El Gaucho

 photo of Jorge Bolke in Estancia Tucu Tucu courtesy of Rafael Smart

Soon I will be heading to Wyoming. When I asked a state native for suggestions, he said "Bundle up and fill your pockets with stones."

I was reminded of Argentine Patagonia, another place where spring bleeds winter and the wind carries special currency. It permeates and dominates. It has overturned tour buses. Once when I was backpacking with a full 28-pound pack it picked me up and landed me a foot away (lucky the embankment was still further). I didn't realize that wind could do that. I spent some time huddled behind a massive boulder, a hostage to its rustlings waiting out the siege.

In Argentina, no one knows the wind better than a gaucho. He lives in it. It's mapped on his face. The gaucho 'grows up like an unshorn sheep living out in the cold winds'  (José Hernandez, El Gaucho Martín Fierro).

At the estancia of Menelik, lifelong gaucho Manuel Pardo told me that no one wants to be a gaucho anymore. His job was to follow 250 cattle over a hundred square kilometers without a fence. But nowadays, he said, people do it in a pickup truck.

They are becoming fewer. Not just gauchos but all who live their lives closer to the elements.

Hot off the Press: Trekking in the Patagonian Andes

With the southern summer nearly here, there's a new version of a classic South American hiking guide. Trekking in the Patagonian Andes was a beast and a ball to research. Yet it would have been impossible without ample help from local guides, mountaineers and good friends who came down to sweat and trudge the trails.

Many thanks and gratitude to those who made it happen!

Wilderness with Teeth

This past week I joined the Cerro Castillo Citizen´s Expedition for a 5-day traverse set to integrate into Sendero de Chile, a national project linking trails its 8,500km stretch.

day I
We set off on a new path only known to Escuela de Guias. A steep, sandy traverse threatens to pitch me into the void. Somehow I dig in my toenails, like a cat on a tightrope, and make it across. Footprints of huemul, Chile´s endagered Andean deer, are everywhere.

The toll: two hikers with debilitating food poisoning from the previous night (the lox?), one guide slips pack first into the river, a few guides and guests wrangle with a full tripod setup (the topographer didn´t interpret work in terrain literally).

day II
¨Aqui me quedo,¨ says the Topographer, and we´ve only hiked for 2 hours. It´s impossible to get him to resist the tendency to flop on his back, and harder to get him back on his feet, as he scrambles like an overturned beetle.

We reach an alpine meadow bordering a snowy pass. Wildflowers peep through the tundra, water trickles underfoot. No one heeds the Topographer. We arrive at camp 7 hours later.

day III
A day for foot repair. A stray dog at the camp receives ham bones, lentils and oatmeal, he must have been starving. We day hike to Glaciar el Peñon but it´s receded so far it´s no longer a day trip.

day IV
The dog turns back at the pass. Every man, woman and mongrel for his/herself. When someone breaks out the horse jerky, I even try it. Stringy. Hard to forget.

We nose up toward the creased blue glacier sitting under Cerro Castillo´s cathedral spires. It releases a curtain of meltwater over cliffs, bubbling into the stream at our feet.

¨The Castle,¨ as it´s named, must be Chilean Patagonia´s most iconic peak, though it is seldom approached and only climbed by experts. We debate Sendero de Chile´s vision for lodgings, including one right in this priviledged spot.

day V
Over the course of the hike we´ve only run into three other hikers, all carrying the guide I´m updating. They have alternately told me that it´s exactly on the money and that the directions are completely unclear.

There´s work to do, if not in writing than in perceiving, including on my own behalf. Outside Torres del Paine, Patagonian trails are another beast: scarcely marked, pocked with rivers without bridges and passes without footprints. For now, Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo has only three park rangers to cover its 200,000 hectares.

In this torrential wilderness, any reception of infrastructure, with all of its blessings and curses, will be bittersweet. Yet memories of a wilder Cerro Castillo (like horse jerky) will be hard to forget.

Where you can hike out any time you like, but you can never leave

Chile´s famous southern road is a dusty, mostly gravel arrow headed south 1,240 kilometers through Patagonia. At some points, passengers are picked up even if the bus is full, since transport is few and far between. It would just be too cruel to leave them. But not in Villa Cerro Castillo.

Welcome to the Carretera Austral. Such a lovely place.

Never attempt to head south on a holiday weekend. After a broiling two-hour wait, both Cochrane-bound buses stiffed the rural stop, blowing dust on my thumb. A roomy pickup stopped and a lawyer from Coyhaique got out to photograph Cerro Castillo, test me on Obama vs McCain and provoke me on Guantanamo.

After thinking I aced cross-examination, the lawyer ¨didn´t have room¨ in the truck. Some curious Argentine retirees stopped and a group of motorcycles. They both wanted directions. Finally a tech from the rural electrification project stopped. He was headed north, but wouldn´t a night at Coyhaique´s only disco do me good?

When between a rock and a hard rock club, there isn´t much you can do.

Technically, a traveller has better chances of getting a bus south from Coyhaique, since it´s the regional hub. That´s what I thought before I found out about the holiday weekend. Hiking´s funny that way. It becomes nearly impossible to keep track of bank holidays.

(The bus in the photo, sans engine, found its niche serving avocado and beef sandwiches to hungry hitchhikers in waiting, Cerro Castillo in background)

The Things We Carried

Hike 1
near Paso Puyehue, Lakes Region, Chile
44kms, 2 days

Km 0
I was still in the truck, two hours in, when I realized my fatal error. A first for me; I hoped we could still go on. After packing the filter. After pontificating on the horrors of Nescafe. After bragging to Ben, my hiking partner, about those beans I'd gotten fresh from the roaster.

I'd forgotten the coffee.

I didn't tell Ben then. It would be bad for the collective animo (mood).

A storm had taken down tree limbs and branches, turning the easy first hours of the hike arduous with the clearing and dodging of debris. After two hours in a tunnel of thistle and bamboo-like quila, we arrived to the great meadow with views. But the day was socked in. After a long, gentle climb, dodging more debris, we came into a dark forest of tall southern beech. It loomed over us, waving surrender flags of gray-green lichen (barba de viejo). Like a dream.

I got my camera. Wait. Where was that battery I'd charged?

Km 20
Clouds broke open as we climbed the pass. Ben woozy with hunger. We'd eaten the turkey sandwiches, a Luna bar each, some nuts. What else did he expect? I had 8 squares of chocolate. I gave him a quarter of his share, lest mutiny set in.

I'd brought food for two. I hadn't realized I'd just brought food for two small women.

Ben, I confessed, I forgot the coffee.

Whatever, he responded. Already without animo. The trail sign was blown over, frozen and half buried in the snow. I kneeled to read the distance but could not.

Ours were the only footprints on the snowy pass, gateposted by volcanoes, with Argentina over our shoulder and at our feet, sinuous streams that fed the azure lakes below. We retreated to camp low in the forest.

Km 25
Dinner:
instant tomato soup
4 cups couscous* with sage and
one tomato
one onion half
a can of salmon
aged goat cheese

(*the bomb for trekking: light and fast, couscous just needs to boil and sit for 5 minutes, pack in ziplock with spices/salt)

Unlike the coffee, all the dinner ingredients came from one of Chile's supermarket chains.

Upon scraping his plate, Ben retreated to warm his wet feet in the sad, square sleeping bag he'd taken on loan from his girlfriend, another urbanite. It was the kind that usually has a plaid felt lining, very Boy Scout, not very Expeditionary.

I felt for him. Though a great hiker, he had no gear, and Chile was hardly the place to accumulate it. His girlfriend had also loaned him a pack holding 5000 cubic meters, packable as a noodle, with no frame and hardly any cushioning. Instead he had borrowed a small pack of mine, hardly ideal, and some technical but not very roomy clothing.

Next to me in the tent, he looked like one very tired tranny. Was he snoozing or seizing? He ferociously grasped his bag, my pink/black down vest zipped snug. Santiago's city life far behind.

We had just the start I'd expected. Flawed. A bit discombobulated. Still fun. With plenty of lessons for next time.

The next morning we packed up swiftly. Coffeeless. Ben had fought off the cold without having to huddle on me. I think that was a primary concern. His spirits lifted, he cataloged exactly what he'd take on the next expedition. But the trailhead was still far.

Ben ordered an advance on his chocolate squares. The end in sight, I complied.

(photo courtesy of Ben)

Chronicle of a Trek Foretold

In 1998 I arrived to Chile with the same goal as every other turista: trekking Torres del Paine.

In addition to a bunch of stuff I did not need, my beastly Lowe pack held Clem Lindenmeyer’s Trekking in the Patagonian Andes. It did not fail me. On trial runs at Parque Nacional Chiloe and Parque Nacional Alerce Andino I faced swarms of horseflies and hip-deep mud. Try that in jeans. Eventually I navigated my way to Torres: thoroughly schooled, loving even the headwind (no tábanos there!) and the sculpted designs of mountain, river, steppe.

Well, it’s time to crack this book once more, but this time I’m doing the writing. That’s right: dream job.

From November through February I’ll be hoofing my way across Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Figuring out how to get there, what to pack, what to leave behind. Stuff will go right. Stuff will go wrong. Miles will be trod, blisters patched and friendships forged. Or maybe I'll go howling mad from the weeks on end alone. It's hard to tell.

I'll be logging the trip right here. Your comments and thoughts are welcome!

The Power of Patagonia's Rivers

Raging pure rivers and untapped wilderness put Patagonia among the planet's great wild places. But Chile's thirst for energy means that ten of Patagonia's great rivers are currently under threat by dams.

This austral summer I journeyed to the ultra-remote Pascua River. My trip had a motive akin to a new form of tourism: seeing the sights while they still exist. To hear about my trip, check out this feature in the Boston Globe Sunday Travel section.

A NY Times editorial on the same subject came out on April 1, 2008.

To learn more about dams and their effects, check out the World Commission on Dams report.

Capacity for Solitude

Ah, research is the best excuse ever to go out and lift rocks and find the world. Because of it, I had stumbled onto a Patagonian estancia. Doors shut to tourism in off-season. It should have been clear. We were five hours from anywhere in any direction.

I stood at a cabin door. Two wire-haired hounds wagged and howled at my presence, not convinced I was the bad guy. The Andes were great sugarcoated humps. The white stuff came down quick now, filling the mud puddles and frosting the air.

At the other estancias I had been sent away.

A man in a black Basque beret and knotted kerchief eased open the door. He took a hard look at the truck (mud-splattered, two-wheel drive, not four), swallowed a smile and asked if I wanted to come in for maté. I did.

It was hard not to fall in love. It helped that my partner was already next to me.

Don Manuel is your quintessential gaucho. Next to him, the Marlboro man looks like the costumed underwear model he actually is. Don Manuel’s face is lined as an oak trunk, but the deep creases and scars don’t add up. He smokes. He rides all day in the sun. He probably has never used face cream. He does the work of a thirty-year old. I did the math upon learning when he did his obligatory military service and came up with the age of 57.

He had been running ranches for almost forty years, a span of time in which the world changed completely. Oil had happened, for one. Roads. Electricity. People didn’t stay on the ranch anymore. According to Don Manuel, they went to work for the municipality. Ranchers’ kids wanted mobile phone service and satellite TV. Save for tourism, ranches were ghost yards.

I asked, “Is it hard to find young gauchos?”

He took a long pull on the metal straw. “There already are none.”

“The countryside is solitary. But I have no problem being here alone for three months,” he said. At sun up, he rides out to the herd. Boring? Maybe it’s cowboy paradise: 10,000 hectares without a fence. “At 4pm I come in to cook, feed the dogs and chickens, but that’s it. All my days go by the same.”

Some summers a French photographer would visit who also spent time in Mongolia. His deference hinted at a great love, either for her or the way she framed his world. We poured over the beautiful albums she left. He knew the photographs by heart.

When we finished we got ready to leave. But the truck lights had been left on. And the battery was dead.

So we spent the night in a bunkhouse, bare and cold as a meat locker. I slept soundly. The next morning we drove away in blinding sun, clumps of snow sinking into the mud, bristly, stubborn grasses stood up.

I scanned the horizon. Somewhere, Don Manuel was already out there.

ends of the earth encounters

I researched all of Patagonia for the guidebook and had a lovely time doing it. It was nice to relearn what I love about Chile--the incredible hospitality of strangers, folks with simple means, and the crazy unfettered landscapes.

I am now am firmly grounded and sulky to have to write 150 pages in a month. So I apologize if I disappeared! I'll run the highlights, that way I can relive them and bring a speck of joy to this restless desk-bound life. These are the most recent flames of memory from a bumpy, interminable trip:

In Puerto Guadal I met an ancient oak of a man who shared some of his stew with me when I stayed in his tattered hostal and told me of the old days, when he was a young sailor afraid of whores, til when he met his wife to be in a dusty outpost of Patagonia (he remains there today, and all for "a sweet face" as he put it). Kemel was his name, part arab, world-traveler, knotted with adventure and a few chuckles left.

I met a Belgian-Chilean whose parents emigrated after WWII and built up a ranch in the middle of nowhere. He was about six and a half feet tall, icy blue eyes, with a thick cowboy accent. He talked about ranch life coming to an end for many, his doubts about this so-called cash-cow called tourism, and shared the utter solitude that for these folks is so comforting.

I met an ex-barmaid at the last village on the continent--in Puerto Williams, across the beagle channel from Tierra del Fuego. She had a salty view of men and a whipsmart maternal instinct that had her popping in my room at 3 am incensed because I came home late without calling!

another one bites the dust

northern patagonia

One more year almost down the hatch. How are my friends out there?Somewhere I know there is winter, there are naked trees and frozen lakes, new babies, work, commutes, but so far away I can barely imagine any of it.

It doesn't feel much like Christmas with the hortensias in bloom, no jingles or pine trees in sight, and (in lieu of a turkey dinner) a lamb bbq this afternoon. American consumer madness has begun to make its way down here, but if you stay clear of the mall (one town over) there is not much in the way of frenzy. Me, I spent my extra dollars on phone cards. thank god I am not licking envelopes, but in the spirit of it all I am sending a Christmas missive of my own.

I have had a fortunate year and feel the need to celebrate a little that I remain in one piece. I plan to stay til the american summer. The plan is to travel during this excellent summer weather and write in the chilly months afterward. I have gained momentum with my project, recovered my ribs and lung capacity, become known in the mountains where I work, and rented a sweet little cottage (with spare bedroom for GUESTS) to make it all worthwhile.

I just returned from another trip to Patagonia for research. This time I went with an American photographer. We took a trip up to a glacier with a local guide, Lolo. He built the trail he built with his own hands, it's worthy of any in Rocky Mt. National park, with carpeted forests of moss and giant southern beech, thick sections of bamboo, a rushing clear river and southern beech. To give you an idea, the forests have the look of Japanese triptych, with whimsical fanning branches.

We never made the glacier. Snow fell both days we camped above treeline. My boots fell in the fire and suffered 3rd degree burns, as a result they shrunk, massacred my ankles on the hike out, then needed emergency "surgery" (via penknife) to refit. I am officially Bad Luck for anyone I travel with. We were able to have a good look around though, and ran into a wild huemul (a deer, endangered species) and a condor. We climbed a nearby ridge and saw the ripple of valleys in the distance, their blue-green snaking rivers and vast expanses of nothing.

People are the best part of these trips. Lolo lives with his sister and elderly parents in an elfin cabin visited by almost no one, it is so remote. His mother Odelia, age 85, puts on stacks of jewlery and her best dress for a visit, then sits and holds your hand. Guests are so scarce in these areas that hosts can tell you stories of ten years worth of visits-the time the German came and we traded chocolate bars and hard salamis for hand knit slippers and quartz crystals. My visit will be the story of "the time we installed the first shower." It was in a stall outside, and functioned with a bucket and very little water pressure. To shampoo my hair I had to bend over. I am sure they'll work out the kinks.

On my last visit I ran into a local who almost fell off his horse giving me the customary kiss hello. He was known as rarely sober. During my stay he turned up missing--his horse saddled and trapped on a raft mid-river (with a pulley used to cross the Puelo, a wide river with heavy current). They sent out divers and organized a search but have decided he has drowned. He is the most recent in a series of drownings, almost every family has lost someone, every crossing has a cross and plastic flowers in rememberance.

With the coming of the first road to the region this place is undergoing massive change. Seeing it first hand, I can imagine what the world was like for our parents or grandparents once and why they so mourn the changes. Every time I return, the footpaths I once walked into the mountains have become gaping sores of gravel (see pics combo and combo 2--taken of the same hillside 6 months apart). With the sense of isolation and community changing in great strides I have plenty of work left to do and will do my best to figure out what it means and to put it into words.

rural boarding school

Northern Patagonia

The Llanada Grande Escuela Internado is only two years old, and in pretty good shape. The only things its missing is a gym and heat. For physical education all grades, 1-8, run up and down the corridor that connects all the classrooms, or shove their desks in the corner of the classroom for stretching. All the classrooms are equipped with small cylindrical wood stoves, fed sporadically by the teacher while she tends to writing on the board or circling among the kids. One kid wore a pair of gardening gloves to class, not a bad idea. I had long underwear and a jacket on all day and still managed to freeze most of the time. Half the kids wear plaid or tan coats, uniforms, and most wear slippers or woolen slipcovers over their shoes. Thirty pairs of black rubber boots stand outside the front door. I have no idea how each kid finds his own.

Approximately thirty kids live at the school for the duration of the school year, whose boots you won’t find outside, since they live in bunk rooms in the building, their homes a matter of hours away by trail, the furthest valley being Ventisquiero (Glacier), where the kids must travel a full day to get home. It makes it hardly worth it to go home on weekends, and some of the kids are left for the year, while others go home all the weekends that the weather holds up, which become fewer and fewer as winter comes on.

The school is lacking so much of everything. Most of the teachers teach two grades at a time, dividing their class in two rows. Because of the scarcity of books the 5th/6th grade teacher had students read passages silently which they picked from various models and editions of reading books and comment individually about them. Another teacher photocopied small bits of text which the students pasted into their notebooks, which then became a sort-of textbook. One teacher lectured, “the problem here is comprehension. So when you read, pay close attention.” Unfortunately, a third of the class couldn’t read.

The students aren’t typically allowed to bring books home. One teacher said, “I can’t count the times we’ve loaned a book and it disappears, then you visit the house and find it in the bathroom, being used as toilet paper.”

I expected a certain amount of claustrophobia, for the confinement, the rain, the lack of space and privacy. What I found was confirmed later on my bus ride out the valley, when I was one of two passengers, and put between the driver and his other passenger on the front seat, and between their conversation, instead of sitting in one of the various empty benches in the back. Proximity wasn’t shunned, it was savored. The girls of third and fourth grade adopted me immediately. They grabbed my hand when they saw me in the hall and snuck touches of my hair. I felt like The Beatles or Nicole Kidman.

The downside of being so special is my every move was broadcasted. I got lost coming home from school to the farmhouse one day. There are no streets in Llanada Grande, a few mud-bogged oxcart trails that end in houses, sinewy paths that meander and loop around straight-shot destinations. Instead, everyone takes the footpaths, which are a little distracting, crossing log cattle fence ladders, the re-paved municipal airstrip, fallen limbs over streams, flocks of ducks, piglets, horses, thick forest, open, ruddy farmland, thick, low forest, pegged wooden gates and fences.

Of course I wasn’t really lost, because I saw the landmark waterfall nearby, but I had roamed back and forth in the fields and the forest and still hadn’t found the farmhouse. Finally I headed for the house under the waterfall and a woman collecting wood gave me directions.

The next day at school a little girl came up to me. She turned out to be the wood-collector’s daugher. “You got lost yesterday?” The question was more puzzlement than inquiry. It drew the other kids closer like magnets.

An army lieutenant thought he saw my horse being prodded by another rider on the trail a few days back. “Impossible,” I tried to convince him. It was no use. Tourist season had ended, there were no other blondes to take cover in. Llanada knew me now.

Of course, like any other place it holds its secrets. But I was surprised to find the kind of stories that became public fodder. One day at recess a kid named Leandro, age 11, played the guitar and sang for me. The principal’s office was packed. I was dragged to the scene by my girlfriends in 3rd grade, who had set up the concert themselves, saying “there’s a kid who can play guitar and he sings about the guy who drowned in the Rio Ventisquiero.” Like a folktale, I thought. No, it had happened two years ago. They even dragged the little sister of the guy to the concert, saying, “She’s the one who lost her cousins.” The girl nodded sadly. I tried to offer my condolences while the music started—Ranchera—which has a huge following in rural Patagonia.

Little Leandro played a mean guitar, but he didn’t author the lyrics. Those were penned by a guy in the valley. The tragic song about the son and husband that was lost in the flooded river when his horse slipped was followed by one about a drunk man who goes to jail for killing another man (also inspired by true local events) and one about a man attempting to make conjugal visits to a married woman. I didn’t even ask about that one.

The kids of Llanada Grande escuela internado clapped along and cheered to the songs, their stories, of their valleys, which everyone knew by heart and counted among their few possessions.

the middle of everything

Back from a rainy, muddy, week in Northern Patagonia in the mountains (or “cordillera,” a term I prefer for its precision and the corduroy sound about it). Anyhow, after several trips to the upper Puelo I’ve found something unexpected. The middle of nowhere is becoming the middle of everything.

Llanada Grande is about 140 km south from Puerto Montt, the capital of Chile’s X Region. Until this past year the village only had an airstrip and a network of trails that could take you and your horse to the city in 12 days, descending parallel to the flat, turquoise River Puelo. Last year the road was finally put in, so now, via vehicle and ferry combinations, the village is seeing more and more traffic. While staying in a farmhouse there this past week I ran into a Tango performer based in Toulouse, was interviewed by a Chilean film crew making a show on fly-fishing and traveling with models, and met a collection of local kids in the public boarding school struggling with poverty, low-funding and scandals.

The major achievement of my trip was learning to ride at a gallop, not achieved by my own election, but rather, with help from a friend bored with the pace. My horse was “motivated” by a slap on the hide whenever Oscar would pass, or a smoochy sound that drives horses wild. We made a four-hour trip in three, me laughing most of the way in sheer terror.

That was Easter, a dark and chilly day of mud and rain, rewarded earlier by a lamb barbecue at a local’s farm and chocolate bunnies for the kids, who found prodigious appetites for the new discovery. In a place where the nearest church was hours away and only open for business every few months when the traveling priest was in town, the date was barely observed beyond a mere acknowledgement, “it’s Easter?” “Happy Easter.”