Santiago, April 15, 2000

Hello all.
A few days ago Bryan and I went out to Puerto Natales. From there we took the bus to Torres del Paine, which is perhaps the most famous national park in Patagonia. Both Puerto Natales and the park itself are completely inundated with tourists, even though locals are complaining that the season is over now and the tourists are disappearing. At the trailhead in the national park Bryan and I split up. He´s now doing the whole seven-day circuit around the mountain range, while I did a day´s hike to a lookout place and back. It was completely dark by the time I got back, and Bryan has the tent with him, and the worst thing was that the book I was going by said that there was a refuge at the park entry, but when I got there there was nothing there (the refuge has been destroyed -- got crashed into by a bus a while ago). And there were no cars or buses left either. I was "looking" (not much use, as it was a moonless overcast night) for a place to lay my sleeping bag where I would not get wet if it rained. You´d expect, with all the tourists hanging around the park, that at least one would be in the same fix that I was in, but it seems that such things happen only to me. Where I did end up spending the night I can´t tell you, because the rangers made me promise not to tell anyone else, lest I give them bright ideas (it wasn´t that bright of an idea, but still one they don´t want published).

Anyway, I was going to try to hitch hike out of Punta Arenas this morning, but I was not able to leave the hostal until mid-morning, by which time all the trucks heading North are already gone, and the family cars heading out are going mostly to Argentina. So I´ll take the bus back North tomorrow.

It may seem to you (and rightly so) that I do a lot of skipping around between Chile and Argentina. I´m suspecting that I´ll need a new passport soon, they´re taking up all my pages by stamping it with the Chilean and Argentine stamps every time I cross the border. It´s so frequent mostly because the southern one-third of Chile is so full of fjords, glaciers and mountains that there is no highway going through. One has to dip into Argentina, or else take a ferry, in order to get South. Because of this, the prices in Chile get more expensive as one gets further South. In northern and central Chile, prices are much cheaper than in Argentina. But here in Punta Arenas, it is almost the same. Accomodations are still quite a bit cheaper though. The most expensive hostal we have stayed at in Chile is still cheaper than the cheapest one we found in Argentina.

The landscape and climate are interesting. In Chile, it is basically the further South, the more precipitation. In the North you have the Atacama Desert, where it doesn´t rain. Not that it rains seldom or little; it just doesn´t rain. After about a thousand kms of that, you start seeing the first signs of life. Low grasses and all that. Then around Santiago, it isn´t really desert anymore, just sort of arid temperate. Then the further South you go, the more it develops into the sort of rain forest you have on the West Coast of Washington or BC. The very South then seems a little drier again, maybe because there are fewer mountains here.
The Argentine side is quite different. Because it is in the leeward rainshadow, everything that is Argentine Patagonia (roughly, everything south of Bariloche)is pretty arid. Once you get away from the mountains, the few bushes or trees that you see (mostly in or near towns) look imported rather than native, and are all growing at an angle because of the constant wind. Mostly it´s just sand and dry grasses though, miles and miles of it from horizon to horizon. Much reminds you of the Canadian Prairies or the Great Plains, rather like North Dakota if it were completely undeveloped. Patagonia is not quite that flat though, even along the Atlantic side. But the only consistent sign of civilization is the road itself and the fences on both sides of it, fencing in thousands of hectares of land on which a few sheep are occasionally seen. Some call this the pampa, and others say that that is just a loosely applied term, that the pampa is the more lush grassland to the North, where you have cows rather than sheep. Either way, it´s solitary land out there.

Well, I must sign off again. It should be interesting to be travelling alone for a while. Hope all of you are doing well. Congrats to those of you who are getting married.
Marco

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