Gaucho Days

We walked out of the mountains and into Cerro Castillo's 10th annual folklife festival or fiesta costumbrista. The tiny town was full of visitors from all over Chile as well as international tourists. Hospedajes were full and tents were pitched all over. The evening we got back to town saw a big party at the gymnasio with traditional dance music.



We danced a lot. To my chagrin I did not get to dance with any of the men outfitted in traditional gaucho wear, pleated pants tucked into boots, a white collared shirt with a wide embroidered sash and felt beret. My partners, not including Mike, were more along the lines of drunken chuckleheads but it was still a great time. The music was guitar and accordion, there were a number of cowboy hats. There did not appear to be any traditional women's wear.



We left the party around two with a guy named Alvaro who never took off his aviator shades and walked to his campground where we stumbled on a lone guy at a campfire boiling water for maté. He seemed really happy to have comrades in maté and set to work brewing a gourdful. For maté the drinking gourd or maté is filled with maté leaves and possibly sugar (my preference, it's quite bitter otherwise) and then filled with boiling water. A metal straw or bombilla with a perforated bulb at the end is used to suck up the infusion. The maté gourd and bombilla are passed around from person to person and water added as needed. It's a warming hospitable tradition and you don't say gracias to your maté host until you are done and don't want anymore. Maté is drunk in Chile and Argentina and is ubiquitous in Uruguay though we never tried it there.

The next day we walked back out the dusty track we had walked in on the day before, to the riverside corral where the rodeo was held. We were moving fairly slowly after our late night and missed the sheep shearing, though we passed a pickup crammed with wild-eyed naked sheep on our way in. When we arrived the cow roping was in progress with 4 or 5 gauchos swinging immense lassoes over their heads as a harrassed cow ran in a circuit around the ring. A dog kept the cow moving in generally the right direction and as it passed each man would try to lasso its front legs.



The roping went on for a long time with groups of lassoers succeeding each other and we wandered around people watching. There was a great bar built out of logs and leaves where a number of participants, both man and beast, gathered. And we ran into our friends Diego and Ilana from the Cerro Castillo trail.





At this point the principal attraction, besides the gauchos playing a sort of horseshoe like game with a cow´s hoof, was the asado being prepared nearby. The meat corral contained 4 or 5 log fires around which were planted 5 foot iron stakes skewering entire lamb carcasses or sides of beef, at least 20 large pieces of meat in the first round. The meat was cooked over about 5 hours by the heat and smoke of the fires and when it was done everyone crowded around the split-rail fence to grab a piece.






When a slab of meat was done the iron stake holding it was pulled up and hefted onto a long wood table where people cut it apart and tossed the pieces in a huge roasting pan. Two men carried the pan around the ring and placed pieces of meat on receptacles held out by the hungry hordes pressed to the fence. A woman followed them with a pot filled with sopaipillas or fried dough.






People in the know and picnickers had plates and plastic dishes. Others had paper towels, pieces of cardboard, their bare hands. Mike scrounged us a couple of plastic bags and we set to on sopaipillas and pieces of tough but deliciously flavored beef. Unfortunately even after going back for seconds we didn't manage to grab a piece of lamb. We dubbed the undertaking Meatstock after Mike noted that it was like Woodstock with meat.






After our feast we joined many others relaxing on the slope behind a riding ring. A band started playing and suddenly and seemingly from nowhere a mounted gaucho galloped into the ring at the head of a group of 20 or so unsaddled horses. The wild horse riding event involved a presumably difficult horse who would be saddled and mounted by the participant. The other riders surrounding them would disperse and the horse would start running and bucking, encouraged by barking dogs and thumps from a crop held by the rider. It was hard to tell if the horse was going to buck anyway or was doing it out of irritation. Regardless most of the riders were bucked off which was satisfying.

This event also went on and on and we started home before it ended. Along the road back to town we ran into first Christopher from Lago O'Higgins and then Steven who we had met briefly on the trail in Cerro Castillo. It has been a lot of fun running into "old" friends from a few days or weeks back on our travels.

The next morning Javier's minibus picked us up at seven for the 3 hour drive to Coyhaique, the capital of the region. This was our first step in the multibus, multiday odyssey to get to Bariloche, Argentina to meet Mike Grafton who would be visiting from San Francisco.

Cerro Castillo

Villa Cerro Castillo is another tiny town along the Carretera Austral, the often gravel highway leading up through southern Chile. The name of the town comes from the surrounding hills, cerros, that resemble the battlements and turrets of a medieval castillo.


We hiked up into these beautiful mountains after saying a sad goodbye to Fay and Steffen and sending them off to points further north. We had such a good time traveling with them, basking in their constant good humor and hilarious takes on pretty much everything. I hope we see them again, whether in Partridge Green, Stuttgart, San Francisco, or DC.


Our trek was over four days, through farmland and forest and over a couple of steep scree-covered passes. We met a really nice Chilean couple, Diego and Ilana, as we were all setting up camp in the downpour we got our second night out. Fortunately this was the only rain we saw and it just meant that we downed some hot tea before dinner and got into our sleeping bags early that evening.


Much of the trail was beside beautiful clear rushing rivers, seemingly everywhere down here. We had a couple of rather difficult crossings and I managed not to fall in this time. At the top of the first pass we got some incredibly strong winds which made me a little nervous crossing the snowfield that is still up there. It was actually harder getting down the snow on the far side and I did a bit of tobogganing without the requisite vehicle. When we finally made it to the bottom of the seemingly endless slope of broken rock we had an amazing view back to a high rock wall festooned with slender waterfalls.




The day after the pass we hiked up a glacial valley to an icy blue lake, Laguna Castillo. It feeds one of the rivers we had been hiking along and is fed in turn by a glacier that hangs on the mountain above it. At the far side of the lake we hiked up another pass and then took at least a couple hours to make it down the boulders and scree on the other side. I fell at least 6 times but was grateful not to be hiking up it.





That night Mike found us a muy tranquilo riverside campsite, after we passed through The Land of the Caterpillars. We started noticing more and more of the furry creatures as we hiked down but only slowly realized the magnitude of the infestation. There were caterpillars everywhere, on every branch, on every stone, all over the trail, sometimes clustered in nauseating piles of 20 or more. In the woods, whole sections of trees had been defoliated as if it were winter. When we stopped to listen we could hear the munching. Fortunately we passed out of the zone before needing to find a campsite, though we still carried stowaways on our clothes and backpacks.


The next morning we hiked up to Campamento Neozelandés, so called for Kiwi mountaineers who made base camp there for some pioneering climbs in the '70s. Sadly we never saw any huemul, the shy Andean deer that live in these woods and parts further south. We hiked out, past our lepidopterous companions and back down to the beautiful sunny farmlands and Villa Cerro Castillo in the valley below. I stained my lips purple with calafate berries that are finally ripe, though we have been sampling them since December.

la Carretera Austral con Steffen y Fay

The Carretera Austral is the major road in southern Chile and begins in Villa O'Higgins. It is slow, mountainous, gravel, and serviced by less than comfortable buses than run irregularly, but it is one of the most beautiful places we have been and we loved the little towns where we stayed and the people we met.


We stayed in Villa O'Higgins for three nights as there was no bus running until Saturday. It rained most of the time so we spent a lot of time in the hostel resting and getting to know our hostelmates. We got to know Pascal and Nancy from Switzerland, Marcel from Germany, and a couple of long distance cyclists from France named André and Claire. We also met Steffen from Germany and Fay from Sussex, England who we ended up traveling with for more than a week, spending most our time cooking, eating like Romans, and laughing.



On our final day in Villa O´Higgins it cleared up in the afternoon and we walked up into the mountains and explored the town a bit. It had a very wild west feel to it. Its "supermarkets" looked like places you would buy supplies for the Oregon trail. They were dark little rooms with unfinished wood shelves stocked mostly with cans and expired condiments. Amazingly, however, they had free wi-fi and Steffen had a little travel computer so we were able to catch up on the inauguration.

That final evening Steffen started playing guitar and we all started singing, Take Me Home Country Roads being a favorite. Steffen and Marcel also sang a German children´s song about apes looking for coconuts that had all of us red faced with laughter. We also discovered from Steffen that the German word for honeybun is "Schnuckiputzi."

Saturday night we camped behind a hostel in Cochrane, another small town that not only had its name up on a hill in the style of the Hollywood sign, but also had the only bank on the southern Carretera Austral. Unfortunately it refused to take my card leaving us in a pretty precarious situation. Steffen, our hero, took out a substantial amout of money for us and saved us from a world of pain.

The following day we went to Puerto Río Tranquilo, another tiny town on Lago General Carrera. When we got there we joined a little tour in a motorboat to see the caves of marble along the coast and in some of the islands. When we got back to town we settled into Odina´s daughter's hospedaje where we got to share dinner with her, Marcela, members of her family, her friend Lidia, and a couple from Buenos Aires named Mario and Monica. It was a special night: boisterous, warm, and deeply amusing.







The following day we failed to get on the bus because it was tiny and packed to the gills, so after a walk up into the hills overlooking the lake, we got to do it all over again. I made pisco sours from Alvaro´s recipe, Steffen made German potato salad, Kartoffelsalat, and we roasted a chicken in Marcela´s woodburning oven. Boisterosity ruled again as we broke the roasting pan somewhat injuring Hilary, Marcela cut my hair, and Steffen and I ate an obscene amount of homemade currant and raspberry cake. Marcela was a wonderful host and we are still eating her homemade cherry jam.






On our final day together we caught the bus with Steffen and Fay to Villa Cerro Castillo where we took a beautiful walk to a somewhat underwhelming wall of ancient handprints (see video). Finally we had a last supper together. Hilary ordered a traditional meal, I went for the healthy option.





It is hard to describe what happens when you meet people who are truly (I believe the Spanish word is) simpatico. I can´t really describe what we talked about or why the words like "breathtaking" would bring on fits of hysterical laughter. Steffen and Fay were not only tremedously kind to us, it was like getting a chance to travel with a professional comedy team. We just received an email from them that turned heads in our internet cafe because of our laughter. We can still see their smiles and waves as the bus pulled away on Wednesday taking them to Coyhaique and leaving us alone by a quite river in the mountains.

Caminamos a Chile de Argentina

Over two weeks ago we left El Chaltén, Argentina for Villa O'Higgins, Chile, not completely sure what we were getting into. This was our first trek where we had to carry everything, so we purged anything not of the essence. The first leg involved walking and hitchhiking to Lago del Desierto along a dirt road. We walked for a couple hours before we got our first ride from a friendly Australian couple named Brad and Heather, but soon we were walking again when they reached their hostería. We walked for three or four hours before we got our next ride which took us a couple hundred feet before leaving us because the road was blocked by several dozen trees that had been downed in the Patagonian winds that apparently have no name. We continued to walk for several hours until the road was cleared and a wonderful bus driver named Raúl took pity on us and brought us to the end of the road, refusing even a modest tip.





That evening we camped at the southern tip of Lago del Desierto and met a man from Buenos Aires named Miguel, mi tocayo (we have the same name), traveling with his son and some of his son's friends. He gave us great tips on places to visit in Argentina and shared a maté with us in the morning, inauguration day. We felt a little homesickness, wishing we could join Hilary's family and friends in Washington and be at the Kellys' for red beans and rice. The day was wonderful, however. The wind died and the sun shone on the lake and Mount Fitz Roy and we had the trail almost to ourselves. That evening we camped at the north end of the lake near the Argentinian border outpost with a great view aross the length of the lake to Fitz Roy. Despite the lack of roads, the border guards had satellite television and the one who stamped our passports said the inauguration had been very good, though he admitted to not having understood the speeches.





The following day we hiked another ten miles or so. After a few hours we came to the border. Though the trail was fairly easy to follow there were no signs, but at the border there were two large welcome signs more worthy of a major highway than a modest footpath. There was also a pleasant old fashioned marker and we were careful to consume the remainder of our cheese before passing it.


We also had a little moment of excitement when we reached a bridge that had been washed out. We took off our boots and forded it, but not before Hilary got pushed over by the strong current and I fished her bag out. Luckily neither of us were hurt and nothing got too wet. The kicker, however, was ten minutes later when we crossed the same river on a bridge and realized that our fording had been entirely unnecessary. We felt like the butt of a sight gag in a silent movie.



The final leg of the journey was a boat ride across the large and many fingered Lago O´Higgins. It started off a little choppy and then turned sunny and wonderful for half an hour or so as we sailed between steep hills with long waterfalls, talking politics with a South African named Christopher, and smiling at the toddlers playing on the deck. But suddenly when we turned a corner and started heading westward, the wind started blowing, the front of the boat started doing a rollercoaster imitation, and the toddlers had to be carried screaming off the deck by a heroic boatswain. Hilary went below, but due to the sickening diesel smell in the cabin, I stayed up on deck getting progressively wetter and greener with a couple of wool ensconced Chilean soldiers who whooped with joy everytime another sheet of water arced over us and continued to chuckle as they wrung out the sleeves of their uniforms. When I finally got too wet and cold to keep my eyes on the horizon I went down below where I met Fay (who will feature prominently in the next episode), feeling similarly. Finally we docked, jumped in a truck, and were driven to La Cascada, our friendly hospedaje run by Odina and Omar, in the primitive town of Villa O´Higgins.