Night
Those were the streets he walked along. Those streets of white concrete, like a compound. Those were the streets that looked pale in the dark. Houses everywhere on the little trimmed grid that was tucked away inside the mountains - tucked away inside the black humps the giant sillouettes. Even here there were houses lit in the quiet settled darkness, houses that belonged to warm families, a warm family of welcome.
It could have been infinite. You could say that there a man, maybe young and foreign, maybe toothless and local, maybe both if its possible, if you think hard enough, had always wandered those streets, far away between rivers and colourless masses. But be assured that this man could not imagine what it all looked like without the vague pain in his tired feet that plodded breaking the night with a dull thud at every step, without the light of the almost full moon. He could only say that those streets semed not to sleep lightly as we do, when any noise could wake us from our dreams, but into a deep slumber from which only the sun could shake them. You should also know dear reader, that these are thoughts before the day breaks, absolutely untainted by the sun that floods, or , shall flood between the cracks of windows, beams, between the cleaved mountains and into the eyes of all who slept that night (and I needn´t remind you that they were many).
Day
Long gone are the ghosts, and the sleeping giantes have awaken, though they do not stir. A rooster calls, breaking the graveyard silence. Once, only once in the hour and from here to the other side of the town they can hear a car engine. Every sound, there a bee licks pollen from the heart of rose pedals, delicate pink that line the chalky road - every sound disturbs yet eerily adds to a picture. There are trees that dot corners and line the grid but everything is , fittingly, dwarfed by the giants. Small and quiet. The sun and the silence are pressing down hard and its difficult to hear.
It is difficult to contemplate complete quiet, utter silence of thie type with words - indeed, it is foolish so let us sit and listen to the quiet.
(Please just sit and be passively aware of the sounds around you, do not read on until you have let everything outside you come inside.)
...
A voice. The voice of a child. Words are unintelligible but they caress the mountainsides for a moment before they fall and drift back into the veins of this town - the necklace of turquoise rivers that from here they do not hear - but they feel. And from this open bowl they would not lie; they are four more sounds: the sound of a combustion engine cresciendos , peaks and decresciendos for full minutes - one engine. Thirty two minutes later there are three minutes orf intermitant barks, yelps from a small dog down the street behind the garden. They smash against the side of this bowl like glass bottles smashing on concrete. Then in the midday suffocation of the sun footsteps are put out by the weight, but not before they unconsciously drag bits of sand and gravel along the rasped surface of concrete... then silence... and the last sound is telling: the house across the road from my cafe creaks...twice...
I drop my fork and everything, for one instant, a moment shatters in the deafening clang... then I pick up my pen.
Sleep
I blinked and the voices started to spit about the room. In my mouth a campfire lingered but from theirs, unintelligible sounds shot out and into the black. Then there were flashes on the walls - white-blue. Through the slits in my eyes I saw heads like beacons moving hither-thither. I tried to comprehend the rude light and harsh noise molesting my senses but in vane. My head was foggy with fatigue.
Their hands fumbled about with plastic bags, ravaging my eardrums at this hour. I tried to be discreet so as not to offend anyone - after giving up on sleep in a timber drywall mess. So I gintgerly pulled back my covers and turned on, no not the light that would be suicide. I groped the ground until I found it. A black fabric case and I grabbed hold of the bulky mass and held it up to the moonlight. I opened the clasp, pulled out the black camera and turned it on...scroll. time: 5:31am. Dark. Discreet? Whit did it matter - to them it was day. The door with its metal clasp was opened and slammed, accompanying the flashing lamps and"outdoor voices". Then with a final flutter of bags - I was concious by this point - some flashing lights (no different from the preceding half hour eternity) and the slam of the door, I was left in darkness and a sudden unexpected silence. As quickly as the storm came it went. I began to feel war and heavy again - a familiar feeling...
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Next Day and two side notes.
We spent 10 hours at Jorge´s house yesterday. He bought tons of meat vegetables potatoes alcohol drinks...etc. and we ate and ate until we couldn´t... and then we ate dinner. We talked about Pinochet (of whom Jorge is a fan) about dams in patagonia, about sharing and the chilean culture of giving and sharing, we talked about european materialism, and we laughed and joked late into the night.
How did this happen? When he dropped us off near Valle Exploradores we hauled all our gear out of the truck and onto the ground and we invited him in for a visit. Then as he got in his truck to leave after hugs and photos he asked us if we had perhaps forgotten anything... no we hadn´t. No sooner had he left then we realized that we had taken his fleece jacket out of the truck by accident. Inside was a cheque for over $2500 OOPS !!! but thankfully the next day he contacted the hostal/camping area by radio (out here its the only way to communicate as there are no phones) and we arranged to bring it back to him after our icy adventures. When we phoned yesterday after arriving here he invited us to his house...
Now what I promised the new vegetarianism. I think most people can imagine why I am vegetarian if I haven´t told them straight up. It is a resource issue and a treatment issue. a) cows, pigs, chickens in canada and the states live in little boxes in their own shit b) they eat corn based products that they are not made to eat and make them sick so they are pumped full of steroids and drugs - unhealthy and painful for them, unhealthy for human beings c) all the corn that is grown takes up space that could be occupied with much more efficiency to feed human beings with fresh fruits and veggies d) the resource output for the growth and cultivation of corn and meat is astronomical - petroleum and water more than anything
So naturally I had always thought that free range was meat and hunted meat were ok because none of this applies. However as I descended into Valle del Diablo a week ago all this changed. Much of northern patagonia was colonized as late as the1930-1950. It was a land grab so the Chilean government gave land for free to anyone who could clear it for cattle. So large enclaves of chileans from around Santiago, as well as germans, french and belgians and yugoslavians colonized the area with their cattle. But how did they clear the old growth native rainforest? They set fire to it. And it burned. The fires raged for almost a decade and over 80% of the forest was burned. Stumps and trunks remain and sides of mountains are falling away due to erosion... and everywhere there are cows... These cows live happy and free but at the massive ecological and environmental expense! While practically I have not changed, I look at free range meat in a different way now, after having seen the direct and recent evidence of the work that is needed to MAKE pasture in the first place.
And now Israel. I like to be open minded. I like to be understanding. I like to love everything and everybody there is. I think this is the way to a better world. And it gives me hope.
Here in Chile and Argentina there are hundreds and thousands of Israelis. Indeed they say that there are no israelis between the age of 20 and 23 in the country because after their 2-3 years obligatory military service they travel. They dress in a certain way, they act in a certain way and lamentable they, like the brithish in spain and the australians in southeast asia, have made a bad reputation for themselves. This is of course a very delicate issue because while this has nothing to do with race or religion people are afraid to speak the truth and want to be politically correct so they think that this sort of talk is racist or antisemitic. It is not. Indeed it says more about the state of Israel and the army, the education system and the indoctrination than anything. My experience with Israelis has been largly negative but there have been some very notable exceptions. I got a ride with a bunch of israelis who had rented a van to do the Carretera Austral and we chatted about all sorts of things and they seemed very nice. But the topic of Palestine was only talked about briefly and superficially and they assured me that they did not "want to all the palestinians to die".
In the Refugio in Valle Exploradores I met three Israeli girls and we began to speak of the sort of diet that Israelis have, the sort of things they eat and so on. Then we got to mentioning the Shabat and how Israeli is completely secular. Then how multicultural it is. Then I went for it: "If neither religion nor origin unites you as israelis, what does?" the answer? suffering at the hands of the rest of the world, always and forever. Perpetual victims. This left me no other option but to speak of Palestine and to speak of others´suffering at the hands of the Israelis. It was like a hurricane. They began to yell at me (kindly, but lecturing) saying that having experienced it, the army, the military, the checkpoints the fear of rockets from the terrorists they knew. Israel is trying to help the Palestinians, they feel bad for them, they give them resources try to set up schools... it is a shame that the terrorists and Iran (YES the conspiracy the the Isreali intilligence tells its country is that Iran is behind everything) are the problem. And so my response was yes I agree they are a problem but they are angry for a reason and their poor behaviour, their violence does not require retaliation against children. They told me that anything that I see on television about Israelis killing civilians is a lie - they would know because they were in the army. It is all a conspiracy, the Iranian government and the terrorist organizations control western media and besides, it is the civilians faults for being killed by Israeli artillery because Israel sends a message to the houses that they are about to destroy to tell them to vacate their own homes, therefore it is their fault for getting killed.
At this point, speaking with apparently rational people, I lost hope completely. This issue will never be solved with this level of brainwashing and control. Indeed, at the end of our conversation one of the girls said "I think that if I had your knowledge - because you know a lot more than most people - and I didn´t live in Israel, I would think the same way as you." She admitted in effect, that she was brainwashed. This is a sad comment.
All we can do is continue to love people and maybe this will become contagious, because victimization, hate and deception do not seem to work.
How did this happen? When he dropped us off near Valle Exploradores we hauled all our gear out of the truck and onto the ground and we invited him in for a visit. Then as he got in his truck to leave after hugs and photos he asked us if we had perhaps forgotten anything... no we hadn´t. No sooner had he left then we realized that we had taken his fleece jacket out of the truck by accident. Inside was a cheque for over $2500 OOPS !!! but thankfully the next day he contacted the hostal/camping area by radio (out here its the only way to communicate as there are no phones) and we arranged to bring it back to him after our icy adventures. When we phoned yesterday after arriving here he invited us to his house...
Now what I promised the new vegetarianism. I think most people can imagine why I am vegetarian if I haven´t told them straight up. It is a resource issue and a treatment issue. a) cows, pigs, chickens in canada and the states live in little boxes in their own shit b) they eat corn based products that they are not made to eat and make them sick so they are pumped full of steroids and drugs - unhealthy and painful for them, unhealthy for human beings c) all the corn that is grown takes up space that could be occupied with much more efficiency to feed human beings with fresh fruits and veggies d) the resource output for the growth and cultivation of corn and meat is astronomical - petroleum and water more than anything
So naturally I had always thought that free range was meat and hunted meat were ok because none of this applies. However as I descended into Valle del Diablo a week ago all this changed. Much of northern patagonia was colonized as late as the1930-1950. It was a land grab so the Chilean government gave land for free to anyone who could clear it for cattle. So large enclaves of chileans from around Santiago, as well as germans, french and belgians and yugoslavians colonized the area with their cattle. But how did they clear the old growth native rainforest? They set fire to it. And it burned. The fires raged for almost a decade and over 80% of the forest was burned. Stumps and trunks remain and sides of mountains are falling away due to erosion... and everywhere there are cows... These cows live happy and free but at the massive ecological and environmental expense! While practically I have not changed, I look at free range meat in a different way now, after having seen the direct and recent evidence of the work that is needed to MAKE pasture in the first place.
And now Israel. I like to be open minded. I like to be understanding. I like to love everything and everybody there is. I think this is the way to a better world. And it gives me hope.
Here in Chile and Argentina there are hundreds and thousands of Israelis. Indeed they say that there are no israelis between the age of 20 and 23 in the country because after their 2-3 years obligatory military service they travel. They dress in a certain way, they act in a certain way and lamentable they, like the brithish in spain and the australians in southeast asia, have made a bad reputation for themselves. This is of course a very delicate issue because while this has nothing to do with race or religion people are afraid to speak the truth and want to be politically correct so they think that this sort of talk is racist or antisemitic. It is not. Indeed it says more about the state of Israel and the army, the education system and the indoctrination than anything. My experience with Israelis has been largly negative but there have been some very notable exceptions. I got a ride with a bunch of israelis who had rented a van to do the Carretera Austral and we chatted about all sorts of things and they seemed very nice. But the topic of Palestine was only talked about briefly and superficially and they assured me that they did not "want to all the palestinians to die".
In the Refugio in Valle Exploradores I met three Israeli girls and we began to speak of the sort of diet that Israelis have, the sort of things they eat and so on. Then we got to mentioning the Shabat and how Israeli is completely secular. Then how multicultural it is. Then I went for it: "If neither religion nor origin unites you as israelis, what does?" the answer? suffering at the hands of the rest of the world, always and forever. Perpetual victims. This left me no other option but to speak of Palestine and to speak of others´suffering at the hands of the Israelis. It was like a hurricane. They began to yell at me (kindly, but lecturing) saying that having experienced it, the army, the military, the checkpoints the fear of rockets from the terrorists they knew. Israel is trying to help the Palestinians, they feel bad for them, they give them resources try to set up schools... it is a shame that the terrorists and Iran (YES the conspiracy the the Isreali intilligence tells its country is that Iran is behind everything) are the problem. And so my response was yes I agree they are a problem but they are angry for a reason and their poor behaviour, their violence does not require retaliation against children. They told me that anything that I see on television about Israelis killing civilians is a lie - they would know because they were in the army. It is all a conspiracy, the Iranian government and the terrorist organizations control western media and besides, it is the civilians faults for being killed by Israeli artillery because Israel sends a message to the houses that they are about to destroy to tell them to vacate their own homes, therefore it is their fault for getting killed.
At this point, speaking with apparently rational people, I lost hope completely. This issue will never be solved with this level of brainwashing and control. Indeed, at the end of our conversation one of the girls said "I think that if I had your knowledge - because you know a lot more than most people - and I didn´t live in Israel, I would think the same way as you." She admitted in effect, that she was brainwashed. This is a sad comment.
All we can do is continue to love people and maybe this will become contagious, because victimization, hate and deception do not seem to work.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
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
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
Monday, March 1, 2010
Terremoto
Let me allay everyone´s fears. I was actually really touched at how many people were worried about me, but I am just fine. I was probably 1000km from the epicentre and the most that some could say was that at 3am (half hour before the tremors started to shake and shatter glas and stone and cement, opening holes big enough for cars to be lost in, and throwing massive bridges into the water) dogs howled in Futaleufu (the little border town that I was in).
To me this sounds like legend, and it likely is but it might be a way for people to feel connected to the suffering. It is bizzare how this works because really, I am no closer to the destruction that any of you. I see it on the tv and hear it on the radio and the closest I get to seeing real reverberations of the quake, are the long lineups at LAN Chile (the national airline).
I am actually poorly informed about the earthquake, in terms of human cost. I know that infractructure damage has ben masive but I think that (and the last thing that I want to do is downplay deaths) the death count is around 700.
Indeed, speaking of anything else seems cheap right now, when there is so much suffering and loss. But if this makes anyone feel better, this is not unheard of - Chile has no poisoness snakes, no tropical diseases, no civil wars, but it does have earthquakes and about every 25 years there is a big one. For many this is new and for all it is painful but it is not a surprise. The question was never if, but when and the clock is ticking again.
As for me my ankle is still swollen (especially after my 12 hour busride, which later I shall write about) and I spent two days with only a few dollars in my pocket and no way of getting money... indeed my bus was on trust that I would get money when we arrived in Coihaique. This area of the country, I think, is the most beautiful, it is the area that I most wanted to explore but lamentably I have to hold back. I could go out and hike but this will ruin my ankle so I am sitting around itching to move but being smart so as not to ruin my trip!
I was walking around Coihaique, a confusing town in the middle of absolutely nothing (for hundreds of kilometres of gravel road and ocean and ice and mountains in every direction there is nothing!!) looking for an internet cafe and there I saw, walking toward me Yani!! My friend from Santiago who bought a motorbike to go around south america like Che Guevara! I had not seen him since november!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thats all the little news that I have and I will post something more later, until then stay safe, and I will too!
To me this sounds like legend, and it likely is but it might be a way for people to feel connected to the suffering. It is bizzare how this works because really, I am no closer to the destruction that any of you. I see it on the tv and hear it on the radio and the closest I get to seeing real reverberations of the quake, are the long lineups at LAN Chile (the national airline).
I am actually poorly informed about the earthquake, in terms of human cost. I know that infractructure damage has ben masive but I think that (and the last thing that I want to do is downplay deaths) the death count is around 700.
Indeed, speaking of anything else seems cheap right now, when there is so much suffering and loss. But if this makes anyone feel better, this is not unheard of - Chile has no poisoness snakes, no tropical diseases, no civil wars, but it does have earthquakes and about every 25 years there is a big one. For many this is new and for all it is painful but it is not a surprise. The question was never if, but when and the clock is ticking again.
As for me my ankle is still swollen (especially after my 12 hour busride, which later I shall write about) and I spent two days with only a few dollars in my pocket and no way of getting money... indeed my bus was on trust that I would get money when we arrived in Coihaique. This area of the country, I think, is the most beautiful, it is the area that I most wanted to explore but lamentably I have to hold back. I could go out and hike but this will ruin my ankle so I am sitting around itching to move but being smart so as not to ruin my trip!
I was walking around Coihaique, a confusing town in the middle of absolutely nothing (for hundreds of kilometres of gravel road and ocean and ice and mountains in every direction there is nothing!!) looking for an internet cafe and there I saw, walking toward me Yani!! My friend from Santiago who bought a motorbike to go around south america like Che Guevara! I had not seen him since november!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thats all the little news that I have and I will post something more later, until then stay safe, and I will too!
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Junkie
Cabeza de Indio (indian´s head), View from close to Cabeza de Indio, El Bolsón... and My feet at the top of the 20km run to Refugio Dedo Gordo and back before turning my ankle
I am shaking. I feel weak all over as I roll down the dirt road. Frested valley and grey rocky clear river on my right and snow topped Patagonian peaks in front of me, to the south. But scenery does not make me shake... only caffeine and adrenaline and I have had no caffeine since yesterday... It must be adrenaline then, an aftershock of my traverse of the little path under an overhung rock outcropping that is Cabeza del Indio.
The train wound up switchback after switchback until the rock face where the path traced the cliff some zero to 3 and a half feet from its edge. Sometimes there was space here for one person to pass another on foot but on two serarate sections if you dropped a line from the edge of my handlebar of my mountainbike it would have to be 60 feet to reach the earth... and the other side? rock wall.
Now as I roll down the hill the adrenaline is everywhere in my body, warm, jittery and excited, but almost weak. So i begin to look for more before it has even flushed from my veins.
Later, I did find some horse trails that traversed the mountainside...sometimes windy and narrow but always quite smooth with packed dirt. A lot of fun, and fairly untechnical. There as I sped down a path among thorns, my breathing rapid (its not the effort its the adrenaline) I see yellow everywhere about the path so I stop...yes, a gift. Ripe and fallen yellow plums litter the ground. And you do not here, have to search to find fruit, like berry picking among the thorns... no here one must avoid the ripe plums so as not to step on and crush them. So I stop and grab a few handfulls. Am I greedy? I sit there supported by my bike frame, in the hot Patagonian sun and eat plums of the same colour, little suns.
I throw another easy few handfuls in my bag and continue.
Hours later I am sitting here in the sade of a mountain: still, unwavering, unshaking (if you allow me to employ this fabricated word) - and I am referring both to the mountain and to my body.
After I close this book I´ll be in search of the shakes, so IU´ll set up my stove and boil water for mate.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
A photo and a fall: Two lessons I should have learned a long time ago!
I embarked on another trailrun yesterday to another refugio near el Bolson (an Argentine hippie town with artisans and vegetarians as well as dreadlocks and slacklines... and lots of weed). The run was extremely steep, and infact I ran very little of the ascent, it was more of a fast hike as it was probably 30% gradient at least, most of the time! I got to the top, of course out of breath, drank a glass of water and kept going higher to a few lookoutpoints from which you can see the Andes, stretching south into the heart of Patagonia.
I thought I would take a picture, a photo, something to remember my time at the top of the world so I setmy camera up for 10seconds and took some self portraits up on the rock, in the cold sun. Upon looking at the photos I was taken aback, my face is fat!!! So if my regimen of running and getting back in shape was ever going to flop it was given new wind! I should have known because there is a woman close to my heart who, in her youth travelled to france. Upon her return, after many baguettes with jam, she also had a chipmunk face... dear mother, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!! Now, not only my physical status but also my diet are going to have to change!!!!
We were small seven and five perhaps, in the quiet forest on a lake. They told us don´t run in the forest, you could trip and fall and out here, its dangerous, out here in the abandoned lakes deep in a remote forest, please, just walk. But there we were on the rocks eating dinner and I can´t even remember what excited her little seven year old blonde hair, her little rosy cheeks, but she ran and in a moment those cheeks had blood pooring down them from the gash in her forhead. DON´T RUN IN THE FOREST!!!
As I descended through the forest, the massive trunks and mud, the emerald streams that stroke the round rocks as they plummet to the valley things were blurring, that is, the slope is so steep here that it islike playing a videogame with your whole body as you descend extremely fast, unable to slow down dodging trees, roots, rocks, streams, rounding corners and then, a shot of pain in my ankle. I drop to the forest floor, the wise trees are looking over me. Are the disapproving? I got up among the wise ancients, the knowing thousand year old trees... they have seen more than this! And I putpressure on my left ankle - a shot of pain and I am 9km from the bottom... So I stretch it out and limp/walk/run my way to the bottom and it doesn´t even feel so bad. The mate that I drank at the top and adrenaline dull the pain but as soon as I stop at the bottom I seize up and the swelling starts: DON´T RUN IN THE FOREST!!!
Needless to say, when this sprained ankle clears up (I am hardly limping today but it will be at least a week before the pain goes I´m sure) I will continue to run... but more carefully.
I should have learned from my mother and my sister, but instead I needed a fall and a photograph!
I thought I would take a picture, a photo, something to remember my time at the top of the world so I setmy camera up for 10seconds and took some self portraits up on the rock, in the cold sun. Upon looking at the photos I was taken aback, my face is fat!!! So if my regimen of running and getting back in shape was ever going to flop it was given new wind! I should have known because there is a woman close to my heart who, in her youth travelled to france. Upon her return, after many baguettes with jam, she also had a chipmunk face... dear mother, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!! Now, not only my physical status but also my diet are going to have to change!!!!
We were small seven and five perhaps, in the quiet forest on a lake. They told us don´t run in the forest, you could trip and fall and out here, its dangerous, out here in the abandoned lakes deep in a remote forest, please, just walk. But there we were on the rocks eating dinner and I can´t even remember what excited her little seven year old blonde hair, her little rosy cheeks, but she ran and in a moment those cheeks had blood pooring down them from the gash in her forhead. DON´T RUN IN THE FOREST!!!
As I descended through the forest, the massive trunks and mud, the emerald streams that stroke the round rocks as they plummet to the valley things were blurring, that is, the slope is so steep here that it islike playing a videogame with your whole body as you descend extremely fast, unable to slow down dodging trees, roots, rocks, streams, rounding corners and then, a shot of pain in my ankle. I drop to the forest floor, the wise trees are looking over me. Are the disapproving? I got up among the wise ancients, the knowing thousand year old trees... they have seen more than this! And I putpressure on my left ankle - a shot of pain and I am 9km from the bottom... So I stretch it out and limp/walk/run my way to the bottom and it doesn´t even feel so bad. The mate that I drank at the top and adrenaline dull the pain but as soon as I stop at the bottom I seize up and the swelling starts: DON´T RUN IN THE FOREST!!!
Needless to say, when this sprained ankle clears up (I am hardly limping today but it will be at least a week before the pain goes I´m sure) I will continue to run... but more carefully.
I should have learned from my mother and my sister, but instead I needed a fall and a photograph!
Friday, February 19, 2010
Handcuffs, rain, and tourism
I left Valdivia, I left behind, as always, someone that I will miss. I got the bus to Osorno and from their a comfy, double decker bus to Bariloche Argentina.
The boarder guard sits down with the poorly stamped passport in his hand. He looks sorry, regretful. "Do you have a spouse here?"
"No...why?"
"Well, we are going to have to solve this some way..." He reaches over to his friend´s waist and pulls out a set of handcuffs saying, "this will solve the problem." And then he laughs and tells me he is only joking.
A scare. I was malinformed when I first arrived in Santiago so I had a resident permit but not my resident number (the final step) So I left Chile 3 days after I was supposed to (3 months would have been Feb 13 and I left Feb 16) so, thinking he was doing me a favour the Chilean boarder guard stamped my passport with Feb 13. So when I arrived on the night of february 16 at the Argentine boarder, they asked me when I left chile and I had to tell them that very day... causing more problems...
Later at the end at 1030pm I met an Australian/French couple and an American guy - none of us had Argentine dollars at the bus station at this time, outside the city of Bariloche - after some negotiation we payed the cab in Chilean pesos and we began looking around in this apparently touristy town for a hostel. This fact was confirmed: we walked for 2 hours and asked at every single hostel - all were full; it was raining, we were tired and it was the next day... we finally woke a woman up who rented rooms, only after having contemplated accompanying the drunk and homeless in the central park under some trees, and trespassing on private property... in the end we paid the 15$ each for a less than satisfactory room...
Bariloche is like Pucón in that it crawls, especially at this time of year, with tourists from Europe and North America. Off-putting. But again, it is touristy for a reason. So yesterday I took the half-hour bus trip to Cerro Catedral ski centre at about 1000m. (It used to be the biggest ski centre in South America but has been overtaken by one in Mendoza Ar. and various in Chile in the last decade.) When I left, with my American companion Jeff, it was windy and cloudy with sun peaking through like spotlights to illuminate the rocky peaks and the specks of snow that remain from the summer, and to glisten off the massive glacial lake.
I was wearing tights and a tshirt and had a rainjacket and long underwear layer in my bag along with water and some food. I ran the trail, that ran 10km along the edge of the mountain, looking down on a river and two glacial lakes in the midst of towering rocky peaks, through a burn and up up up to a rock and wood refugio above the treeline. The last three kilometres began to rain and get much colder, and when i got to the Refugio I was wet and quickly became cold. I drank and ate and sat among the dirty climbing and mountaineering bums in the refugio, playing cards and drinking mate. The rain reached torrential status and then backed off - I took this opportunity to start my 10km descent. The rain only increased and the steep sections became very dangerous to walk let alone run. In the end I probably ran about 3/5 of the 20km and the other 2/5 were a brisk walk or an almost crawl on the slippery mud... that was yesterday... today I am sore but have escaped Bariloche and my penthouse hostel with panoramic views to come to this campground in El Bolson, an area renowned for its hippies and its lowkeyness - it still has a touristy feel but is much smaller and lacks the glitz and the polish. (streets, save three, are unpaved) My campground is at the foot of a huge rocky ridge of mountains that rises behind me to block out the sun and accross the river and the small town another ridge of mountains, the Andes, runs, snowspeckled into the distance...
Thats where I´m at now
ciao
The boarder guard sits down with the poorly stamped passport in his hand. He looks sorry, regretful. "Do you have a spouse here?"
"No...why?"
"Well, we are going to have to solve this some way..." He reaches over to his friend´s waist and pulls out a set of handcuffs saying, "this will solve the problem." And then he laughs and tells me he is only joking.
A scare. I was malinformed when I first arrived in Santiago so I had a resident permit but not my resident number (the final step) So I left Chile 3 days after I was supposed to (3 months would have been Feb 13 and I left Feb 16) so, thinking he was doing me a favour the Chilean boarder guard stamped my passport with Feb 13. So when I arrived on the night of february 16 at the Argentine boarder, they asked me when I left chile and I had to tell them that very day... causing more problems...
Later at the end at 1030pm I met an Australian/French couple and an American guy - none of us had Argentine dollars at the bus station at this time, outside the city of Bariloche - after some negotiation we payed the cab in Chilean pesos and we began looking around in this apparently touristy town for a hostel. This fact was confirmed: we walked for 2 hours and asked at every single hostel - all were full; it was raining, we were tired and it was the next day... we finally woke a woman up who rented rooms, only after having contemplated accompanying the drunk and homeless in the central park under some trees, and trespassing on private property... in the end we paid the 15$ each for a less than satisfactory room...
Bariloche is like Pucón in that it crawls, especially at this time of year, with tourists from Europe and North America. Off-putting. But again, it is touristy for a reason. So yesterday I took the half-hour bus trip to Cerro Catedral ski centre at about 1000m. (It used to be the biggest ski centre in South America but has been overtaken by one in Mendoza Ar. and various in Chile in the last decade.) When I left, with my American companion Jeff, it was windy and cloudy with sun peaking through like spotlights to illuminate the rocky peaks and the specks of snow that remain from the summer, and to glisten off the massive glacial lake.
I was wearing tights and a tshirt and had a rainjacket and long underwear layer in my bag along with water and some food. I ran the trail, that ran 10km along the edge of the mountain, looking down on a river and two glacial lakes in the midst of towering rocky peaks, through a burn and up up up to a rock and wood refugio above the treeline. The last three kilometres began to rain and get much colder, and when i got to the Refugio I was wet and quickly became cold. I drank and ate and sat among the dirty climbing and mountaineering bums in the refugio, playing cards and drinking mate. The rain reached torrential status and then backed off - I took this opportunity to start my 10km descent. The rain only increased and the steep sections became very dangerous to walk let alone run. In the end I probably ran about 3/5 of the 20km and the other 2/5 were a brisk walk or an almost crawl on the slippery mud... that was yesterday... today I am sore but have escaped Bariloche and my penthouse hostel with panoramic views to come to this campground in El Bolson, an area renowned for its hippies and its lowkeyness - it still has a touristy feel but is much smaller and lacks the glitz and the polish. (streets, save three, are unpaved) My campground is at the foot of a huge rocky ridge of mountains that rises behind me to block out the sun and accross the river and the small town another ridge of mountains, the Andes, runs, snowspeckled into the distance...
Thats where I´m at now
ciao
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