Backpacking in Southern Chile

I know I said I would keep in touch, but here I am, a month into my three months in Chile, and only now am I sitting down to write everything down. I have at least been keeping a journal, but unfortunately my camera took a dive into a river, so pictures will have to wait until my friend Dale sends them to me. 

Disclaimer: As I am living without Internet, I didn't fact check the things people told me on the trip. As such, I don't take my word as truth in regards to the history of Chile or the interesting little tidbits about the places we visited. I may well be completely wrong, and when I get back to the US I will actually look up things like the size of lake General Carrera, the age of the Alerce trees, the history of the Carretera Austral, the name of the graffiti competition in Valpo, and the status of Valparaiso as a heritage site.

I arrived in Santiago, Chile on January 11, and booked it out of the city by bus to Valparaiso. Santiago is enormous, dirty, busy and smoggy - not my cup of tea. Valparaiso is about the population of Colorado Springs crammed into maybe a quarter of the space. It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and proud of it. It is a university city, with a multitude of public and private universities attracting thousands of students each year. Cultural presentations and heritage events are common, and the entire city is covered in beautiful graffiti murals; artists compete each year to win prime space for their artwork on the sides of buildings in the middle of the centro, or entire neighborhoods are taken over by teams of graffiti artists who convert every wall into an explosion of color (cerro Polanco is the most recent of the neighborhood projects). I love Valparaiso and could easily spend my entire three months in Valpo and Viña. The point of the trip was to travel, though, so that wasn't ever an option. 

After meeting briefly with Dale to plan a little of our trip south, we left more or less in disarray and definitely not on time, but with excitement, on January 15. The goal was to make it as far south as possible by the 29, then get Dale  back to Valpo by February 1 paying as little as possible. It ended up being more expensive than planned, and we realized that we could have done it with no costs other than food if we stayed North of Puerto Montt. That also wasn't the point of the trip, but it was a good lesson learned. 

We weighed down our bags with all of our non-perishables and a lot of fruits and veggies and trail mix for the road in Valpo, and hit the road aroun noon. We took a bus from Valpo to Santiago, then another to outside of San Fernando where we hopped off at a bus stop on the highway, ready to hitchhike all the way to Puerto Montt. An hour of waiting brought success in the form of a trucker (camionero) who carried us all the way to Chillán where we spent the night with friends I made last time I was in Chile. We were treated to an excellent once (the Chilean version of dinner which is really more like elevensies with bread, avocado, cheese, butter, jam, etc and tea). I love the cheese in Chillán, and the family had homemade peach jam too. We talked and played cards until we couldn't keep our eyes open, then fell into bed to sleep for a few hours before we took to the road again. 

Before we even made it over the overpass onto the southbound highway, a truck already loaded with two packs stopped to pick us up. The driver, a father, was dropping off his son and a friend on a backpacking/volunteer trip in Lautaro. From Lautaro, a campesino traveling in convoy with his family took us to La Union. The trip was mostly quiet, not for lack of interest, but because neither Dale nor I could understand what the driver was saying. La Union to Osorno is about 20 minutes, but they were by far the most interesting. A vet picked us up, and he had lived and studied in the US and New Zealand. We discussed our studies, the US, mad cow disease, beer, and surely we would have covered more had our time not been cut short by our arrival in Osorno. We parted with a promise to call on our return to Osorno, and an empty tour van with awesome air conditioning took a few kilometers further down the road where another pickup took us the rest of the way to Puerto Varas. The talk turned to beer again, and it was just our luck that the next day was the start of the artisanal beer fest in Puerto Varas. 

Puerto Varas is a picturesque city on the side of a lake that perpetually holds the reflection of a snow capped volcano, and it was easy to decide to stay another day to explore the city and try the beer. I preferred the beer from the beer fest in Monument this summer, but the entertainment was hilarious - a street clown in the square offered imaginary flowers and kisses to those crossing the plaza, barked at the dogs, and attracted children like the pied piper. He soon attracted a large crowd and another clown, and the two offered an improv show that must have lasted an hour at least. The first clown knew exactly the point he could push a person to make him laugh without making him uncomfortable, and the kids were fascinated and many joined in on his games for a few minutes before running back to their parents. Pure coincidence brought Dale face to face with a friend ("the one who germinates her lentils," he explained) he met during an "end of the world" party at the beer fest, and she invited us to spend the night in her house, an invitation we gladly accepted. On the way home, we passed a boy selling flats of blueberries and raspberries, and we couldn't pass it up. It must have been about three kilos for 3.000 pesos (~$6). 

Since we couldn't eat it all in one night between the three of us, we decided to make jam with some of the berries and eat the rest. The jam was excellent, though fairly runny since we basically mashed up and boiled raspberries with a tiny bit of sugar and called it good. We popped some popcorn with merken, washed the rest of the berries, and made ourselves comfortable for "The Fifth Element," a movie I highly recommend despite the absolute insanity of the plot, the characters, and the costumes. The next morning we had an early start to catch the bus from Puerto Montt to Chaitén, a full day ride that included three ferry crossings around fjords and a peek into Tompkins Park (Parque Pumalín). 

Chaitén is practically a ghost town, destroyed by an unexpected eruption a number of years ago. Houses still stand filled halfway with ash, sheets still on the beds and the humped shapes of abandoned toys and appliances distinguishable beneath layers of gray dust. We camped outside of a hospedaje with a Fench couple and with Ed and Skip, brothers we met in Puerto Montt from Montana and New Hampshire who grew up with the back to the earth movement, LSD and war protests, and it shows. A group we met on the bus slept inside after a week of hiking in Pumalín. 

Plans to hike the volcano fell through, so we continued on our way to the nearby hot springs, and ended up completely covered in ash when a couple from Santiago took us in the back of their truck. We overshot the hot springs, but ended up helping an Argentinian pair with a baby pull their car out of the ditch in the side of the road when we backtracked. The hot springs were full and expensive, so we continued on in the pickup towards lago Yelcho, adding two more backpackers along the way. They somehow missed the lake completely, as well as the hike up to the glacier that we wanted to do, and we ended up with five other backpackers in Villa Santa Lucia, notable only because it is the turnoff to reach Futalefu. Many rounds of Jungle Speed and hours later, a campesino finally took us about 20 kilometers down the road, where another pickup took us the rest of the way to La Junta. We set up camp in a field next to the river, bathed in the river, and made a feast and a bonfire, sharing food and stories with two other backpackers. 

La Junta is a nothing town, and the sun was fierce as we waited for countless hours for someone to take us on our way. In the end, after valiantly asking every single person entering and leaving the gas station, Dale got two undercover cops to take us to Parque Queulat outside of Puyahuapi. The ride was cramped, and we were wiped out and frustrated, a situation exacerbated by the guard turning us away because the camping inside the park was full. It turned out to be good luck after all, because the woman with a tiny shop outside of the park let us use her water and sleep in the abandoned bus near the house and we woke up early to hike the 6 km to the lookout point for the hanging glacier inside the park, avoiding paying for camping and the park entrance fee. 

Another frustrating and hot day awaited us after the hike, and six hours of waiting with flies driving us crazy finally bore fruit in the form of another couple from Santiago taking us to the turnoff to Coyhaique, stopping at all the tourist spots to take pictures along the way. From the turnoff, we dirtied up the fancy car of two university students from Santiago on their way to Coyhaique. We payed far too much for a hostel that provided terrible service, but we did at least have the chance to wash off all the dirt from the journey and use the Internet. With our goal in sight, we set off the next morning to ask again at the gas station on the edge of town for a ride to the entrance of Parque Nacional Cerro Castillo. An English woman who works with horseback riding groups took us to the entrance and gave us advice for the journey on her way to drop off provisions for a group in the middle of their two week trek. 

The four days we spent in the park were Dale's favorite, but by far my least favorite part of the journey. The park is beautiful, the trails are pretty well marked, the park guide is helpful, the views are incredible and and campsites are good, but hiking isn't really my thing. I keep thinking that maybe the next time I go I will enjoy it, but I usually spend the whole time calculating how long it will take to get out of the woods. I like camping, but hiking to get there is the worst. I always liked exploring in the woods and climbing up rocks as a kid, but the best part was roasting marshmallows and watching the stars. 

The hike through Cerro Castillo was two partial days of easy hiking at the beginning and end, and two days of mountain climbing in the middle. It could be done in three days, but I slowed us down by falling down the mountain and getting my ankle trapped under a rock on the second day. I ended up with scratches on my knee and hand and a swollen and sore ankle, but thankfully nothing more serious. Dale got to practice his WFR skills, but it was slow going for a while there. I'm sure I didn't help matters when we spent the entire next day climbing scree. The going up was bad, but going down was much worse; everything was loose, my ankle was more or less unstable and I was walking scared, talking myself down the mountain step by step. Dale was a trooper - I could tell he was fed up, but to his credit he never left me behind or even rolled his eyes at my slow progress. I was more than ready to be done once we made it to camp in the early afternoon, and I stayed behind collecting wood and setting up while Dale and a couple from Montana who had quit their nursing jobs to travel hiked up and back the 6 km to the next campsite so they could say they hiked the entire circuit. 

Hiking is a strange activity because it's something that I think of as being mostly solitary, of just me, my pack, my hiking buddy, and nature everywhere. In reality, we were never more than an hour or two from meeting another group, and we never camped alone except for the first night which we did by choice. Setting up camp the third night was the first time in Cerro Castillo that I was alone with my thoughts. My thoughts wandered, replaying the fall from the day before, the beautiful view from the top of the mountain of the entire valley spread out below me, the terrifying descent over kilometers of gray rocks that looked stable until my weight sent them rolling down in mini landslides every few steps, then back further into memory. I spent many weekends as a kid wandering around Rocky Mountain National Park while my dad chopped wood and smoked a cigar or his pipe before we roasted marshmallows for s'mores. The only time my dad smoked as a kid was in the woods, and that smell always reminds me of him. 

As I grew up I was less willing to leave civilization and technology, but now that I am in a house where the kids spend most of their time watching tv or playing on their parents' cell phones, I thank my lucky stars that my parents enrolled me in art classes, went camping, and made me play sports, play music, read, and play outside rather than drown myself in video games and television. It's too easy to get sucked in, especially after spending four years in college stuck in textbooks or reading articles and the news online only to be glued to the computer for days at a time writing essays. It's not the same as fooling around, but it is surprising the amount of "essay time" is spent on Facebook or YouTube or loading an entire season of a show that I really shouldn't even start because I don't have time to breathe, much less get my entire apartment addicted to Vampire Diaries while I catch up on eight seasons of Grey's Anatomy. It's refreshing to be living without a computer and with very limited Internet, mostly used to obsessively check my email for a response from Peace Corps and keep my mother updated on my whereabouts so she doesn't call the embassy to send out a nationwide search for me. 

I didn't actually think about all this during my time setting up camp. I mostly thought about how I remember liking hiking in Waldo Canyon and dying hiking up to Barr Trail on Pikes Peak but enjoying the hike down and the chocolate I ate with my dad sitting on a rock looking down at the city on the side of the trail. I remember picking berries in the woods and coming face to face with a bear cub doing the same, then watching from the safety of the truck as the mother bear lumbered out to collect her cub. The woods in Colorado are filled with wildlife, and I remember thinking that it's a shame that the only wildlife I have seen in Chile are birds and far too many bugs. I love the ocean in Chile more than the forest, but whenever I leave Colorado I miss the mountains and the sky. Valpo is gritty, but it is full of color and culture and the tantalizing sound of the ocean. I am happy in the shadow of the mountains under a blue sky, or staring into the immensity of the ocean. 

I digress. Dale and the Montana couple returned to a camp full of myself, an elderly couple, and an Italian, Stefano, who studied abroad in Valpo last semester and was traveling solo through Chile via its national parks. In the morning Stefano set the pace and we were out of the park in under two hours. Montana and Stefano caught the bus out of Villa Cerro Castillo, but Dale and I were back on the highway with our thumbs out and a few bananas and cookies we bought in town. 

A bit of advice - when the driver of a truck is checking his truck for problems, even if he has the only truck for miles, it's probably unwise to ask him for a ride. Regardless of that little warning voice in our heads, I asked the driver, a mechanic, for a ride to Puerto Río Tranquilo and received the affirmative. Even with a good pickup the 100 km to Puerto Tranquilo is a long ride; from Chaitén south almost none of the mostly one-lane highway is paved and the road worsens every winter with the rain. The highway, called the Carretera Austral, was commissioned by Pinochet in the 1980s and is the only highway that passes through southern Chile. Our driver, Mario, was vehemently indignant over the state of the road, reminding us that it is the only  road that unites southern Chile and most people drive it every day. Everything in the South is far from everything else, and although the population is small, I was surprised to find the famed Carretera Austral to be little more than a dirt road.

Partway through our ride with Mario, he raised his eyebrows and gave us both a look, then pushed hard on the brakes. Nothing happened. Our brakes failed not twenty kilometers into the journey. We stopped for lunch and to fix the brakes, but only lunch was a success. With a shrug Mario started the engine and we continued on our way with only the motor brake to slow us down. 

Another few hours of puttering with the brakes before the big descent yielded no results and no brake fluid, so with another shrug we took to the road again. Nine hours after we left Parque Cerro Castillo, we finally arrived in Puerto Río Tranquilo, the furthest south we would reach on our journey. Our strange day wasn't even half over upon arrival, although we were ready to make camp on any patch of grass we could find. Mario suggested behind the restaurant, but before we even pulled out the tent, a car rolled past. The driver asked to speak with us, inviting us to his cabaña for dinner. We were a little skeptical, but accepted the invitation since he was accompanied by his mother. The family (father, mother, daughter, cousin and grandma) in the cabaña accepted our dirty, smelly selves with open arms and tons of food, leftovers from their asado. They were leaving the next day and didn't want to waste their food, so they thought of the backpackers earlier in the day desperate to leave the town but faced with sparse traffic and perpetually overfilled buses. The father had himself hitchhiked in his youth, though the daughter and her cousin looked at us like we were crazy when we said we spent most of our trip camping and relying on the kindness of families like theirs. We stuffed ourselves, talking all the while about everything from US history to Chilean foreign relations to the War of the Pacific to the differences in education in the US and Chile to pets to food and travel. 

Sometime around 2 am, exhaustion finally took over. The family offered their floor for our air mattresses, an offer we gladly accepted. The water ran gray when I showered in the morning and I stepped out surprised that the family hadn't insisted that we shower before siting down to eat the previous night. They treated us to a delicious breakfast then we all applied ourselves to packing our bags. 

Kisses goodbye taken care of, Dale and I headed to the water to inquire about tours to the catedrales de marmol (marble cathedrals) in the middle of Lago General Carrera, the second largest lake in the Americas after Lake Titicaca, so they tell me. The price was right, so we took our first and only tour of the trip. The boat ride was an hour and a half of speeding over blue water, slowly entering the marble caves carved by thousands of years of water smoothing out rock, running my hands over the cool marble, and an opportunity to jump into the water and swim through the caves. Dale jumped in at the first chance to explore the rocks and the walk inside the shallow caves, returning soaked and shivering but thrilled to the boat for the return journey.

Tourism is the only industry in Puerto Río Tranquilo. The town has one Cyber cafe, two grocery stores, three restaurants, four tourism offices, about twenty different cabañas and hostels, a school, a playground, a library and nothing else. We spent two days in town, and that was one day too many. The town is too small when after one day I start to see how the town functions, who holds the power, and I can name the owners of most of shops in town, who incidentally are primarily all related to Mario, the mechanic who brought us to Puerto Tranquilo. It was more or less like knowing Puerto Tranquilo's own mini mafia, an uncomfortable situation, to say the least. Romila and Felipe, Mario's daughter and her fiancée, finally took us back to Coyhaique and Felipe invited us to camp near his house. We spent two days wandering around Coyhaique, playing with Felipe's three beautiful dogs, reading and writing, and sharing conversation and an asado the first night, and soup the second night with Felipe. 

The morning of January 29, we grabbed our flight from Coyhaique back to Puerto Montt. Security is not up to par with the US, I have to admit. Dale accidentally smuggled his pocket knife through the x-ray machines and onto the plane without any trouble at all. The trip that took us three days on the way down took an hour and a half on the way back. Dale's friend Mariela picked us up from the airport and invited us to her house to shower, wash our clothes and to enjoy a fantastic lunch of pastel de lentejas (they ran out of corn, which was fine by me - I much prefer lentils to corn) with her twin nieces, Fernanda and Francisca. 

Mariela packed us all into her car to see the Saltos de Petrohué and Lago Todos Los Santos. The waterfalls were packed with people of all ages taking advantage of a beautiful day to visit the park. Families spread along the lake as well, but we had space to talk and watch the water and identify the birds as we wandered along the edge. Talk turned, as it does, to food. Dale and I talked about our favorite recipes, and somewhere along the journey we all decided to get the ingredients to make pizza and cookies. 

Mariela watered the plants and the twins, Dale and I got started on pizza and cookie dough. While the pizza dough rose, we baked the first batch of oatmeal m&m cookies. The pizza was an experimental creation, so we added everything that sounded tasty and made a cheese-pebre filled crust brushed with garlic.  Pebre is fairly spicy and kinda like salsa - onions, tomatoes, spices, cilantro, garlic, etc. On the pizza we added oregano, sauce, cheese, mushrooms, corn, green peppers, green onion, more cheese and salami. It was delicious. Needless to say, the cookies turned out well too. The twins practiced their English all day, Mariela kept us entertained with stories about her life and her students, Dale and Mariela discussed birds and biology and chemistry, the twins and I worked out English grammar and vocabulary, and we all interpreted song lyrics and exploded with laughter when we confused bolas with balas. After our midnight dinner we fell into bed. 

The morning brought new adventures in Parque Nacional Alerce Andino in the form of a 6 km hike to the Alerce Milenario, a thousand year old Alerce tree, one of the very few still standing today. Although the park is Alerce park, almost all of the Alerce were chopped down to use as siding and for artisan sculptures, bowls, and spoons. Indeed, very few Alerce still exist in all of Chile. The tree can live forever, but it grows slower than the Himalayas. The ride home revealed another miscommunication which had me laughing. Spanish, like English, has many words that sound similar, but if you change one letter you end up with an entirely different word. Dale was explaining his neurobio project investigating deafness in zebrafish. In Spanish, deaf (sordo) and pig (cerdo) are differentiated by one vowel sound, so imagine our confusion when Dale said he was investigating how zebrafish turned into pigs! 

Our recipe exchange continued when we returned to the kitchen, this time to learn to make Chilean bread (pan amasado). We divided the dough into three parts, each choosing a different flavor to add after kneading the dough for what seemed like forever. I chose oregano, Mariela merken, and Dale garlic and semillas (seeds). Bread in Chile comes in small rounds, not loaves, and the diet is primarily bread since both breakfast and dinner are often bread with toppings. I told the kids here that I like cinnamon sugar toast, and they looked at me like I was from another planet. The same thing happened when I suggested peanut butter and jelly on bread (peanut butter isn't really a thing here). The three types we made were fantastic hot out of the oven, and we made ourselves a feast for dinner, coming up with all the toppings we could think of for our delicious homemade breads - pebre, cheese, salami, avocado, corn and green beans, tomatoes, butter and blackberry jam - and toasting with a glass of Chilean red wine alongside the obligatory Ceylon tea. 

The next morning saw us off loaded with the extra bread and a cookie or two stuffed in our mouthes and on the bus to Osorno to meet up with our vet friend Nicolas like we promised. He invited us for a quick lunch to talk about our trip and again left us with an invitation, this time to see his home if we return south. We hit the road, or rather the gas station, around 2 pm, hoping to make it to Chillán before midnight. 

Within ten minutes a trucker, Richard, returning home with empty salmon barrels offered to take us within an hour of Chillán. We spent the hours talking about our lives and our families, the life of a trucker and what is it about US culture that results in so many lunatics deciding to take the lives of innocents in the act of taking their own. The biggest difference between the US and Chile that I have noticed is the sense of community and family. Everyone is involved in the lives of everyone else, and there is much less of a sense of independence, especially independence of children from their parents. I like the independence of America, but I have come to love the sense of inclusion I feel in Chile. Complete strangers willingly offer advice and aid, something that I have rarely experienced in the United States. Richard skipped a toll booth by taking side roads, something called "haciendo la bicicleta" here in Chile. Pleased with himself, he offered us soda and cookies to share with theory he saved. We continued on our way, chatting until nightfall and our destination near Chillán. 

A bit of perseverance in asking drivers for rides landed us our final short leg, a trucker driving through the night to Valpo willing to drop us a the toll booth in Chillán. His truck was completely decked out with decorations, and we flew down the highway with reggaeton pounding from the speakers. 11 pm found us walking towards Chillán Viejo, where the family I am currently staying with picked us up and brought us home. 

Dale left before lunch the next day, but I stayed to spend more time with Monica and Leonard, their daughter Yahel and her husband Mauri, their two boys Lucas and Martín, Monica's sister Mariela, and their three dogs and three cats. 

Tomorrow we head to Confluencia to camp with the entire extended family including cousins and uncles and the whole clan at the Río Itata, then it's off to Pichilemu for a little time at the beach.