Perito Moreno, March 22, 2000

Hi everyone.

As many of you know, one of the main points of this trip we're currently on was to do some hiking in the Patagonian Andes. And as fun as the hitch hiking and other experiences were, Bryan and I were quite ready to start some actual trekking. So it was good to be able to do a four day hike around Cerro Castillo in Southern Chile last week.

After my last eMail from Bariloche, Bryan and I started hitching out of the town. One of the most time-consuming aspects of hitch hiking tours are the long walks you have to take through towns and other bad-hitching areas. In Europe that´s particularly bad, but at least there you have a lot of people who trust you and give you rides (way more than in the States or even Canada). Here in South America it seems to vary wildly from area to area and day to day, I have not yet picked up on a pattern.

Like getting out of Bariloche. When we finally did get a ride from a local English teacher, we had been on the roadside for quite a while. She took us to El Bolson, the next town down. El Bolson is sort of a hippie refuge place, you have original generation hippies and younger generation hippies, wearing their hippie clothing and holding organic markets and stuff. Bryan and I bought some very good strawberries and then headed out of town again. We lost a lot of time because we got on the wrong highway. When we were finally on the right track, we stood there for hours without getting a ride. Who would have thought that it would be this hard to hitch hike out of a hippie town?

One of the more humorous or annoying (depending on your current mood) aspects of hitching rides is seeing the reactions of people who drive by. Obviously, you get people making faces or obscene gestures, people ignoring you or (these are the most annoying) giving you a thumbs-up sign. What on earth could be wrong with these people´s mental wiring? Some yell out the window at you, as if there is any chance at all of you understanding anything. Most feel like they somehow have to make a gesture to get you to understand that they feel for you, but can´t take you along. Some point down or in a circle to indicate they´re not going far, or returning right away. Some point to the right or left to show that they´re not gonna stay on this road for long. Some point at all the stuff that´s in their car already, hey guys, there´s no room for two hitch hikers with backpacks. These are easy to forgive, but too often it´s one or two people in a huge empty car who pretend that we wouldn´t fit in. The funniest are those who point straight ahead. "Sorry guys, I´m heading down this road." Where do they think we want to go?

Shortly before sunset we finally got a ride from three people in a pickup truck with a calf in the back. We´ve shared vehicles with dogs, cats, chickens, etc., so this was no big deal. But when the calf started experiencing incontinence and we found ourselves downwind of it, there was some scrambling around to stay dry.

We camped the night next to a stream. It was raining a bit, but we still got a fire going. The next morning we got picked up pretty soon and brought to a junction further down. Man, the landscape is awesome in Patagonia. It´s somehow so unspoiled and free and much distance. We ended up walking a good fifteen kilometers further because there was about a car every ten minutes and NO ONE stopped for several hours. Again it was late afternoon before someone picked us up. Along the way to Esquel we stopped because the driver had spotted a condor. It was flying quite low over us, and we took pictures (hey, we´re tourists).

Once in Esquel, we met a German tourist that we had already met in Chile a few days earlier. She told us that the next bus to our destination left in ten minutes, so we decided to take that, even if it meant paying (sometimes you gotta do public transportation even on hitch hiking tours if you wanna move forward). The problem was that we arrived in Carrenleufu, the border town, after the border control was already closed. A local teacher who was in the bus had told us that the school in town sometimes took in travellers, but no one at the school seemed to be aware of that. As we were looking for a place to crash for the night, we found a small church. The front door was unlocked, so we spread out our sleeping bags over the pew pillows and caught some sleep.

The next morning we had to walk the three kms to the Chilean side of the border. We saw that the road made a long turn around to a bridge, and we figured we could make a short cut if we just skipped across the river. This turned out harder than it looked, and we ended up getting quite wet and having to jump over fences and stuff. Right next to a border. But the officials were nice, though they asked a whole bunch of unnecessary questions. They wanted us to write the answers in the margins of those questionnaires that you are always given at a border crossing. And they told us that there were only like three cars a day passing through that border, so we would not have luck hitch hiking. They offered to drive us to the next town down for some money, so we said sure. But that town seemed pretty dead as far as outgoing traffic goes as well. It was bizarre, because it was a tiny town, and yet everyone was driving around running their errands by car. But no one was heading out of town. They all drove their cars around within the puny perimeters. Finally, though, we got a ride out. They only took us a few kms down, but we hung out at a bridge and Bryan did some fishing until his rod snapped on a snag.

We finally got a ride all the way to the Carretera Austral. This is the main highway of southern Chile. When we saw it, we were amazed. It´s a gravel road. You get about a car an hour. There was a little shelter near where we were dropped off, and there was all sorts of graffiti from previous hitch hikers on that shed, telling about how many days they had waited for rides, etc. It didn´t look good. But within an hour, a car came, and they actually picked us up and took us another eighty kms or so down the road. It was getting dark and had been raining all day, so Bryan and I found a hostal and spent the night there. It was very nice to have hot showers, clean sheets, actual beds, etc.

The next day we took the "bus" South. It´s actually just a van. And it took them like eight hours to drive three hundred kilometers. You do the math to find the average velocity. Fortunately the landscape was very beautiful, though, so things were nice. It was dark when we arrived in Coyhaique.
Coyhaique is a provincial capital, so things were a bit different there. We did some shopping for our hike and had some dinner. Then we were looking for a place to spend the night. We both felt the pain of all the money we had been spending recently, and didn´t want to pay for a hostal again, as tempting as the idea was. We asked the police if they had a free cell or two, we asked the army if we could sleep under their armored cars (I´m not kidding, we actually asked them). They categorically refused. Eventually we found a Shell station whose workers let us sleep next to their kerosene pumps.

The next day, rides went much better. We spent one ride in the back of a truck, though. Like, inside the container. We saw nothing of the outside world. Otherwise we would have seen that the truck took a turn that we didn´t want. But when we got out we kept hitching, and ended up pretty far from where we had to go. We backtracked.

After some more hitching, we finally got to the trailhead. We got out of the car. At that point, every hitch hiker´s second worst fear became a reality for me. Every hitch hiker´s worst fear is of course that his ride turns out to be an armed psychopathic paraphile with a working knowledge of local backroads and a child security lock on the passenger door. But only slightly lesser, and far more justified, is the fear of leaving something irreplaceable in the car as you get out. In all my hitch hikes neither of these things have happened to me (and I stopped counting rides at 100, but they must be around 200 by now). But now I had left my woolen poncho in the pickup truck that had just dropped us off. Man. The air suddenly felt very cold as I was thinking that we would be spending the night in the mountains and my poncho was the closest thing I had to an insulating mattress.

The hike was beautiful though. The first bit took us through mossy druid woods where the slanting sun was putting a golden green glow on all the foliage. As Bryan said, "this would be the place to read Lord of the Rings again". We camped by a lake and Bryan still caught some fish before we turned in for the night. I didn´t sleep well, since I only had my laundry spread out inside the tent to soften the gravel bed on which we were. I guess it wasn´t so hard, but it got pretty cold without the poncho.

The next day we kept going up a mountain pass. We cleared the tree line and finally had a view of all the rugged snowcapped peaks around us. The way through the pass was difficult, with large boulders that have broken off because of the freeze and thaw on the mountain and have sharp, jagged edges. You feel them cutting through your boots and blistering your feet. The way down is not good on your knees. We were back down below the treeline by the time we set up camp, and I was very thankful for that.
On the following day we went through similar terrain again as we crossed another mountain pass. Only this one was much steeper and longer than the previous one had been. There was a glacial lake and we both took a swim. I´ve swum in glacial waters before, but never like this. We were only like thirty meters down from the summer snowline, and there was ice floating around in the lake.

The last day was the easiest, with clearly marked trails through the woods. We got to the town Villa Cerro Castillo, and spent the night in a hostal. Then we tried to hitch hike out to Puerto Ibaniez, but the traffic was so scarce that we ended up walking 22 kms of the 38 km stretch. In Puerto Ibaniez we met that German tourist again. This seems to happen much when you travel. We took the ferry across the Lago Buenos Aires, South America's second largest lake. We have bad luck with ferries. We wanted to cross the lake on Monday, but it turns out that we came on the very week that the ferry worked on a new schedule which operates every day except Monday. So we stayed another night and took the ferry on Tuesday.
Well, and here we are in Perito Moreno, Argentina. Got a ride that took us across a few hours ago. Hoping to head further South tomorrow, and hopefully hit Puerto Natales soon. There are some spectacular hikes down there. And if we get the opportunity, we may try Tierra del Fuego as well.

Sorry, my time is up. It is midnight and we still don´t know where we´re gonna spend the night tonight.

Marco

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