A band of freezing rain
swept over the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, turning the waters of the Strait of
Magellan dirty gray. Puerta Arenas’s “oldest and grandest” hotel was, well, it
was just a hotel. All of its walls were painted a determined mustard. A bare
minimum of staff kept the Cabo de Hornos open and we all watched cold squalls
spray over the strait.
The Pan American highway
stops at Puerto Montt, 816 miles of Chilean coastline to the north, so there
are no roads to get down here and there is little tourism, because you have to
be damned determined to get here.
Feliz Navidad. Punta
Arenas was closed tight, for we came in on Christmas night.
*****
I think I snared the last
car for rent in southern Chile.
In the morning I stopped
for coffee and touched Magellan’s shiny toe (this was so destiny would bring me
back), on the plaza, then I found Hertz.
“Buenos dias. You have a
car?”
“No.”
A happy smile.
“If I go to aeropuerto?”
“No.”
I looked across the street.
“Budget?”
This “no” betrayed a smug
certainty, and at the same time a creeping regret that he wasn’t helping. He
allowed that I could always “ask the question” across the street at Budget and
furthermore, the man down the street at Santander might have uno auto. He
wouldn’t open until ten and it was scarcely 9:30. Still, that was something, so
I bid him and a man washing cars adios.
At Budget they had big
smiles but no cars.
“For today!?” He acted
amazed.
He phoned around, but
nothing. At least I had “asked the question.”
I found Tourismo Pehoe and
from them got a line on Bus Sur at 13:00 to Puerto Natales, up toward the
Torres del Paine park, where we were bound. With that less than ideal
alternative, nothing was left but to wait for Santander at 10:00.
*****
It’s hard to
imagine being so far from home – so isolated – as Ferdinand Magellan and his
crew were, sailing through appalling weather where nobody they’d ever heard of
had been, five centuries ago. Especially when huge bonfires appeared onshore.
These fires
gave Tierra del Fuego, or land of fire, its name. Tribes called Ona and Yaghan
kept them constantly stoked for warmth. The Yaghan wore only the scantest
clothing despite the cold.
Canoeists,
adept at navigating the labrynthine channels and tributaries around the
straits, they hunted the sea and smeared fat over their bodies as protection
from the wind and rain. As recently as 1834, on the voyage of the H.M.S.
Beagle, Charles Darwin noted, “these people going about naked and barefoot on
the snow."
With time to kill, I
walked to the water, past mongrels outside a Purina warehouse and put my hand
in the chilly Strait of Magellan - right there amid the plastic bags and candy
wrappers.
*****
I tried the knob at the
Santander Car Rental but it wouldn’t turn. The windows were still boarded.
Whoops, wait a minute. Soon as I turned the knob a man appeared from six doors
down and opened the store and ushered me in. The long and short of it (mostly
long, since we did the whole mileage and insurance wrangle without a common
language) was that he finally approved the last car in town for me and
eventually it appeared, driven by the Hertz car washer(!)
*****
Punta Arenas was 110,000
people, a proper town with a proper town park just across the street, which was
the home to the statue of Magellan and its smooth, often-rubbed toe
(conveniently located for rubbing), which was mandatory according to the local
lore. 2200 kilometers south of Santiago, you take what you get.
One passenger ship was calling
just now. Across the strait, looking just about west to east, low hills rose
around Bahia Porvenir, Tierra Del Fuego, home of a village of the same name,
though I couldn’t make it out.
*****
Having rubbed the toe we
spent the rest of the day driving to Hosteria Lago Gray. And weren’t we the
city folk, speeding our petite white Nissan Saloon across 430 kilometers of
utter wilderness as if we were in a hurry.
A wire screen over the
windshield was to avoid a crack due to gravel, the rental car man made me
understand. But no one else had one, so I gathered this really must have been
the last car for rent in town.
We looked silly, I
thought, motoring off toward the hills. A 1/4 inch mesh of expanded metal,
anchored to the window all around. It extended far enough out for the wipers to
operate underneath. A foot-square hole was cut in front of both the driver and
the passenger with more mesh hinged over it so that the normal position was
open from the top, for city driving, but for your serious gravel roads you
could pull a string that reached inside your side window and roll the window up
real fast to catch the string and bring the panel down, sealing the whole
windshield against rocks and providing you with about a thirty percent view of
the world in front of you.
*****
The first 109 kilometers
were on blacktop, virtually no houses, virtually no traffic - a bit of
Greenland with white wildflowers but no trees. After that the pavement
disappeared and after a Mack truck barreled by we battened down the wire hatches.
Eventually a combination
of intermittent rain, lack of traffic and squint-induced tension convinced us
we really didn’t need our mesh pulled down. Some of the other traffic out here
had wire cages, but less than half, and we made it all the way without a crack.
Alternately Greenland and
Ireland (a little less green), the landscape rolled by undisturbed by man. Back
on pavement. Then just one paved lane for eighty kilometers.
At a place called Reubens,
where stood a settlement of a few buildings, the landscape blossomed
dramatically into full Tasmania. Trees returned (we were northbound), namely
the Nire, or notofagus antarctica, the native species, which grows to twenty
crooked and branched meters, compacted and dominated by the Magellanic winds.
Fields of innumerable tree trunks twisted from the wind. Live trees of
two-color green - the needles and lighter clinging lichen.
Rolling hills replaced the
horizon-to-horizon flat, back where you could watch sheets of rain approach
from miles away, then wash overhead on their march to the other horizon.
I finally got it 260
kilometers from Punta Arenas, at the petrol station at Puerto Natales. The
rental man at Santander kept insisting, too hard, I thought, that I must use
benzine simple, benzine simple. I could only figure he meant regular, or
inexpensive. In fact, he wasn’t saying “simple.” He was saying “sin plomo,” or
lead free. A real language whiz, here.
Puerto Natales was the
last town. Slung over some low hills, it overlooked a bay from which ships
sailed up to the Torres del Paine park, with a nice view across the harbour at
snow capped mountains.
There were moments of
tarmac around Puerto Natales, but we knew it was too good to be true and we set
out down the gravel again, minutes outside of town, for the last long 130
kilometers plus 58 additional kilometers we’d find out about later.
Snow topped a few low
peaks.
A thousand sheep blocked
the road. Two gauchos and a squad of dogs marched them forward. The dogs did
the running and juking, responding to the gauchos’ whistles, and moved the
sheep off the road for us. Mirja pointed out they weren’t sheepdogs, but mutts,
or “cocktail dogs” as she said, and observed that you wouldn’t need to play
with these dogs at night as they’d be tuckered.
A few jagged snow capped
peaks appeared in the distance and we wondered if they were our destination,
but they weren’t - faux Torres, if I may.... Now, just past Estancia Domingo
(Domingo’s ranch), like flipping a switch, the left horizon suddenly revealed a
snow-covered massif that literally made us exclaim. I can’t remember when I
have ever literally gasped before but we did at this place’s majesty, its
towering presence.
Not that we were there, or
even all that close.
At a fork where the sign
pointed us toward “administracion,” watched over by carabiners, began a series
of lakes, ups and downs and curves, and Mirja spotted our first guanacos.
Herbivores, they live all over the park, usually grazing in steep cliff areas
like mountain goats.
They’re tall, llama-like,
brown and white, from the camel family and similar in size, maybe a little less
tall. This was mating season. They live in family groups and they were always
to be found near others, often with their kids in tow.
They do this funky juke
with their long necks when they run. There were big birds but neither condors,
with their white collars, nor the nandu, said to look like a feather duster.
Park administracion noted
our arrival in a tatty old book, took some pesos and showed us we still had
some 58 kilometers to the Hosteria Lago Gray. Unfazed anymore by flying gravel,
tired of driving, we sped on and bailed out of the Saloon six and a half hours
and 400-something kilometers out of Punta Arenas.
*****
This is one of those
places the wind just works its way in - not because it’s not well built - but
because nature just wins - its dominance over living things, evidenced by the
twisted tree trunks everywhere, beats the best builders can build.
*****
A long sand spit stretched
outside our cabin window in front of Lago Gray. Blue bergs floated near shore,
not quite building sized, but several people tall. Then in the distance, and
not that far in the distance, a massive glacier some hundreds of feet high
formed the horizon where it slid down between peaks.
All the peaks were snow
covered but the ones on the east were taller. In the southern hemisphere, the
south face never gets sun, and wide swathes of permanent snowfields gathered in
the folds of all the mountains.
Still farther east stood
the famous Torres, or Towers, Del Paine, and we could see a couple of the
Cuernos, or Horns, too. They were just impossibly thin, tall formations,
jutting so shear that the last of them wasn’t scaled until 1963.
Most of the first hours
they stayed in the clouds, so we didn’t know they were visible until the light
began to fade, maybe past ten. Prevailing wind whipped straight down the
glacier north to south, and the trees were all permanently bent to show it.
Mirja and I talked about
it. We couldn’t remember being in a windier place. Each night, about five or
six, it kicked up like a gale and bore down, and rattled the windows and
whistled through the grass.
*****
There was a loud generator
around the side of the building, and a tiny reception/lounge area with a
Christmas tree. A card-playing French/German group filled the room entirely.
Next afternoon I heard six
jets. This was a remote part of the planet, not really between anywhere and
anywhere else. Could have been three round trips between Puerto Montt and Punta
Arenas, I guessed, doubtfully.
There was a flight a week
to Islas Malvinas, or the Falkland Islands, but that was Wednesdays and this
was Sunday, so I wondered if they were flying to Antarctica, where Chile claims
1,250,000 square kilometers comprising some 30 million cubic kilometers of ice.
*****
After morning coffee we
set out over a suspension bridge (“2 max at a time”) and along the edge of Lago
Gray to see the icebergs, bluer by degrees than the water, then up to mirador
(lookout) Ferrier - a vertical rise of just 300 meters, but as steep and tough
as we wanted.
Gales of wind blew hard
across barren rock at the top, with views back west to another snowy peak, and
up into Lago Pingo and the glacier at its north end, closer to the Patagonian
ice cap.
No wildlife, save for tiny
birds. Rabbit sign, though. There were lots of flowers Mirja recognized from
Finland, and scrub reached knee high. We drank from a brook on the way down.
All the dead tree trunks
were hollowed and burned, suggesting lightning strikes. Looked like if you were
a tree, you could just hang out until you were struck by lightning.
We left for the glacier in
the morning and walked back into the lodge late in the day and just like
Mirja’s cocktail dogs, you wouldn’t have to play with us tonight.
Before the others could capture and hold the common room, I
moved the card table in front of a chair by the Christmas tree to relax with an
Austral beer and write these words, waiting for the start of dinner at eight
and a chance of sunset showing on the Torres Del Paine. Then I, for one, was
sleeping. Intently.
*****
Monday all day was heavy
and wet, as if a Georgia spring shower might start anytime. By five we were
beset by gray - no Torres showing. Our whole stay in Patagonia it rained nearly
the whole time, including from a clear blue sky, but most of the time it rained
about three drops per second per square meter. You got hit but you’d dry by the
time you got out your parka.
We drove to a car park to
walk to a salto (waterfall) and another mirador. The path was thick with bugs
and heavy with wet, but the bugs didn’t really want us. The bushes sent out a
pungent but pleasant smell either side of the path that was, like the path up
the hill the day before, cut flat as if by a foot-wide mower.
Salto Grande, chalky water
rushing from Lago Nordenskjld into Lago Pehoe, wasn’t really all that grande.
Up and over the hill, suddenly the rumble of the salto gave way to the silent,
stone face of the Cuerno Principal (2600 meters), the highest of the Cuernos
Del Paine.
After an hours’ walk,
Mirja and I stood at the sendero mirador Nordenskjold and gazed across Lago
Nordenskjold at Cuerno Principal, shortly before the clouds conquered the tops
of the cuernos for the day.
We had a pretty big time
with a giant Jewish Brazilian we met at the Posada Serrano, a
guesthouse/provisioner along the road. They were so happy to see us they fried
up some fresh papas fritas, so we bought a twelve pack and drank most of them
with this huge man whose father from Poland and mother from Odessa met in
Palestine and moved to Brazil.
We told stories and passed
the time with Austral beers, warm from the box there in the Posada Serrano
dining room, dry in the rain. A bonus: there was no one to drive into driving
slow on the gravel after a six pack apiece, on the way home in the rain.
*****
I peered through the front
window. As we feared, the hosteria lobby was filled to the rim with ill-matched
family and party groups, lining the walls waiting an hour for dinner. They
alternated Pachelbel’s Canon and some Out of Africa rip-off over and over and
served Imperial and Austral beers.
It was well enough built,
was Hosteria Lago Gray - prefab four-unit blocks with siding, five of them
facing one another with deftly placed driftwood in between. The common area,
alas, was sadly lacking, too small by half, so that any one group could
dominate and only six people max could sit at a table. And sorry to say
(especially for cabin 103) it smelled like skunk outside of cabin 103.
The chef threw meat to a
nearly domestic fox, which warily came within feet of us to grab it. The chef
whistled for that fox like for a dog. One happy bird perched behind the common
building, worm writhing in its beak. White and black sea birds cruised in pairs
close to the surface of the water, one of each pair in full throat.
Five hundred meters across
the water at the close end of the sand bar sat the hosteria’s low red boat. It
looked like holding forty - so it must have been an attraction park-wide,
carrying passengers through the bergs up to Glacier Gray.
It was parked there now
though, grounded up against a bergy bit. The hosteria (or at least the captain)
was being punished for sailing too close to the bergs.
Now there were frequent
jets, so I was all muddled. Argentine planes coming in from the north, maybe,
or maybe they were flying east to Ushuaia in Argentine Tierra Del Fuego.
*****
The Alps are massive and
majestic. The Torres Del Paine only tower three thousand something meters. But
the Alps have been domesticated, everywhere you go, all the way up onto the
slopes. Cows tinkle with cowbells so farmers can keep up with them, and every
village is prim.
It was the vastness around
the Torres, the silence. There were no houses, no farms. Land wasn’t delineated
by perpendicular lines - or fences to keep anything in or out. Nothing, except
for the presence of the snow and the big rocks, and the water and the animals
and the silence.
That’s the kind of thing
you’re after when you come to a place like this, but too often you find
yourself in the common room hearing about Kurt’s blister.
“It’s out to here,” Kurt
said several times, showing a distance between his finger and thumb. Each time
the wife of Kurt would chirp something like “He’s not very athletic,” the more
galling because her butt never auditioned for Buns of Steel.
There’s always people like
that, though, and Kurt was a good enough old guy, running a party of five, some
of them sullen kids.
Maps was what Kurt liked
and he’d sink his head farther into his maps to ignore his wife. The wife of
Kurt liked showing people things. She’d go back to the room (“Wait right here,”
she’d command the guy who ran the hotel tours) to get some page that she’d
printed off the internet. Or she’d inflict her sack of trail mix on a dubious
little boy.
Each time Kurt would move
his face closer to his map and trace lines on it with his finger.
The wife of Kurt had a
running disagreement with Kurt, apparently, over the price of gas, or benzine
as they called it here. Kurt had heard they were getting six dollars a litre
out of jerrycans back at Posada Serrano and the wife of Kurt wouldn’t hear of
it.
She asked the little boy’s
father if he knew, and he allowed that he’d got some and it was close to the
normal price.
“See Kurt! Six dollars a
litre is impossible! I thought six dollars a litre was impossible. Did you hear
that Kurt? I told you six dollars a litre was impossible. Kurt, this man says
it’s not any six dollars a litre. Kurt thought gas cost six dollars a litre!”
And Kurt pulled the edge of the map nearest his wife nearly to his ear and the little boy’s father, who had a naturally puzzled, disheveled look, tried to find somebody else to talk to. You just wince imagining the fun of the six hours back to town with Kurt, his wife and sullen kids.
*****
From the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey by Bill Murray.
See more photography from Chile in the Chile Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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