Rio Pico

Weather conditions have not improved since the interlude two days ago, the wind is still blowing, daytime temperatures hovering around -5 C, roads are barely passable if at all - I better go back to the Patagonian summer, then.

We had the whole morning to spend in Gobernador Costa, and I decided to have a cup of coffee at the little restaurant at the front of the hosteria and write the few postcards I was going to send north. Johann, in the meantime, went for a walk through the little town. Our bus would leave sometime between eleven and twelve-thirty, depending on the source of information, and as we were right beside the bus terminal there was no big danger of missing it.

 I was the only customer at that time of day, except for a little mouse that appeared from behind my chair and scurried over to the window where it disappeared between some potted plants. I kept an eye out for his return, but he stayed hidden. I can’t say I objected.

Johann came back after about 45 minutes: the town was bigger than it looked at first sight, roads branching off to the town centre south of the long Avenida Julio A. Roca. He found a bank and even a tourist information, from which he brought back a nice little illustrated brochure extolling the beauty of town and area – in Spanish, of course. In fact, among all the people we spoke with in Gobernador Costa – and there were quite a few – not a single one spoke English. How nice to be at a ‘real’ place again, away from the hordes of tourists (to which we belonged as well, of course ...)!

The bus came in shortly before noon. Only a few passengers were waiting to get on, and not many got off. Among them were two gauchos in full regalia, this time not dressed in felt slippers and boinas but  leather boots and wide-brimmed felt hats, white shirts and black leather vests. Each of them carried a saddle and a huge trophy: obviously they were coming home from one of the Gaucho festivals that happen all over Patagonia in the summer.

Once again we were on our way. 85 km to Rio Pico – and we still didn’t know if anybody would be there to pick us up, or how to continue if there wasn’t. Once again it was hot and sunny, a slight breeze bringing some relief. The houses on the outskirts of Gobernador Costa were either brick or adobe, big and well kept ones right beside others on the verge of caving in. I noticed more flowers than at our first visit to Argentina, rose bushes now in full bloom. Was this simply because everything was not quite as new as last time so that I was able to experience it more intensely? Surely there must have been flowers then already.

The country started to look familiar soon after we left town. I even recognized a small flat lake where we had seen flamingos after we left Lago Vintter by car two years ago on our way back to Buenos Aires. This time there was almost no water left in the lake, and I don’t know what happened to the flamingos. Strange, actually: two years ago we were here a month later, and it was said to be a very dry year, and if it rained a lot last year – as we knew it did from Gretel and Nikita – I couldn’t quite understand how the lake could have contained water then and not now. People are worried about drought again, and winds are supposed to be really bad this season, too.

What I hadn’t noticed in 2009 was how much greener it gets the closer one comes to Rio Pico. The arid, pampa-like conditions gave way to more pasture land, with a few estancias along the road.

Rio Pico awaited us with its main street almost empty, more restaurants and shops than I would have expected in a small village of about 1000, a park with trees, a few benches and a swing set, and finally, at the round ‘plaza’, the bus terminal with white lace curtains. Several vehicles were parked along the road in front of it, awaiting passengers from the bus. Had one of them come for us? Our hopes dwindled with every one that opened its doors to release an obviously Argentinean person, none of them with white or blond hair. Hmmm. What would we do if nobody showed up, if our messages hadn’t been received?

First things first. We sat down on the grass in front of the bus terminal and took out bread, cheese and salami and had lunch. We would decide how to continue after. The lazy siesta atmosphere was taking hold of us, too, main street quiet in the early afternoon glare. A man walked by with a horse, small clouds of dust rising from their feet, and stopped at the little creek running between road and park to let it drink; once in a while a car drove by.

                                       Entering Rio Pico   

                            

How should we proceed, then? Our options were rather limited: no buses drive out to Lago Vintter, and we couldn’t reach Gretel and Nikita by phone. Well, the first thing we needed to do was to find out which road led out of town to Lago Vintter. We’d shoulder our backpacks and start walking, and hope that someone would take us along for at least part of the way. It was only about two, and days were long. Even in the worst case - if we had to walk the whole thirty-eight kilometres - we should be able to make it.

This is how far we had got with our planning, our lunch not quite finished, when Johann suddenly said, “There she is!” “NO!” was my first reaction. But the short woman with reddish-blond hair waving excitedly from the open window of an old pale yellow Chevrolet camionetta  coming to a rattling halt across the street was Gretel, without a doubt. “So ein Zufall! (What a coincidence!)” she called to us over the roar of the engine.

It wasn’t a total coincidence, of course, but they had indeed not had any news of us until that morning when they went to town thinking we’d have to arrive sometime. Finally able to check her phone at one of the places in town with cell phone reception Gretel found my two messages. 

How good it was to see her again - and what a relief to know that we didn't have to walk all the way to Lago Vintter! 

Interlude: Musings from the Farm.

"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?" John Keats wonders in his ode "To Autumn".

I, too, ask this question, but unlike Keats who goes on to say, "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too", I have a hard time hearing the song of this season. Or is it really the rustle of treetops bent and twisted by the wind, the hoarse calls of ravens and magpies trying to conduct a conversation while battling the elements? Maybe I simply have to adjust my thinking. 

Do I sound disillusioned?

I have to admit it is a little hard to keep up my spirits when one gets stuck about half a mile from home with a four-wheel drive pickup at seven in the morning - four days into spring!

It snowed steadily for the last two days, not those thick flakes that almost cover your eyes when you lift up your face, but very fine stuff, almost bordering on drizzle. It is difficult to take this snow seriously; much of it melts upon contact with the ground, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference if the snow cover is sixty or sixty-two centimetres deep.

This deception lasts only so long as we stay in and around the house, however, sheltered by the bush in the east, thus unaware of the fierce south-east wind. We always know about west or northwest wind which has much easier access to the house and announces its presence with rattling windows and clattering chimney.

There are other ways of finding out about the wind, however. Watching the top of the tallest spruce tree bend low, the one I can see from my bed in the morning, towering above the surrounding poplars, is a good indication, and so is the phone ringing at a few minutes past seven. Nobody phones at that time of day – nobody but Doris, the bus driver, and it almost always means that roads are poor.

Twice in a row this happened this week. Maya is the only student on the bus on our two-mile stretch of road, and two days ago Doris asked Johann if he could take Maya one road over to the west so that she didn’t have to negotiate the blown-in area with the bus. At that point we could still get through with the pickup ...

The snowplough cleared one side of the road later that day, and yesterday morning the bus had no trouble. In the afternoon, however, it was a different story already: Doris had to drive all the way around the block (a detour of 10 km) to come in from the south.  

Our neighbours to the north, too, resigned themselves to that approach after pulling a stuck van out of a snowbank north of their house last night, not wanting to succumb to the same fate. She phoned to warn us about the poor road conditions, and plans were made for this morning to leave for town together at seven, when Johann was going to take Maya to an early Badminton practice. It would be safer to travel in tandem in case something went wrong. Also, a phone call to the county office hotline had given them reason to hope that the roads would be cleared by morning: two snowploughs were supposedly working in our area.

No such luck: they obviously hadn't got around to our road yet in the morning. Instead, the neighbour had cleared a path through the drifts with his little tractor and the snow blower, as they informed us shortly before seven; it should be fine. Johann and Maya left. Only about ten minutes later, however, I heard the front door: ‘Oh, we’re stuck,’ Maya mentioned, almost casually. The problem came a couple of hundred meters before the neighbour's place already: while the path to the north was clear there was a stretch of road before that which proved non- negotiable even for the pickup. No school for Maya, then.

Familiar procedure: plug in the tractor for an hour (or it doesn’t start), then drive down to where the bush on the east side ends and the open field begins, where the wind suddenly has access to the road, sculpting drifts higher than the wheel wells, hard enough for me to walk on. Access, too, to my face, assaulting it with a fine, hard mist of snow, not at all pleasant at a temperature of -7. Our brave old tractor, aided by the snow chains it has worn since the beginning of December, once again did its job.

Now, at the end of the day, the roads have been cleared. Very little snow has fallen since this morning, and we are hoping to have free passage now for a while.

But wait! Just now the mournful whistle of the train and the distant rumbling of its wheels, much louder than it should be, is interrupting my dream of a road free of snow drifts. Only when the wind is blowing from the east or southeast can we hear this so clearly. Here we go again ...


                  Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

                                                  
                                                Indeed.

Gobernador Costa - now what?

The days are considerably longer than at the time of my last blog entry, and we are getting close to the spring equinox – such a nice word, isn’t it? Night and day of equal length, darkness and light in balance.

Yesterday I saw the first flock of starlings; they seem to go by date rather than the weather, because rarely there is as much snow left around the middle of March as this year. What will they eat? How will they survive? And yet they must be confident they will, and their presence is as certain a promise of spring as the drumming of the woodpeckers staking their territory and the suddenly changed song of the chickadee. No longer is there only the idle chatter around the feeder, but from the surrounding trees also sounds the melody that, according to German folklore, encourages farmers to “sharpen their plough shares”: two short high Ds followed by a longer B: “Spitz die Schar’, spitz die Schar’!”  

It will be a while, however, until we can pay heed to that call, as there are still two feet of snow on the ground, and only occasionally does the temperature reach the freezing mark. It is not unreasonable, then, to let my thoughts wander back to South America. There are still a few loose threads to tie up, after all.

                                             

A few weeks ago I told of our long bus ride along the ruta 40, on our way to visit Johann's relatives  Gretel and Nikita at remote Lago Vintter. While they spend the winter months in Buenos Aires with its much gentler climate, they live in Patagonia during the summers, renting out cabañas, cabins, mostly to sport fishers. We had visited them two years ago and had loved both them and the location, and now that we were so “close” we decided to spend a few days there again. They knew of our plans, and we had given them a rough idea when we would be there, but the exact date and time would depend on the bus schedule, which we had not managed to find out via the internet.

As soon as we had bought our tickets in El Calafate, a couple of days before we embarked on the 23-hour bus ride, I wrote Gretel an email to let her know when we would arrive in Gobernador Costa, about 120 km from Lago Vintter. There, she had written earlier, they could possibly pick us up, although it would be nice if we could make it to the little village of Rio Pico, still 40 km by gravel road from Lago Vintter.  She had also mentioned that it would probably better to phone them than to email as they were more likely to check messages on the phone.

What we hadn't quite understood before we got there was that they don’t have any phone or email access at Lago Vintter now but have to drive all the way to Rio Pico to check for messages, and if Nikita is the one going to town email messages don’t get checked at all. 

Not seeing any reply in my mailbox the day after I wrote I decided to try phoning. The internet place I used offered Skype, and ear phones hung on a hook beside most of the twenty or so computers, so I tried my luck – in vain: the number I was trying to dial was “not valid”. Hmmm. Well, we had one more day before we had to leave, and surely there would be an answer: they knew we were going to arrive sometime in the next few days. But no email came, and yet another attempt at phoning resulted in what seemed like a wrong connection: a female voice – not Gretel’s –spewed several sentences in Spanish at me, and I – by now able to find out about bus schedules and order a meal if the person I was dealing with was right before me and patient - didn’t understand a word. I assumed I had the wrong number, and we had no further means of reaching them. Oh well. We’d manage somehow – we were seasoned travellers by now, weren’t we?

Thus we started the journey I described a few weeks back. The bus, filled with tourists from all over the world, made its slow but steady progress northward.  The landscape didn’t change a whole lot after our breakfast in the middle of nowhere: quite flat, with sparse vegetation mostly in variations of beige, silver, and pale green, interspersed with neat mounds blooming in at least three shades of yellow, which, upon closer inspection, probably all would have proved to be generously equipped with thorns, spikes, or bristles. Some of the hassocks of grass looked like porcupines, long dark spikes with light grey tips.

                                           

Once more the bus stopped, in the dusty little town of Rio Mayo at the bottom of a steep hill, the sheep shearing capital of Argentina, as we found out from the Lonely Planet.  It looked totally deserted, probably because it was Sunday – but we would never find out: we were not coming back.  Between Perito Moreno (the town, not the glacier) and Rio Mayo we rumbled over a particularly rough stretch of road, but soon after Rio Mayo we finally reached pavement, and at least for a while travelled relatively smoothly.

The mountains had come into view again, and slowly we got closer. Closer, too, came our final destination. Would anybody be there to pick us up? I didn’t really let myself think beyond that, however. We would deal with it when the time came.

It was after five o’clock already when we passed two big metal arches framing a sign claiming that we had reached Gobernador Costa.  The town seemed to stretch for a long time along a single road, and I was already getting a bit worried that the driver might have forgotten that we wanted to get off here. Finally he stopped, across from a YPF gas station with a long line of cars waiting for service. As foreseen we were the only passengers who wanted to visit this charming place that was described – again in the Lonely Planet – as ‘a place where children are just as likely to snap pictures of you, the tourists, as you of them’, in other words a place not usually frequented by foreign visitors to Argentina. Well, we could see why ...

Our searching eyes didn’t alight on any known vehicle or person, although there was a busy coming and going at the gas station. Given the distances and state of the roads this didn’t necessarily mean that we had to give up on the idea of being picked up. Maybe there was an email message now to give us further instructions. I asked a passer-by where I could find an internet place; he told me there was none. With my limited ability to make myself understood and the equally limited ability to understand everything I was pretty sure that I simply hadn’t computed this information correctly. A town of that size – and no internet! Every little place we had passed through had had internet so far. But an attempt at communication with the cashier of the gas station led to the same conclusion: no, there was no internet here, only phones, a couple of booths at the rear of the little restaurant belonging to the gas station. Well, I might have to try that route again, but we weren't quite ready for that yet.  

The bus stop where we had been dropped off didn’t look like the ‘bus terminal’. Indeed, the cashier at the gas station informed us, the terminal was three and a half blocks down main street. Maybe that's where they were waiting for us! We shouldered our backpacks and followed the sidewalk to the terminal, again, however, we were out of luck. The terminal itself was closed, but we found an open door at the rear which led to a saloon-like room with a blaring TV. An elderly couple was glued to the screen. With an effort the woman tore herself loose just long enough to tell us that there would be no bus to Rio Pico until the next morning. Of course not - what were we thinking? A bus connection to a village of maybe 500 on a Sunday evening?! What time tomorrow, we wanted to know. About eleven, she thought, turning back to her show. Not that this information surprised us. We probably could count ourselves lucky that there even was a bus the next day.

Which options were open to us now? The worst of this was that we had no idea if Gretel and Nikita had a) got our message, and - if they had – b) they were planning to pick us up at Gobernador Costa that night. There was no way to find that out.

Right beside the bus terminal we found a small hotel. If we were going to stay in town overnight we would need a place to stay – but so far we weren’t sure of anything.  We found an older woman in an apron at the reception who was very eager to give us a room for the night, but so far we didn't even know if we were going to spend the night in Gobernador Costa. Good to know, at least, that we would have a roof over our heads.

Back to the gas station, then, to try the phone again. This time I decided to leave a message after the gush of Spanish words -what would be the worst that could happen? A very puzzled Argentinean scratching his head over a message left on his phone in German. If it was indeed Gretel's phone, however, she would at least know that we had arrived in Gobernador Costa, would wait for a while at the gas station, and would spend the night at the hotel beside the bus terminal if they were looking for us. Also, I gave her the estimated time of departure for the morning.

Satisfied that I had done all I could under the circumstances I rejoined Johann in front of the gas station. Now it was my turn to keep watch over the backpacks, while he went off to buy a large bottle of beer. I spent the time watching the customers at the gas station: a few men - mostly older - with boinas, the traditional Basque hats, wearing not their high leather boots but felt slippers: so much for the Romantic idea of the gaucho. He, too, a man to whom his comfort is more important than his pride, a man who could let his guard down and just be "normal" at this place unblemished by misguided tourists? 

We drank our 1 l of "Iguana" beer sitting on a low brick wall, keeping an eye on incoming traffic, and when we still hadn't spotted Gretel or Nikita after almost two hours we made our way back to the hosteria we had found earlier.

The room was neat and clean, and the landlady insisted on taking us to the bathroom, where she turned on the cold and hot water tap - to show us that there was water, we assumed. Oh, good! We were really looking forward to a shower: after the bus ride I was itching all over, with or without reason I wasn't sure, but this had been the only bus so far that looked grubby. It was also the only bus we had been on that had only tourists on board ...

Johann, who showered first, cautioned me: the jet from the hot water faucet wasn't very forceful. Well, okay - but did it have to stop altogether by the time I was ready to rinse the shampoo from my hair? Still, it was nice to feel clean again, and my anxiety concerning the next leg of the journey had abated somewhat after we had found a place to sleep and done all we could to inform our relatives of our plans. Things would develop the way they would, and we'd get to Lago Vintter - somehow ...

The simple life

For the last few years we have been part of a wonderful Family Day-weekend get-together that combines the opportunity to spend time in the mountains with a fun group experience. We – Johann, Maya and I – first took part in 2006 when Maya was only eleven, and Magnus and Courtney plus our “third son” Ben and his wife Steph came along a couple of times as well.

Usually the group – varying in its complete constellation, but with the same core – spends Friday night to Monday morning at the Ribbon Creek hostel in Kananaskis Country west of Calgary. This year, however, the hostel had been booked by a different group already, and we had to find other accommodations. As we like to have the whole place to ourselves for the thirty or forty people the range of possibilities isn’t all that big, and we ended up renting Mosquito Creek hostel north of Lake Louise. All any of us knew about it was that it was supposed to be ‘rustic’...

It's a loong drive from home (Kananaskis as well, but this even more), and we could only leave after Maya came home from school. By the time we were on the road it was almost five: another hour of sunlight, another hour and a half of decent light; after that there were four more to be driven in the dark, much of it on mountain roads. It was a beautiful night, however, and the roads were fairly good. We had chosen not to take Hwy. 2 south to Calgary and then go west to Banff and Lake Louise, both very busy roads, but go cross country and get to Banff Park via Rocky Mountain House and Nordegg, then arrive at the hostel from the north. I drove after the first hour and a half, and for much of the last three hours the other two were asleep, which suited me just fine. Going west on Hwy 11 I was all alone in this moonlit mountain landscape, and it was magical! There is the small issue of wildlife on the road, of course, and I was very aware of that, but the snow is deep in the ditches, and it was very cold; the only animals we saw was a herd of elk very close to Nordegg.

We weren't totally sure where the hostel was, only knew that it was north of Lake Louise and should be pretty close to the highway. National park campgrounds and hostels are usually well advertised, however, and finally the headlights lit up the yellow letters "Mosquito Creek" on their brown background. By then it was 10:30, and my "crew" had just woken up again. The turn-off looked a bit adventurous, with two tire tracks leading downhill in very deep snow - not like something one should tackle with a Toyota Corolla! 'Wait', said Johann, 'don't drive in there! I don't think we'd get back out ...'  Great! Now what? Only a few yards further on, however, there seemed to be a second access which looked a lot more promising upon inspection. A bunch of cars was parked in a cleared space below, and we had indeed arrived at the right place. The first access was for the campground, only used in the summer, obviously, except for some tough back-country skiers with 4-wheel drive vehicles.

Well, we had found the right parking spot (and saw somebody we knew unloading his car right away) - but where was the hostel? All we could see at first was a wall of snow. Once we got out we spotted a couple of entries into this wall, pathways through waist-high snow that, after 100 m or so, ended at a few dimly lit buildings: we were there, thank goodness!

Most of the others had arrived already; some were in bed, some huddled around a not very warm fire in the common area, some busy putting their stuff away in the kitchen. Somebody had a sled, which proved to be very handy to get our things from the car, including a cooler and a tub with foodstuff. But why was everybody puttering around in the near-dark? Well ... this place is rustic, as I mentioned before, with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and only a small tap providing water for the kitchen from a reservoir, and we were supposed to use the solar-powered LED lighting sparingly, which makes sense, of course.

So Maya and I, aided by the small cone of the flashlight, followed another path in the labyrinth to the ladies' dorm, Johann a different one to the guys', and we made our beds with the bedding provided, encouraged by one of the people already in bed to switch on the light for this purpose, which made it a lot easier. Every dorm had twelve beds, not all of them in use, and another building housed the three families with little kids.

The main building consisted of the kitchen (with wooden tables and benches), closed off quite effectively from the cold entrance with a comforter nailed to the frame, and the common area with the aforementioned fireplace which, as we found out in the next couple of days, was able to heat up the room quite well if one started the fire early enough. Here, a few people were talking, the flames dancing behind the window of the iron stove giving just enough light for us to make out their shapes. We greeted friends we had met on these occasions in previous years, but also a few strangers who we'd have to look at more closely in the daylight to be able to recognize them again.

A glass of wine helped to counteract the effect of the copious amounts of coffee I had drunk during the drive and made me think of sleep, and by midnight the group split up and went their different ways. Now it became inevitable to check out the one building still missing from the assembly: the - brrr! – outhouse. The thought of having to get up in the middle of the night instead held no appeal whatsoever. At close to -30 this took a bit of determination, of course, and the fact that the beam of the flashlight revealed a toilet seat sparkling with a furry covering of ice crystals didn't make it any more inviting to dwell there - but what can you do? It was either that or the snow bank, and the toilet at least had - if thin - wooden walls and was off the ground. I hadn't registered it then, but a toilet seat cover cut out from a foamy hanging on the wall proved to be the peak of luxury on subsequent visits to this place. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

This first night was ... hmmm ... a little challenging. It's never quite easy to share a room with a group of people for the night, and when your feet are like two lumps of ice seemingly not belonging to your body it is really hard to fall asleep. The blankets, too, had a tendency to slip off into the dark, and I lay there listening to the quiet but consistent snoring coming from the next bed over, trying to get my feet warm without rubbing them vigorously which, I was afraid, might result in a mass-waking. How would I ever fall asleep? And how, for that matter, had the others managed? After what seemed like hours of lying awake, I came up with a solution: I retrieved my fleece jacket from the bottom end of the bed and stuck my feet into the sleeves as far as they would go, wrapping the rest of the jacket around my calves. Finally! It wasn't a ticket to hours and hours of blissful oblivion, but at least it got me warmed up.

I must have fallen asleep, too, because I was startled from some dream or other twice after that, once by an angry shout - somebody else's dream, more violent than mine - and again by a quiet whimpering which I took to be Maya's at first. She was in the bunk above me, and I carefully screwed myself up to be able to reach her. My probing hand found a face relaxed in sleep, however (and I'd hear about that in the morning: 'whatever for did you touch my face tonight, mom?') Twenty-five years of being a mother made it easy enough to go back to sleep when I was reassured that the child needing a mother was not my own ...

The next time I woke up the pale light of morning was seeping in through the windows - thank goodness this night was over!

                                                                        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While the sun took its time to find its way to the hostel itself, tucked into a loose spruce forest, the snow-covered massive wall of the mountain across the road was soon touched with a glorious golden glow: the promise of a beautiful day ahead. Now we could get an idea of the outlay of the place, too, and as always things looked a lot different in the daylight. What a charming place this proved to be, huddling in the deep snow, roofs pulled low! The buildings were a lot closer together than they had seemed the night before, and we marvelled at the tunnel-like paths connecting them and leading out to the parking lot. Somebody had done a lot of shovelling!

The kitchen area bustled with activity, every burner on the two gas stoves covered with pots filled with water for coffee and tea or bubbling porridge, and pans in which slices of bacon sizzled beside generous amounts of scrambled eggs. The windows had steamed up, and a chatter of cheerful voices indicated that everybody was getting ready for a day of outdoor activity. As usual, some were off to the slopes of nearby Lake Louise for downhill skiing or snowboarding, others – Johann, Maya and I among them - wanted to make use of the groomed cross country ski trails in the area, explore the country on snow shoes or just go for a walk. We had no extreme back-country skiers among us, but many come to the mountain parks for that as well, even though the danger of avalanches is ever present, and this year seems to be particularly bad: several people have been killed already when they ventured where it wasn’t safe.

                                                                                                                                    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~           

                             

Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountains the hostel filled with its inhabitants again, returning from their various adventures. Everybody had had a good day, even though it had been fairly cold with a high temperature in the mid teens and some wind. Soon the kitchen was once again filled with the sound of clattering pots and happy conversation: time for one of the highlights of this weekend, the first of two potluck dinners. These are no ordinary chilli and meatball affairs, however, although those, too, can sometimes be found alongside such exotic delights as dolmadakia, spanakopita, tahari, and a variety of salads, to be followed by the most wonderful desserts.

Washing dishes was a little more complicated at Mosquito Creek than it would have been at Ribbon Creek: water, carried over to the sink in buckets from a small tap in the opposite corner of the kitchen, needed to be heated on the stove first, and some planning was involved to get the work done as efficiently as possible. It is not such a bad thing to “do without”, however, not only for the teenagers who might have never experienced this before but also for us baby boomers, so used to our comforts that we most often take them for granted.

How good it feels to share in this sense of community, be it by cooking and washing dishes together or clapping to the lively strains of fiddle and guitar music afterwards, by playing games and catching up on the events in the lives of friends we see but once a year!

We learned that we indeed can get by with a lot less luxury than we are used to, which doesn’t hurt anybody – but I’m sure nobody will complain if we have to make do with indoor plumbing once again when we meet at Ribbon Creek next year!

Wind - Torres del Paine

 Last time I wrote that it was getting harder and harder to find back to the summer landscape we had left only a short time before, and today it seems farther away than ever. After another brief mid-winter thaw that left the deck glistening with rain when I went to bed last night I woke up to the silence that comes with a fresh snowfall, when sound is muffled and doesn't carry very far. Funny that it should be noticeable from inside, but it is.


Soon the snow was moving by the window almost horizontally, and silence gave way to the wailing of the wind.It fiercely attacked and tried to shake loose everything that wasn't firmly attached, rattling window panes and shrieking in the chimney. And suddenly I was back in Patagonia ....


When we were in Argentina two years ago, we spent the bigger part of one night hanging on to our tent stakes because we had foolishly thought we had outsmarted the wind by putting up our tent in the protection of a hedge. During the night the wind shifted directions, however, and showed us that we really didn't know what it was capable of. Since then we have learned that, when travelling in Patagonia, there is no use complaining about too much wind: it simply is a fact of life there, and it is best to embrace the wind as a sometimes annoying but loyal travel companion.


Of course, it sometimes sleeps during the night, even forgets to get up in the morning, which happened on the first day of our stay in Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile. We had travelled from Puerto Montt through the Patagonian channels on a "Navimag" ferry and disembarked three days later (and about 1200 km further south) in Puerto Natales, where we arrived in the late afternoon of January 3rd. Our friends Wilfried and Doris had booked a hotel in the Park, and we had hoped to find a place at the Refugio Las Torres, not far away from their hotel. My attempts to inquire about the booking process and availability were met with the same standard package in two different emails, which didn't answer my questions at all, and we finally decided to trust that there'd be room. If necessary we could sleep in Koch's SUV: we had our sleeping bags with us, after all, even though we had opted against a tent for Patagonia this time.


We were late getting off the ferry in Puerto Natales, had to pick up the vehicle, do some grocery shopping, get a message out to friends and family that we hadn't even noticed the earthquake near Temuco earlier that day, and still had a one and a half hour drive ahead of us. My confidence that we'd certainly find a place to sleep was waning with the fading light - even if there were still beds available, would they let us in close to eleven at night? And if not, and we needed to sleep in the car, would they ban us from the parking lot of the fancy hotel? And was it even permitted to just sleep by the side of the road in a national park in Chile? Suddenly I saw a mountain higher than all the snowcapped ones awaiting us. Johann was unperturbed.
A bridge so narrow that we had to fold in the mirrors to cross it had all of us worried about reaching our destination that night, but with the encouragement of some kids in the car behind us we overcame that obstacle, too, and soon arrived at the refugio.

How could I have doubted that a place that calls itself a refugio would take in weary travellers? Yes, they did have room for the two of us, in a six-bed dorm in which four guys were snoring quietly already, and we just had time to go through the check-in process before the generators were turned off for the night and we were left in the dark, me scrambling to climb up to the top bunk without knocking anything over and waking everybody up. Big sigh of relief!


The view I had from that top bunk the next morning made up for all the worries the night before: I was looking straight at the three "torres"  after which the park is named, glowing in the early morning sun!

One of the things I had tried to find out with my email inquiry was if there were kitchen privileges at the refugio. It turned out that there was no kitchen use available, although one could eat any or all of three daily meals prepared there. Thus we gathered our bread and cheese and palta, avocado, and had breakfast under the low-hanging branches of a small tree outside, guarded by a circle of thorny calafate bushes. An abundance of birds, from the funny, long-billed bandurria to swallows and chipping sparrows, entertained us with their morning songs, the sun was already warm, and the slightest of breezes stirred the long grass. A perfect day to go hiking up to the foot of the Torres!


Some of the men in our dorm, Americans about our age, had done the hike the day before, and we knew to expect a partly strenuous but very rewarding climb that would take us most of the day. The four of us were on our way at nine, so it would be no problem to get back when it was still light.


The path led by the fancy Las Torres hotel through fairly level terrain for a little while before it started to get steeper. A group of about twenty German tourists with walking sticks soon overtook us. Johann, who had, together with Doris, climbed Villarica volcano with a guided group the week before, showed us what he had learned about pacing oneself and conserving energy, and we made very slow but steady progress during that first ascent. I was much too excited about the wonderful flora to be much concerned with anything else on that stretch of way: there was the strange pale beauty of the Porcelain Orchid, the vivid golden calceolaria tenella, better known as slipper flower for very obvious reasons, and, weirdest of all, its cousin, the sand lady's slipper (calceolaria uniflora) that looks more like a creature with telescope eyes and a wide open mouth than a plant. It's especially funny to come upon a whole group of them: no caricature could
give a more perfect impression of a choir in action!

   

                                                                                                        

                                                                                 

After a lunch break away from the crowds gathered at Refugio Chileno we entered a beautiful old-growth lenga forest. Lenga, ñire and cohüe are the three varieties of southern beeches that can be found in Patagonia. Their leaves are much smaller than those of the European beech, and they are very slow growing, but they can get up to 800 years old. The walk through this forest with its widely spaced trees whose branches formed a closed canopy over our heads reminded me of early summer walks in the beech forests of my native Germany, the sun painting patterns on the forest floor where it was able to penetrate the green umbrella shielding us from its heat. Here, walking was easy, the soft ground under our feet a welcome change from firm rock and small rubble. Small glacier-fed creeks tumbled over rocks, sometimes disappearing underground for a while, their banks lined with moss and lush green plants.

Slowly the grade increased again, and became quite steep for the last ascent. Here, we scrambled over rocks big and small, and the sun, unfiltered by any trees since we were above the tree line now, beat down mercilessly. I was starting to feel the shortness of breath I have to contend with for the first day of strenuous hiking when we go backpacking in our Rockies in the summer, although I didn't carry even a small pack this time. It was hard work, and as always the uncertainty how far we had to go made the final leg challenging.


Looking up, we had seen a few people on a big outcrop of rock which seemed to take forever to reach, but suddenly a little army of "inukshuks" greeted us from a flat boulder, cheering us on, or so it seemed, and in less than five minutes we were gazing at the milky blue surface of a glacier lake at our feet, from whose far end the mighty towers jutted up into the almost clear sky: we had made it!

Together with about thirty other hikers, tucked in a niche between some big rocks away from the wind that had started to pick up and from most of the crowd, we enjoyed the view that presented itself to us. As always in the presence of these ancient mountain giants that have weathered so many storms, have stood silently long before any human being ever laid eyes on them, I became silent, too, and again was aware of how small and insignificant we are, swarming like ants on that mountainside, forever drawn upward to stand as close to the sky as those peaks. I had been hot on the way up, but now I was shivering, and my hands were almost numb: the wind drove the icy glacier air right at us. It was time to turn around.




Again the challenge lay in the steep section we had to traverse first. The gritty surface didn't afford much hold, and we stepped carefully, every once in awhile loosening small rock slides with our feet. Johann again led the way, and at one of the steepest sections had missed the only barely recognizable path, taking a shortcut across the scree. We had followed, not paying attention to the markers either, and I suddenly found myself slipping, looking down the steep slope at my feet and at the small figures of other hikers far below me. A brief moment of panic, but Johann's outstretched hand helped me to gain firm ground again. There had not been any real danger, but the mind sure can play strange tricks!

As usual, the descent was a lot faster than the ascent, and a lot less strenuous. Now we could enjoy the view of the valley opening up before us, the mountains on the other side, waterfalls  hanging from their sheer rock face like strings of pearls.


As long as we stayed in the shelter of the ñire forest we were protected from the wind, but on the short climb after the Refugio Chileno the wind got ever more forceful. When we turned the corner at the top it suddenly hit us so fiercely that I felt it could lift me off my feet with only a little more effort. It was an uncomfortable feeling on the narrow path, the steep mountain flank below, and I was glad that the gusts were not very frequent, and I not a featherweight. Resting for a moment to enjoy the view we noticed that the wind was playing games not only with us: a small waterfall on the opposite side of the narrow valley was turned into a “water rise”, the water actually blowing upward before falling down!

No wonder they put up warning signs like these here:

                                   No comment ....

"Pisco Sour"

Two weeks ago yesterday we arrived at the bus terminal in Santiago after a nine hour bus ride from Temuco. It was hot - almost 30 degrees -, and the terminal was buzzing with people in holiday mode. We, on the other hand, had only one more bus to look for: the 'aeropuerto' that would take us to the airport for our flight home.

I remember thinking, 'once we are home it will be only a little while, and this will feel so far away, soon almost seem like a dream' a week or so before we left, resolutely putting these thoughts out of my mind to not hasten the process. But of course it is true! How could it be otherwise, when surroundings and circumstances are so different? 'A harsh beauty', I wrote in my last entry, and that, at least, is a label that can be applied to the place where we have made our home as well. Harsh and beautiful in a totally different way, and, just like in Patagonia, sometimes needing a second look to appreciate it fully.

It is the everyday reality, however, and it takes a bit of an effort to transport myself back to our wonderful holiday. A glance at my zebra-striped feet will do it, causing a sudden longing for a climate needing only sandals and short sleeves instead of felt-lined boots and a snow suit. Looking at the photos, reading my journal entries - that, too, helps.

And then there is the route via the taste buds ...

Soon after our arrival in Chile we started hearing about the national drink. 'You HAVE to try the pisco sour', we were told by several people. It didn't seem like a big priority: sure, it's interesting to try the local food and drink, but we mostly enjoy red wine, or a beer when the weather is hot. We'd try it sometime in those five weeks, just to know what it was.

Little did we know that it is not just a drink, but a piece of Chilean identity! It took no more than five days until we tasted the first one: a group of Chilean agronomists with whom we went out for supper insisted that no visit to a restaurant was complete without a pisco sour, and by the time we left Chile five weeks later we had grown so fond of it that we stopped at the duty free shop to buy a bottle of this strong colourless Brandy, distilled from grapes. We have experimented with it already, and feel that we can serve a passable pisco sour even here, far from the Central Valley of Chile where the grapes are grown.

My fondest memory of it is not connected with a restaurant, however, but with Isla Negra, and I suspect it has less to do with the pisco sour than with the circumstances surrounding its consumption.

I told the story of our arrival in this little coastal town, the walk up the hill to "The Poet's Madness Hostel". I had found it when I checked the "hostelworld" or "hostelbookers" website, a very helpful tool in finding accomodation. It was the only hostel listed under Isla Negra, and they did indeed have room.

    

"The Poet's Madness"

We arrived at its gate in the afternoon, guided by several wooden signs along the way. The path through a small ravine leading up to the pretty little wooden house included a short suspension bridge, flowers and a little garden to the left and right, and signs that younger children either lived or were welcome here. The door was opened by an attractive woman in her thirties, who turned out to be the sole operator of the place. She spoke very little English - and we spoke very little Spanish. This was only the beginning of our second week in Chile, and we hadn't had too many opportunities to practice.



I have to say that my idea of hostels was definitely antiquated before we went on this trip, stemming from school excursions in the 1970s. Memories of dorms with many beds, strict rules concerning quiet times that were never adhered to, the smell of dirty socks and wet towels and of bathrooms that strongly suggested the need for flip flops to prevent an almost certain infection with athlete's foot came up at the mention of the word 'hostel'. They were a slightly more comfortable but not necessarily preferable alternative to a tent.

Hostels, however, were the accomodation we had decided to use whenever possible for our travels in Chile, encouraged by Magnus's and Courtney's experiences the year before. "They are not much different than hotels nowadays", they told us. "Just cheaper."

We had seen that confirmed in our first two nights in the "Rio Amazonas" hostel in Santiago, and now again at  "La locura del poeta (The Poet's Madness)". Sandra and her seven-and twelve-year-old daughters live in the house as well, and Sandra, with her warm personality, infused the whole place with a sense of peacefulness. We had a private room, not very big, but comfortable and decorated with loving detail, just like the rest of the house, and the two bathrooms and small kitchen were shared with Sandra and the other guests, two students from Germany and two from France.

The two German girls had stayed with Sandra for a few weeks while they did a practicum at a school in Isla Negra, and on our second night Sandra and a few other Chilean friends had a farewell party for them at the hostel to which we were invited as well. This was a very impromptu, unhurried affair. Johanna, one of the German girls, had wanted to learn how to make bread from Sandra, and around nine the first steps were underway, the kids and Johanna all crowding around the bowl to start the yeast, cut onions and garlic to roast while the dough was rising, three dark heads and one blond bent over their task.

Eucalyptus Tree

Everybody walked over to the fire pit beside the suspension bridge to pass the time until the bread could go in the oven. By now we were joined by a few more Chileans and a Columbian, and the small fire, fed by eucalyptus twigs and bark gathered on the road outside the gate, cast a warm glow on our little multinational group talking to each other in Spanish, English, German and French, whatever worked best.

In the meantime the bread was baking, one of the guys was busy cooking choclo (corn) soup, and we were finally getting ready to eat, by now close to eleven o'clock. Oh, but there couldn't be a Chilean party without pisco sour! The lemons were brought out and squeezed with a strange wooden contraption that looked awkward but worked beautifully, and lemon juice, a generous amount of pisco and some liquid sugar went in the blender for a first melding of tastes and textures,  later joined by some ice and an egg white to add the desired frothy crown.

This meal, prepared and shared with so much love, is what I will really remember when I think of pisco sour, and it is indeed true that it represents a piece of Chilean identity for me. It is not so much the taste of the drink itself as that of friendship and warm hospitality, a taste we met with wherever we went.

Notes from a bus

              We are back home, and already it is hard to imagine that it is no more than ten days ago since I wrote the following entry. My good intentions to post a blog once a week were thwarted by the unexpected death of my computer, or rather its screen, and I found it impossible to 'quickly' write a blog the few times we had internet access at an internet cafe.


              I did write in my journal, however, and will try to post blogs in retrospect, though not necessarily chronologically, more like a series of impressions of different stages of the journey. Here is the first one of them.

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

After three days on the ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales through the Patagonian channels, after hiking up to the foot of the Torres del Paine, after watching and listening to Perito Moreno glacier calve, we are now sitting in a 42 passenger bus, on our way north on the (in)famous Ruta 40, Argentina. We started out in El Calafate and will get off in the little town of Gobernador Costa after 23 hours of travel.

7:50 pm

The bus is finally leaving El Calafate, half an hour late because of some mechanical problem in need of fixing, and another stop on the outskirts of town to go through a police control. I’m still not sure what these controls are good for. A policeman came through and wrote down everybody’s name and passport number.

Although the bus is not even half full we got the two last adjacent seats available when we bought our tickets yesterday. I assume we’ll pick up more passengers on the way who probably booked earlier than we did. Our seats are at the very back, right beside the bathroom – not ideal, but we are happy that we managed to get on at all. The next bus goes in a couple of days, which would have made it too late for us to stop at Gretel and Nikita’s at Lago Vintter.

It is pretty bumpy already, even though we are still on pavement. I wonder how my back will feel at the end of this journey: a good part of the way it is still ripio, the Argentinean version of gravel road.

10:30 pm – first stop on the way in El Chalten. Very few people got off the bus here, but a big bunch of backpackers is getting on, and the bus is now full. All of these travelers are tourists, from many different nations, and I believe all but one of them are not much more than half our age. They’ll go all the way to Esquel or even Bariloche; I’m sure nobody will get off at Gobernador Costa with us.

We still had enough daylight to see mighty Mount Fitz Roy, one more of the trademark peaks of Patagonia and one of the reasons why El Chalten is so popular with tourists. Even now it is not totally dark, but it is very windy. I watched the play of clouds across the huge sky stretched over the plains earlier, mountains in the background, with another big lake and its “house glacier”: Lago and Glaciar Viedma. These mountains rise almost without warning from the flat steppe, without the presence of real foothills, just a buffer of bare mounds, one layer thick.

Sunday, January 9^th, 2011, 11 am

At the bus terminal in the town of Perito Moreno, with a 1 1/2 hour break

More than half of our journey lies behind us, and I slept for a fair part of it, even though at first I thought I couldn’t.

When we left El Chalten we were given lunch packs, and the driver pointed out a stack of Styrofoam cups and a big container with water we could use as we needed. After a few minutes the lights in the bus were extinguished, and as the little spotlights were too dim for reading I soon fell asleep. Whenever I woke up during the next few hours I saw a mass of stars through the slit in the curtains.

I must have slept for quite a while after that, because the sky was a deep, flaming red when I woke up next. It was close to 5:30 in the morning, and we had turned onto a very bumpy stretch of road and eventually came to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Far and wide the plains stretched in the pre-dawn light, hills in the distance a black ink drawing against the slowly brightening sky, a river, band of shining silver, meandering through a shallow  valley.

This was a scene I will remember for a long time:

A small house – a kind of truck stop, it turned out - in the midst of all that empty vastness, our bus, almost as big as the house, parked beside it, the gravel road getting lost in some invisible distance. The warm glow of light shining through the windows like an invitation, and the group of about 40 tired tourists, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, lined up for bathrooms and a breakfast of coffee, tea, mate, cake and media luna, croissants.

The restaurant owner, a tall, neatly dressed Argentinean with a grey ponytail, looked well rested at this early hour and handled the many orders calmly, patiently repeating the cost of an order for those who weren’t well versed in Spanish, and I, too, got a good, strong cafe sin leche.

To heighten the sense of surrealism a TV screen showed Beatles videos. How strange to watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to listen to “Imagine”, in these surroundings! The hallway leading to the baños (bathrooms) ended in a fair sized room filled with shelves of books, couches, arm chairs, labelled “Public Library”. What was this place? Had we landed in some Hitchcock movie?

There was nothing to worry about, however:  a good half hour later we were on our way again. The sun had just appeared on the eastern horizon, and it was light enough to see that we were now driving through a landscape that would be called bleak by many who love the verdant green of moister climes. I, too, would have counted myself among them, but again and again I am surprised to find that this barrenness has its own appeal for me.


It is so enormous, and in all its dryness so variable, ever changing colours and structure, rocks smoothed and ground to small pebbles by the force of the ice of long-ago glaciers; hills upon hills, valleys wide and narrow, some with a hint of green because of a bit of water, sometimes not even visible anymore, and above it all the endless sky, deep, deep blue; sometimes a cloud ship sailing by, casting a shadow on the bare hills below.


Guanacos and sheep live here, never many in one spot except in those green valleys, and every once in awhile a carcass is stretched out over the tightly strung fence: a misjudgement of height, maybe, or the result of a panicked flight from a predator or a vehicle. Bleached bones, too, are loosely scattered in the ditch from time to time, no longer showing what animal’s skin and meat once covered them.

It is an unforgiving country, harsh in its beauty, glaring sun and lack of moisture, creating an environment not suitable for the weak – but boring? No, boring it is not!