell a few times.

This place is away from everything. 2 mountain guides live in a small refugion for 4 to 5 months a year off of a 52km of winding gravel road that starts at Puerto Rio Tranquilo a town whose children 20 years ago had never seen cars or trucks nor a telephone. The road is off the the already isolated gravel Carretera Austral and winds along the Rio Exploradores, Rio Tranquilo and Lago tranquilo in between rocky peaks and hanging blue glaciers as well as roaming cows.

Christian Eva, Olivia and I left Tortel by bus, camped in Cochrane and hitched out the next day catching a ride in the back of a speeding pickup that took us only 15 minutes. We then waited 5 hours in the sun where the Rio Baker (largest river in Chile) meets the Chacabuco. We met some cyclists and we played cards and drank mate. Then at 430 a man stopped in his pickup and took us all the way not to Rio Tranquilo but 44 km off of the road to a hostal at the foot of the glacier where we camped. He spoke with Olivia the whole time in French and I surprised myself by understanding almost all of it, but I had a headache by the end! Our conversations were very interesting (now this is not the diary entry) but I cannot talk about them now because I have to go to his house. We are back in Coihaique and he has invited us (as well as to do laundry and sleep) to have a big barbeque at his house, so I´m already late and he is being a military man, very punctual!)

Thats all for now. After this I am headed south again to do some backcountry tripping with a Polish guy I metin Tortel.

Next entry I shall speak of the new vegetarianism (vegetarianism revised) and my loss of hope on the issue of Israel. until then happy travels (both spacial and temporal!)
ciao