Quito time

If anyone is concerned about global droughts and needs to reassure themselves that it still rains in this world, I would advise a trip to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, where I currently find myself. Truly a remarkable amount of rain. Every day for the almost two weeks I’ve been here. Fortunately the purpose of my time here is to learn Spanish at a language school inside so the rain isn’t a problem at all. And I have a rain jacket and the general attitude that a bit of water never hurt no one. (Except people who drown). 
Back to where I left off last time. My last day in Chile I spent with my hiking friend Anna. We had a deeply jolly day. It’s remarkable how close you can get to someone when you meet them in the right circumstances and are suited to one another. That night I slept in the airport, curled up in my sleeping bag in the corner waiting for my morning flight. When I checked in they told me I couldn’t board because I had no proof of onward travel from Ecuador. I tried to explain that I was a free spirited, spontaneous hippie who hitchhikes and had no intention of settling permanently in Ecuador but they weren’t buying it. During my 8 hour layover in Bogota I had to buy a pointless plane ticket to Fort Lauderdale which I cancelled immediately. What a silly system. 

When I arrived in Quito I went right to my host family’s apartment. Very nice and comfortable. I have a large picture of Jesus and another of Mary and Jesus guarding me all night. I had Sunday to explore the city before my lessons started last Monday so I went into the old town and sat on a park bench in the main plaza for a while. Two random old men started talking to me. One of them offered to show me the centro commercial, which I understood to be a local market where we could get lunch so off we trotted to a bus that took us 30 minutes through the city. Finally we disembarked and walked into the hugest, cleanest, most American mall you can imagine. Zara and Armani and Apple and KFC. I was almost sick. I explained to him in my limited Spanish that I hated shopping, I don’t buy things, I have no interest in seeing shops that are abundant at home and wanted to return immediately to the historical town. Things soured between us rather, and anyway he was quite a bore. We went our separate ways. 

My lessons started the next day. I have four hours one on one from 9am-1pm for $7 an hour. And unlimited bread rolls at the school! I mean, they cost approximately 10 cents so it’s not as if I couldn’t buy them myself but there’s something nice about having an bowl of them handy for mid lesson nibbling. And my teacher Isabel is very cute and brings me fruit every day. She is a very good egg – open-minded, kind, good teacher, friendly etc but boy can she talk. She asks me about my day yesterday and I say a couple of sentences and they might remind her of something and then I learn about the fight she had with her nephew and her tumultuous relationship with her brother and the other brother who moved to Spain and the mass exodus from Ecuador when the economy crashed and they moved the currency from the sucre to the dollar 15 years ago or so and the corruption of the politicians and the impossibility of saving money here and the terrible hospitals which only give ibuprofen and only let you in if you have a fever and how she gets up at 4.30 every day to milk the cows before work. You could almost say my lessons are more lessons in the minutiae of Isabel’s life than Spanish lessons. But they are in Spanish and I do understand so I must be learning. We turn to grammar eventually and I approach it with such fervor the 16 year old Emma of school French and German would fall off her chair in shock at the difference. Back then 40 minutes of class felt like an interminable waste of time and now I find I’m easily able to focus for four hours and then go home and revise everything I’ve learnt, shove some more vocab into my skull and do my written homework, all with great happiness and diligence. I suppose that is what happens when you choose to do something and pay for it yourself. And it pays off – I’m probably better at Spanish now than I was at French after learning it at school for 7 years. 

(Easter parade).

There is another person staying with the same Ecuadorian family as I am – an older American gentleman called Brian. I have taken umbrage with him. He speaks not a word of Spanish and seems to have the impression that I am remotely interested in his political opinions and recommendations of hop on hop off bus tours around the city. After a couple of meals together I had a quiet word with the host mother and now Brian and I eat separately. It’s always bit awkward when my meal overruns and we cross paths at the table but life’s too short to listen to lameoids ad nauseam and anyway, I’m paying for the homestay for full immersion. 
On Saturday I went to a famous market town a couple of hours out of the city for the day. (Brian tried to get me to pay $45 for a tour there but I took the normal bus for $2.50). You had to write your name on a list when you got on the bus for whatever reason and when I sat down another tourist sat next to me and started talking to me in German. He’s seen my name and assumed I was German. Gerhard was perfectly nice, quite stereotypically socks and sandals German, but I wasn’t quite feeling his company. At this point I enjoy being on my own so much uninvited people sometimes feel like a real intrusion. We walked round the market a bit together which had the one bonus of making me feel like I really could speak German. It was quite a relief to be about to express myself fluently in a foreign language. Previously I’d been insecure about my German and was loathe to speak it in case I conjugated some verb wrong but now I know what it’s like to actually be bad at a language my German has shot up. Everything is relative innit.

 I managed to shake Gerhard off and walk up a hill to a sanctuary for birds of prey. What amazing creatures. Reminded me of that great book H is for Hawk. There were tiny Pygmy owls the size of my fist which were particularly wonderful. All the birds are threatened by humans destroying their habitat which added some pain to my appreciation of their beauty. 

When I returned to the bus station who should I run into but bloody Gerhard. We sat together on the bus again and I pleaded exhaustion and put my headphones on and stared out the window. It turned out we both had the same plan for the next day: to take the cable car up the mountain over the city and climb the volcano that’s up there. Most tiresome. I managed to arrange it that we wouldn’t go together and would just “hope” to see each other at the top. Once up there I climbed up for a couple of hours and just before reaching the summit I turned back. It was a real breakthrough for me to do that. Imagine getting close to the summit and not bothering to climb to the top of it! Madness. But actually not madness. I wanted to avoid Gerhard who I knew was ahead of me, the summit was covered in cloud so there’d be no view, I didn’t need more exercise, and basically I just felt like turning back and realized I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone about reaching the top. It was quite freeing to just turn around and skip down towards lunch and not push on for the sake of it. 
Yesterday I went to the the old house and museum of a famous Ecuadorian artist called Oswaldo Guayasamin. It was incredible. He was profoundly struck by the violence man causes against man and had painting after painting of contorted skeletal bodies, and anguished faces crying tears of blood representing exploited miners, oppressed people, victims of dictatorships etc etc. He was a friend and contemporary of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who writes about such things, as well as Victor Jara, a Chilean musician who sings about them. The whole thing really made it clear how affected South America’s culture is by its past of being brutally conquered by Europeans and their very recent past of being subjected to military dictatorships. Unsurprising I suppose, and not easy to swallow. 

Self portrait. 

(I was crying because I had no shoes until I saw a child who had no feet)
His house was full of beautiful art from all over the world and made me want to fill mine, once I’ve built it from scratch, in a similar way. 

Final Chile segment

I’m writing this from probably the oddest situation I’ve found myself in yet this trip, right on the two month anniversary of my departure. I’m alone in a very dirty house of a stranger I met on couchsurfing. It’s in a suburb of a coastal city called Valparaiso, and the house is one of those indentikit houses, with its twins all around, and the street is gated off from the main street. The house is foul on the inside, as if 5 student boys were living here. I don’t really understand the host – he sounded nice and fun and friendly from his profile and in our whatsapping, and at first he was all those things and then just before we ate he basically stopped speaking, only giving monosyllabic answers and smiling. Then he went out and said he would probably be back later or the next morning. I think he might just be extremely high because he is a chronic stoner, growing huge marijuana plants in his backyard. All of the spare rooms in his house are filled with beds and according to all the (overwhelmingly positive) reviews online he has hosted a lot of couchsurfers. I was trying this out to meet locals and socialize but this is the least social evening I’ve had since arriving. (Not including the camping nights because there my tent is my friend). But anyway, nice to have some downtime and to see that there are people in this world who welcome in strangers no questions asked and trust them in their home all night. I dread to imagine my parents’ reaction if I opened our house’s doors in such a way. 
That is setting the scene. Now back to where I was with Tilly last week or so. The pleasant times continued. I had an attempt at bareback horse riding, which is easy enough once you’re on but it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get up gracefully. You supposedly just fling yourself over onto the horse’s back, clutching its mane for support. But that is a lot easier said than done. The poor horse stood there patiently while I threw my entire body weight against its back again and again. Eventually I just had to slide over it perpendicularly, looking like a beached whale until I managed to get into a sitting position. But once up you feel very hardcore roaming around with none of the paraphernalia. Lucky the horses there were extremely docile or I would have been eating ground in no time. 

Tilly’s new existence is very enviable except that I don’t think I’d be able to slow my pace of life down enough to be satisfied. There is a huge cultural difference in the work ethic of Europeans and Patagonians meaning that basically nothing gets done here. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re not starving, and I am far from thinking that the purpose of life is to run around madly “achieving” things but I need a bit more activity I think. Another issue was that everything is cripplingly expensive in Argentina because of incessant inflation to the point where families take day trips through hours of customs queues across the border to Chile to buy basic electronics and alcohol etc. A tiresome side effect of a poor economy. But all that aside, it was amazing to be there in the beautiful countryside hanging out with Tilly.

 

After a week we made the 24 hour journey to Santiago for Lollapalooza music festival. The night we got there we went for drinks with a gay couple that Tilly met on couchsurfing who bought us loads of drinks and who talked to us in Spanish, not seeming to mind that we were about as witty as a park bench. Again, who are these freakishly generous people who take foreign strangers in and spend time and money on them with nothing in return? Amazing. (And this isn’t just me being naive. They genuinely wanted nothing in return). 
The next day we went to the festival, along with a German friend of mine from the eco camp, Alex, who is obsessed with Metallica, the band headlining along with the xx. We saw some good bands, chatted away merrily, didn’t drink at all because for some unknown reason it was a dry festival and then split up so Tilly and I could be overwhelmed by the incredibleness of the xx and Alex could have his ear battered to smithereens by the foul barrage of noise coming from Metallica. He called us stupid for not trying to experience their concert because apparently it’s out of this world good, but we just couldn’t bear it. 

The next day at the festival we met up with Anna (my friend from hiking in el Chalten) and a couple of her friends from their study abroad program and spent the day with them, raving away and lying in the grass intermittently. A random saxophone playing dj called Griz who I’d never heard of was a highlight. We moshed with a crowd of 17 year old boys. 
For the last couple of days I’ve been in Valparaiso with Mauro, who took a bus 3000 kilometres to come visit. Valparaiso is such a cool city – covered in murals and street art, set on extremely steep hills with painted staircases everywhere, mosaics, music coming from open windows all over the place, beautiful views of the sea.. all in all a place conducive to a romantic retreat.

 He told me about when he just graduated college and wanted to experience life in a factory so worked as a cushion gluer-together for two months. Apparently factory work is horrific as it sounds. I’m not sure I could handle it. We parted ways for good this afternoon and I came out here to this bizarre empty place with its marijuana plant taller than my head. 

Staying with people

Next on the agenda was an eco lodge in the middle of nowhere I’d been recommended which I wanted to visit for research purposes. It was quite a lot fancier than the eco camp from a few weeks ago, with cabins and beds and proper furniture and a chef etc but was still cheap for me to camp. It has a great selling point in their early morning kayak trips. I woke up in the dark and set out alone onto the river in the kayak, with the stars’ reflections glistening in the utterly still water and the moon shining so bright I had a shadow. Mist swirled around me in most eerie and ethereal manner. Gradually the sky ahead lightened until the sun popped out from behind a hill and bathed me in golden rays. No sign of other humans, just loads of birds chirping merrily away. You could go on kayaking all day if you wanted but I knew that breakfast was awaiting my return, and I’d seen loads of bee hives so knew there’d be fresh honey and bread so was physically unable to stop myself turning around a little prematurely and heading foodwards. 

In the evening I played a strange board game involving building civilizations with the three staff. They included me because I was the only guest which was good Spanish practice. Now I know the word for mud: arcilla.
The next day I made my way to my German friend Ali’s farm in the Lakes District. It was a big change in lifestyle from how I’d been going along until that point. When I arrived we went to the supermarket and basically played supermarket sweep. So much fun food! The supermarket wares were a far cry from the shriveled carrots and bulk bags of flour of most of the villages I’d been in. I even bought artichokes. 
We had a lovely relaxing time. Lots of eating and cooking and talking and reading and walking around through the beautiful rolling fields admiring the happy looking cows. Although I have to say I’m not cows’ biggest fan. They have a kind of simultaneously vacant and ominous stare that unsettles me a little. I also picked about 12,000 blackberries. There were so many bushes utterly laden with fruits! Apparently they’re actually a weed here. Ex-pats brought them over to make them feel at home and they have spread like a rash. But I wasn’t complaining as I made a huge blackberry crumble and am not the one who needs to spend my days uprooting them. 

One night I went camping (it’s not good for my mental health to be separated from my tent for too long) and had a lovely spot down by a little river. Ali and I had a beer together and then he left me to enjoy the river’s company. I got so carried away by the privacy and the music of nature I started to sing to the trees. I haven’t been able to form song-like noises from my throat ever since my voice box operation last year but a couple of months away from shouting myself hoarse in the big city seems to have restored my vocal cords so the trees were treated to repeated renditions of the only songs whose lyrics I could remember: Once in Royal David’s city, Edelweiss, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Kumbayah. They gave me a standing ovation so I’m sure they enjoyed it greatly. 
From Ali’s I went north to visit my friend Tilly who lives on a horse and husky ranch just over the Argentinian border. She came as a volunteer last year and, excepting a few months away, has settled here semi-permanently. It is an amazing place: the owner Hernan built everything from scratch (so many people seem to be able to do this – maybe it’s not that hard..?!) and the houses are absolutely stunning. There’s one main house and two guest cabins for people who come to ride the horses and do dogsledding in winter. There are 36 dogs, 9 horses and 2 cats. I’m here now, catching up with Tilly, riding horses, walking in the mountains, eating more fresh bread, trying to make a wooden spoon and generally having a slice of Tilly’s wonderful, calm, natural life. 

Going North

From the town I was in when I last wrote, Cochrane, I had 245 kilometres to travel by hitchhiking. It turns out that there is a famous road called the Carretera Austral that runs from Villa O’Higgins northwards for 1,200km, and I had inadvertently (due to a complete lack of planning) found myself on this notoriously beautiful route. Hitchhiking is such a strange way of transport. When you start walking along the road (I guess you could stand still and wait, but it’s more fun to walk and I suspect cars are more likely to pick you up if you do because they feel sorry for you) you have no idea how long you’ll be going. It could be five minutes or it could be an hour. Or longer. I’m working on not resenting the empty cars that drive past and ignore me, telling myself they’re probably en route to their wife giving birth or something. But actually the ignorers are the minority. People are just so freakishly nice here! Twice it’s happened that I was driven past, and then the driver obviously took pity on me, stopped 100m up the road, and reversed back to get me. We have some limited chat in Spanish, and then some good old window staring time. I really enjoy the walking part, the uncertainty, the gratefulness when I’m collected, the car relaxing time and then another walk. Much better than hours and hours cooped up on one bus seat. 

 I reached my destination, Villa Cerro Castillo at around 3pm, and I was almost tempted to start the four day trek that the town is famous for that afternoon. It had been too long since I’d put myself under intense physical pressure and I was aching for it. Luckily a nice Ecuadorean guy starting talking to me as I was staring about dumbly and told me about a nice campsite down the road where I could shower and chill for a night before setting out. Not really sure what I was thinking… I wasn’t remotely prepared for a four day hike. 
So the next day off I went. After 5 hours hiking I arrived at camp, set up my tent, and proceeded to lie in it for four hours as it rained. After a brief abatement for an evening stroll to a mountain lake and some soup for dinner (basically just an extremely salty stock cube in hot water with some minuscule pieces of pasta floating desultorily in it), I went to bed. I have to say, it was rather an unpleasant night. I was SO cold. My feet were like ice bricks. I had a recurring dream every time I managed to drop off that I was at my childhood home in England and I was allowed to come in from the cold. But just when I was about to go in, I’d wake up, and there would be no respite from the cold at all. Eventually day arrived and I packed up and charged off in the hope that movement would solve my temperature issues. And it did! The sun came out and my spirits rose and rose and I was warm and gleeful to be bounding around in the beautiful mountains, with barely a soul about me. 

Then I got lost. I tried to ask a bird for directions but it fluttered off up in the direction I didn’t think the path was. I was adamant the path was down through some trees and I’d pop out the other side and reconnect. So I kept going down an extremely steep sandy hill through denser and denser woods, across streams, slipping and sliding, until eventually a cliff dropped in front of me and it was impossible to continue. I couldn’t believe I had come so far so doggedly when it was clearly wrong. It was a case of, “well I’ve come so far now, I can’t go back so may as well push through.” False! False. False. You can always go back. Sunk costs and all that. Turned out the bird was right. I had to go UP not down. I mentally apologised to the bird for doubting its superior wisdom. (Oh my god a whale just breached and spouted water out 100m away from the ferry I’m on. So cool! I’ve never seen a whale before). Anyway, off I went up the hill, following now beloved trail markings. It was a mountain of rocks, and every time you got to the top, you’d see an even bigger one behind it. It felt quite Sisyphean but not really because I did reach the top eventually and was euphoric. 

My body was very grateful for the yoga I did with it when I eventually reached camp, after climbing another rock mountain over a pass. Stunning views. It ended up being one of the top days of hiking ever. 

The next day, after five hours hiking and an hour’s hitchhiking, I reached Coyhaique, a biggish town. I’d agreed to meet up with Mauro (it’s a longer story than the scope of the blog. You can apply to me for details if desired) and he picked me up from the town square and took me to his friend’s house, who was celebrating her birthday. They gave me a piece of steak and some salad and I ate up hungrily. I haven’t eaten steak in a matter of years and was not particularly adroit with my knife handling skills. It felt quite strange joining this party when everyone had already finished, tucking into their food, and trying to be inconspicuous. 
Then we all repaired to the yard to form a band. There was a selection of random instruments, from a couple of bongo drums, a xylophone, guitar, sax, a strange vase with a hole that was also a drum, and I got a Wagnerian tuba. Similar to a normal tuba but with four keys instead of three. My years as a French horn player paid off at last. We all sat around drinking red wine, smoking homegrown weed, eating chocolate and intermittently making noises on our various instruments for a couple of hours. Mine was rather loud which was unfortunate as I wasn’t very good at making a tune. But no one seemed to mind. 
Mauro and I eventually left to find accommodation and weren’t sure where to go. He has an iPhone with data so I said “google it”, because how else would you know how to do anything? It hadn’t even occurred to him. I couldn’t believe it and couldn’t stop laughing. Imagine having a question and not googling it! 
The next day I ate the most delicious bread roll with butter to date and then hitchhiked to a port to get a 30 hour ferry to an island off Chile which is kind of en route north. Not really sure what I’ll find on this island but I have high hopes nonetheless. 
Quite a weird thing happened on the ferry last night: I went out to see if I could get my sleeping back from my backpack in the hold because I was cold, wasn’t able to, and then was aimlessly walking down an aisle when a man came out of an office and said “Emma?” I said yes… and he handed me my credit card which had fallen out of my backpack pocket as I left the zip open when I took an avocado out and they’d supposedly found it on the floor of the hold. I couldn’t believe he knew I was Emma! But I’m reunited with my card and all is well. 
Now it’s later and I’m sitting trying to digest the largest collection of food I just stuffed gleefully into my belly. First was the local speciality that I had to try for a cultural experience, curanto, which is a huge pot of various mussels and clams, a sausage, a pork steak, a potato and a strange dumpling thing, all of which would have already sorted me out for the rest of the day, but then I saw the lady take out a carrot cake from the oven and she cut me an extremely generous slice. I had already had a very large slice for breakfast because I was feeling like it. I’ll try not to have one for dinner too. 

Leaving the eco camp

It feels like I’ve lived multiple lives since I last posted. My time at the Eco Camp was quite intense. The daily routine was different from office life – we’d wake up in the hand built cabin with the sun coming in the big window with a view of the mountains and make our way to the kitchen for a breakfast of freshly baked bread and butter and maybe jam from raspberries we picked up the mountain on a hike. Eventually we’d think about getting to work and would go over to the building site and collect logs from the forest, chainsaw them to size, nail them in, make cement out of earth, woodchips and water and then fill the house in with that and glass bottles. 
After a few hours we’d stop for lunch – some sort of vegetable pasta or rice or lentils and more bread. Always bread. My innards have turned to flour. Then we’d have tea and coffee and read around the fire listening to music for a while. Everyone would do their own thing, building stuff with wood, chopping firewood, walking around, going to town, chatting to the cool people who passed through, whatever. Eventually we’d think about having dinner, eating at about 10pm, maybe drinking red wine from some dodgy looking boxes, then bed at midnight or so. Guests came and went but the three Spanish guys and I were there with Mauro for the two weeks. There was of course plenty of soulful, sincere guitar playing, unavoidable in places such as these, and luckily for once I didn’t have the urge to roll my eyes. 

It was a blissful existence, a sustainable lifestyle I aspire to continue, enhanced by my deepening relationship with Mauro. It is very sexy to dig a big hole and then kiss in it. But then trouble came to paradise…
The situation came to a head on a day hike we did a couple of days ago, the five of us and two french couples who were also staying then. After a couple of hours of walking, one of the Spanish guys and I walked ahead for an hour or two and then stopped to wait for the group to catch up. Mauro was black with rage. He shouted at Jordi for a long time and then said to me angrily: “you come with the group, you stay with the group. You’re my responsibility. If you want to run off, run back to the campsite and take your backpack and leave”. And then he didn’t say another word for the rest of the long hike, even during lunch up by the glacier we reached. Overreaction is an understatement. 
Later he apologised for shouting at me but didn’t acknowledge that his anger was unreasonable. I have zero tolerance for someone losing their temper at me so decided to leave with the boys two days later. He was disappointed I was leaving, and asked me to stay, but it was too late. I had a fear of the black cloud descending on him again (we diagnosed him as bipolar) and that meant I couldn’t be truly comfortable. I parted from him sadly, he taught me a lot, and I will never forget him. He gave me a beautiful bilingual book of Pablo Neruda’s poetry to take with me. 
I left with one of the French couples to Tortel, a tiny little town on the sea with no roads, only board walks. I camped in the strange shed of a campsite, with a chainsaw, nails, hammer, planks of wood and an evilly staring cat for company. Here’s a picture of the end of a path that says “tsunami evacuation route”. Not sure how effective it would be:
 Now I’m at a slightly bigger town in a tiny room with a bunch of cyclists. I had two carrots and two bread rolls with butter just now and am utterly satisfied. I am obsessed with butter now. Making up for all the butter I didn’t eat while I was a good honest vegan. The Spanish boys mocked me a lot for my supposedly very British love of butter. 

Just made bread

A new way

I write this in the rain from the side of the road in a little town called Villa O’Higgins, where I and two guys have been standing for over three hours trying to hitch a ride out of town. But the town is tiny and it’s at the end of the road and there is no traffic whatsoever. Sometimes cars go past but they already have four or five people in them. People in Chile seem to be more efficient car users than in America. In any case, this is a good opportunity to describe how I got here. 
Last I wrote Anna and I were about to head up the mountain to camp before some more hiking. I had plotted quite an ambitious route which ended up being 34km/21 miles which we proceeded to do very merrily, even though we only had half an avocado and a cereal bar to eat for lunch. Anna was very much not a complainer – a highly desirable attribute. 
Dinner that evening was graced by a majestic view as our reward. To say we appreciated the food would be an understatement. It’s crazy how exquisite packet soup and plain pasta can be. 

The next day we returned to town, said our farewells and I set off north. I hitchhiked the first 20km with an Argentinian guy who has a summer house in the valley. He parked, we got out, he put on a harness and zip lined into his garden. There is no driveway! The only way in is via zipline over a river. 
Eventually I got to the start of the trail and was looking forward to an easy 5km hike to the campsite. Unfortunately I was gravely mistaken. It was a 4 hour clamber up and down steep slopes, crossing little rivers with barely any stepping stones which was impossible with my big backpack on my back and my little backpack on my front unbalancing me, and it had started to rain very hard. My backpacks aren’t waterproof so I had to put my rain jacket over the front one and just hope for the best for the back one. It was quite a bleak walk that I got through by chanting inspirational quotes to myself repeatedly and forcing myself to list out loud all the ways in which the situation could be worse. At least my legs weren’t broken, and my feet weren’t cold, and I had friends and family etc. I was scraping the barrel a bit by the end. The walk took a bloody long time to finish. Then I had to put my tent up in the rain and I couldn’t do up my jacket to sleep in because my fingers were paralyzed by cold. 
The next day I refused to leave my tent until the sun shone directly on it and me. Eventually I set off and looked for a campsite that was supposedly 10km away. Unfortunately it didn’t exist and I limped lamely the full 20km to chile. The old Achilles’ tendon was not in a good way. Luckily it was a beautiful day and a beautiful walk and my spirits refused to be dampened by my physical travails.

 

The next day after a long ferry ride it was raining again. And I tried to escape the wretched town we arrived in, Villa O’Higgins, via hitchhiking, and that was the situation when I first started writing this blog post almost a week ago. 
Things have changed drastically since then. Or rather, they haven’t at all. I’m still here and am staying indefinitely. I’m staying at an eco camp in the woods which is the most heavenly place.It is all built by hand by the owner, Mauro, from naturally fallen trees. Everything is recycled, water from a spring, wood stove, compost loos, communal cooking, incredible light coming through the trees all the time, and mainly just an amazing energy and atmosphere. Almost everyone who comes here stays for a handful of days when they only planned on one day, even though there’s technically nothing to do, just because it’s such a pleasure to be here. I was umming and ahhing about how long to stay, and I asked Mauro if there was any work to be done around the place, and then we started this project building a little wooden cabin. Later on he told me that the project was just an excuse to get me to stay, but it is SO fun to work on, the ulterior motive doesn’t matter at all. I’m doing it with Mauro and three Spanish guys. We wield the chainsaw, collect wood, hammer logs into place, chisel…all these cool skills I was clueless about before. The other guests come and go, but we are staying for free because we’re volunteering, and I’ve been upgraded from my tent to Mauro’s house and like to think of myself as queen of the campsite. Everyone is Chilean or Spanish at the moment so my Spanish is coming along a bit. Mauro has to leave the campsite in a week or so to go do biology classification work on a glacier somewhere and he’s asked the four of us volunteers if we want to stay here and run the place in his absence. We would take all the money from the guests and put it towards the communal food. We wouldn’t be giving money to him on his return or taking wages ourselves. It would just be for fun. It’s a dream of mine to run a sustainable eco lodge, so actually getting to do it right now is a crazy opportunity. I am full of the knowledge now that there is another way to live – like this. And I like it a lot. Every evening I go walking through the woods and it is extremely trippy. Every sense is magnified and I can’t stop staring at trees and plants.

El Chalten

Blog post numero dos. See how the Spanish is coming along! At this rate I’ll be fluent by April. 
Last I wrote I was en route to El Chalten. On the final leg of that journey I sat next to a nice American chap called Sandy who was doing an MBA in order to go into environmental consulting. We hung out the whole day, walking to a waterfall and eating together but at the end I was quite happy to shake him off. We agreed a lot and he was pleasant but overall was rather meh. No lasting contribution. 

I had found out about a four day circuit that I was very keen to do but it required that I rent a harness, two carabiners and a couple of ropes for two sections where you have to zipline across a ravine and a river. Off I went to find that gear, but it was far easier said than done. Every shop was sold out so I had to keep going back every couple of hours to see if anyone had returned one yet, to no avail. Then a harness turned up but none of the other stuff. Then finally at the end of the day all the stuff was there except for the steel carabiner and the guy said you only needed one per group so if I register with a group, I could use theirs and Bob’s my uncle. I wasn’t entirely sure where I’d find a group of people doing the same random hike as me though. That evening I was quite out of sorts. It was so frustrating to have all my plans dependent on things out of my control. I was hanging around in the hostel eating the cold pasta someone was about to throw out which I tried to enliven by cooking it with an onion and some oregano but more or less failed and listening to the really hardcore mountain climbers around me plotting their ascents in the coming days and I felt quite useless. It was very unpleasant and led me to the earth shattering realisation that my comfort zone wasn’t a physical place (I’d slept like a baby on a bench in the bus stop the night before) but being in a situation where I couldn’t control my immediate future and furthermore felt softcore compared to the people around me. 
In the morning in a last ditch attempt to find people to register as a group with I went to the visitor centre when it opened and lo and behold – two people who’d watched the safety video for the hike with me the day before were there registering, Anna and Zach, so I signed my name on their form, ran back to the hire shop to pick up the gear, grabbed my backpack and set off up the mountain in a state of euphoria. The sun was shining, the mountains were singing, the birds were tweeting…everything. 

I got to the campsite at 230 and set up my beloved tent, ate some nuts and generally relished the afternoon but then the wind started up in a most alarming manner. When I say wind, don’t be imagining a gentle, caressing breeze. This was Wind with a capital W. I have never experienced anything like it. I had clambered up the side of the hill a bit to shelter under a boulder and write my journal and could watch as the other people went to the river to collect water. They’d start off walking normally but then a gust would come and they’d be knocked sideways, or forced to start running or crouch down, depending on the random direction it came in. It was so loud it sounded like jumbo jets were flying directly overhead. It got too unpleasant being out of the tent so I went to bed at 630 but the wind had blown so many dust particles into my tent, even through the inner lining, that the inside looked like Pompeii. All night I kept crushing crunchy bits of dirt between my teeth. I also knew I needed to find Anna and Zach so I could walk with them the next day and use their carabiner for the ravine crossing so I’d make occasional forays out into the big bad world to look for movement but every tent was buttoned down and no one was in sight. In the morning it was raining and the wind was just as bad. It was rather bleak. I kept doing my forays to find people, interspersed with reading Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, and in the absence of other conversation the way of speaking in the book started to infiltrate my thoughts so I would think things like “get thee hence, o wicked wind”. 
Eventually I ran into an older German man who wanted to set off too and from whom I could borrow the gear needed so we sallied forth, unable to speak because the wind snatched away every word. 
We reached the ravine to cross after a couple of hours walking and there was a raging river underneath. It was quite scary. I had no idea how to use the gear and was so grateful for Jens’ expertise. He went across first then I sent the two backpacks across and then I went. My life hung in my ability to tie myself to my harness and attach it to the wire. Luckily I sailed across without mishap. 

Another couple of hours hiking up before the pass and then woaaaahhhh the view. The sky had cleared and a huge glacier was flowing down the opposite valley. I kept swearing out loud and shaking my head in awe and joy. 

The campsite was next to a beautiful lake and it was great to shake the foul dirt out of all of my belongings in the sun. It was time to tackle my stove, which had been a source of pain to me mentally since I’d given it a practise run in the garden of the hostel the morning before and had made quite a fool of myself. The gas was filled too high in the bottle and I didn’t know how to dispose of the excess so eventually I figured I’d just pour it on the ground (I know this was the wrong thing to do for the grass but I didn’t know want to put it down the sink either) but it was so bloody windy I tipped the bottle slightly and the gas whipped all over my leggings. So I was convinced I was going to set myself on fire. But I couldn’t even light the thing so a kind soul who’d obviously been watching my struggles from inside came and showed me what to do. Anyway, up the mountain was time to use it for dinner. And I didn’t set myself on fire! It worked. I cooked packet mashed potatoes and ate it from the pot on a rock in the sun and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it was one of the most delicious meals I’ve had in a long time. 

Then Anna walked by and we were both relieved to have found each other safe and sound. She’s a college student from Colorado who’s travelling alone and who met Zach, a 30 year old ex navy guy at a bus stop and co-opted him to come hiking with her. She’s quite an impressive character and full of joie de vivre. She invited me to share their pasta and we were both so happy to be there we just laughed hysterically the entire time. Zach sat there. Nothing wrong with him but he had really small pupils that made him look a bit like an evil lizard. 
Lovely day hiking the next day. The highlight came at the campsite at the end. It was above a glacial lake – one of the the biggest glaciers in Argentina ended in this lake and it was scattered with icebergs that had broken off and floated into the middle. Like a ginormous cocktail. Anna, Zach and I were mincing about on the edge dipping our toes in and then 70m away an Argentinian guide who was doing the trek with a French girl client (really no need for a guide but maybe she wanted someone to cook her meals for her) stripped butt naked and plunged right in head first. He put us to shame rather so we had to follow suit. It was surprisingly pleasant! The air was warm so my whole body felt so alive afterwards. Anna had brought her stove down so we cooked on a big stone overlooking the lake and continued on with our hysterical bliss, compounded by a total fiasco with puréed mashed potatoes which were burned and cold and butane tasting and which got an honourable funeral on some bushes. 

The next day was raining but the hike was lovely. The mountains looked eerie and ethereal coming out from wisps of clouds. All the other people doing the trek (we were 12 or so in total) convened at the end while waiting for the bus and bonded sharing our leftover food and comparing wind abuse stories from the first night. 
We agreed to meet for a beer that night and back in town went our separate ways for a much needed shower. As we were having the beer outside, an Israeli guy Anna had met a couple of weeks ago walked past so we arranged to go to their hostel for dinner. We went armed with garlic bread and red wine and had a delightful evening with three Israeli guys. They were quite young, just finished their three years military service, and one of them asked my age and told me as if it were a compliment that I don’t seem 26. I wasn’t sure if he meant that I seem older or younger. He said younger. I guess he meant it in a good way but I can’t say it’s the most meaningful compliment I’ve ever been given. 
Today it’s raining and my Achilles’ tendon is hurting so Anna and I are having a rest day before going up the mountain at 7pm or so tonight to camp. It gets dark quite late here. Very far south innit. 

Pictures from last time I didn’t put up yet

And so it begins

Greetings! I feel like I’ve talked a big game about writing a blog but now the time has come to put words to the page I’m rather at a loss at how to express myself. Here goes my attempt. 
On Tuesday afternoon I landed in Ushuaia, Argentina’s most southerly city, known as “el fin del mundo”. I had planned to go to a campsite a couple of kilometres out of town and then head to the national park, Tierra del Fuego, the day after, but the woman at the information desk told me that it had closed down two years ago. Damn my out of date guidebook. And from there ensued a rollercoaster afternoon, best understood in the context of a story I heard in philosophy class a few months ago, which I’ll explain here for those of you who’ve been lucky enough to escape my verbal telling of it up to now: There was once a farmer. One day a horse came up to his farm and all the villagers were envious and said he was very lucky because now he had a horse. The farmer shrugged and said “it is what it is”. A week later the horse ran away and the villagers lamented on the farmer’s behalf. The farmer shrugged and said “it is what it is”. The farmer’s son went looking for the horse and came back with a whole herd (or whatever) of horses. The villagers rejoiced for the farmer. The farmer was indifferent. Then the herd of horses stomped all over the farmer’s son and he broke his leg. Villagers wailed, farmer stoic. Then the king came and rounded up all the young men from the village to go fight a bloody war but couldn’t take the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. Villagers jealous, farmer indifferent. Etc etc etc. Point is to not pin all your happiness and calmness on external circumstances because these are always changing. I tried to channel the farmer that day. 
First the campsite was closed, but then the lady said I could go directly to the park, which would actually be better. But then there was no bus into town (I needed food and to get the bus to the park from there) and she said I could walk as it was only 4km. I set off and right away a nice man in a van picked me up (not a man in a creepy murderous van, it was more like a minibus) and dropped me off at the supermarket after five minutes of extremely limited Spanish chit chat. Naughty me for not dedicating myself more fully to language learning. I sound like a blithering idiot. Bought some nuts and raisins and apples and then went to the bus stop to get the bus to the park which is 12km out. Apparently the next one was the next morning. Grrr. So I went to try and get a hostel for the night and the first one I found was full but had just had a cancellation. But the bed (a top bunk above a languishing old man) was $26, which is quite excessive for South America and for an incomeless traveler. The woman at the hostel suggested I hitchhike to the park. So I set off. But for kilometres and kilometres no one stopped, I was just walking along a dusty road next to half finished houses, sticking my thumb out at all and sundry to no avail. Then eventually I saw a sign saying I was 5km from the park and I felt totally triumphant (before trying to channel the farmer again) because if I’d already done 7 I was sure I could do another 5, and shortly after a minivan finally stopped and picked me up and we went merrily on our way. And thank god he did because that 5km sign was pretty misleading. It would have taken a good two more hours to reach the park entrance and another half hour through the park to near the campsite where he eventually dropped me off, and as it was we had fifteen minutes of pleasant 5 year old conversation about how beautiful the park is. I say “si” and “gracias” a lot. I also prepared a final speech for the nice man which was “estoy muy feliz de ser aca”, which hopefully means “I am very happy to be here”. He smiled and waved nicely as I got out anyway. 

I set up my tent in a little woods and it started drizzling. There’s something a bit depressing about putting your tent up in the rain but I was so glad I was actually there and not miles away down the road still I didn’t mind. The rain scuppered my plan of sitting on a rock and reading so I just got into my sleeping bag and accidentally fell asleep at 8.30pm. It was all very surreal and despite the potential troughs I felt it had been a day of peaks. 
The next day I packed up camp and walked along a beautiful lake coast line for 10km or so until my next campsite. Put up my tent, chilled for a bit and then walked off to carry on exploring the park. There aren’t very many trails in this park, only really enough for two days hiking, so I wanted to reap them while I was there. I walked for a couple of hours along a lake until an obelisk appeared marking the border with Chile, which it was illegal to pass. So back I went, after falling asleep on the beach for a bit while trying to meditate. A recurring problem. 
At the visitor centre I learnt about how the park is the product of the last ice age, and the lakes are full of sea molluscs because when the ice melted, sea water remained caught. Also that for 10,000 years a tribe of people called the Yamana lived there in accordance with nature and since the European invasion happened only 100 of them remain. In their place we have tour bus upon tour bus of rotund old folks taking pictures and then getting back in and driving away in a cloud of dust. I can’t get too comfortable on my high horse though because I’m kind of doing the same thing, just on a slightly different scale. 
Pleasant night camping then the next day walked along until the bus stop. 

When I was back in the city I needed wifi to figure out what to do next. I had had a vision of 7-9 days non-stop trekking but the size of this park didn’t allow for that and there wasn’t much else there. So I went to a bus ticket agency to get a ticket to Torres del Paine, where I could do one of the most famous treks in Patagonia, a good 8 dayer. But alas! Apparently because the campsites had got so overcrowded in recent years you now had to book well in advance to camp there. And obviously I had failed to do any preparation whatsoever so hadn’t done that. So I bought a ticket to El Chalten instead, which is no less wonderful, supposedly. A mountain climbing Mecca. The man who sold me my ticket, Elius, invited me for dinner at his house so I agreed to meet him back there at 830 so we could go to the supermarket and buy vegetables. I was in charge of cooking because he didn’t know how to cook anything but steak. He seemed a bit of an odd bod in a harmless way so I wasn’t expecting that he would be my soul mate but I wanted to talk to someone who lived there. So off we trotted to the supermarket and I could see why Argentinians are so skeptical about vegetarians – the veggie selection was pretty terrible. I had a vision of making guacamole and lime rice with mango and beans but couldn’t do any of that. I ended up making peppers stuffed with plastic cheese and tomato (beggars can’t be choosers here, and vegans can’t be vegans), and rice with onion and mushroom and two objects that vaguely resemble a zucchini, one was circular and one was bulbous. 
His house was extremely basic. Very small and random bits of crap everywhere. But it sufficed and we had a pleasant meal. Well, I ate like a pig and was very happy with my cobbled together dinner. He didn’t touch it for an hour then shoved all the rice in in one go then didn’t touch it for another hour then shoved the whole pepper slice in. 
Good conversation about how he prefers the outright racism of the South African government (where he’s originally from) to the pretend equality of the Brazilian laws. Apparently in South Africa everyone knows where they stand, whether you agree or not, everything’s on the table, but in Brazil everyone pretends everything’s fine but will never call you back for a job if you’re black and will never accept you. He said that’s why he respects Donald Trump. Obviously that is hard to hear and I pushed back but he said I would never feel it as a white person and even though he doesn’t agree with anything Trump’s doing, he can see why he has an appeal. 
He knew a lot about wine and told me something I probably should have already known, as someone not unfamiliar with wine drinking, which is that it is not really relevant to say that you like a certain grape or mixture of grape, like Malbec or Cabernet Sauvignon, because those grapes are grown all over the world and the type of soil and climate has just as much impact on the flavour and texture (or however it is you measure wine) as the grape. So when talking about what kind of wine you like you should say more like “dry” or “oaky” than naming grapes. Or name grapes from a country.
 He used to work in IT in Buenos Aires but hated being in the cubicle with his computer all day so quit and moved to Ushuaia and now at his job in the tourist office gets face to face interaction with people from all over the world every day and was very happy with his lot, living from day to day. He had a funny habit of scattering his speech with “do you understand what I’m saying?…do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” and it took me quite a while to realise this was rhetorical. Eventually I got tired and left. He got rather repetitive in the end.
Now on a 24 hour bus journey to El Chalten. The nice ladies next to me shared their mate tea and cake with me and I felt part of their jolly crew.

Internet connection is too dodgy for more photos. They will come.