Bumps in the Road, Part I

Travel is not a glamorous activity.  If you have enough money, of course it can be, but for the rest of us it tends to be an arduous undertaking of patience and perseverance interspersed with moments of sheer glory.   The travel magazines don't talk about the endless hours of waiting in airports, at bus stops, and on the side of the road.  They don't tell you about long bus rides through boring countryside and ugly concrete cities, or endless trudges across depressing towns in search of a decent place to sleep.  The articles don't include the frustrations of missing a bus because the connecting city got lost in the language barrier, or finding that the only ATM for 300 miles doesn't accept your card, or feeling like the entire universe is conspiring to keep you from your goal.  They say it's all about the journey, but sometimes the journey's really not that fun.

Such was our misadventure down Chile and into Argentina.  Mary, Cristian, Benjamin, Carl, and I were all loaded into their car and driving south on the gravel Carretera Austral to go rafting with their friends when the car started shaking alarmingly only five minutes into the trip.  Cristian wisely decided to turn around (it turned out the power steering was being held in place by one out of four screws, and even that one was loose), and we arrived back at Cerro Castillo just in time for Carl and me to catch the last south-going bus.  Needless to say, for the rest of the journey we were on our own.

We successfully found the tiny hamlet of Bertrand, where we spent the night in a lodge perched on the edge of the lake, and woke the next morning to go rafting down the beautiful blue waters of the Rio Baker.  Safely back on shore, we headed to the bus stop to await another bus, only to be pleasantly surprised when our hopeful thumbs garnered us a comfortable ride south in a new VW truck.  The driver was an pleasant fellow who worked for a water company here in Patagonia, and we had an interesting discussion about Douglas Thompkins, the founder of North Face, and his private reserves as we passed one by.

Confluence of the rivers Baker and Neff

Thompkins is seen as something of a hero of conservation in the States, especially if you've seen the movie "180 Degrees South", but you start talking to folks down here and a much different side comes to light.  While he's done a good job recruiting international attention for the Patagonia Sin Represas movement (Patagonia Without Dams), his attitude towards the local people is condescending and disrespectful of their culture and customs, putting his park's well being before anything else.  The conservation he's done is accessible to selective foreigners only and any research done or artifacts found go back to the States, leaving little benefit for the general population of the area.  It's a complicated topic about which people hold very strong opinions.

Our conversation concluded when we arrived in Cochrane, the last decent sized Chilean town on our way south.  We had been counting on the ATM there to replenish our cash supplies, but to our dismay it only accepted Mastercard.  With my limited Spanish we couldn't figure out if this was a temporary problem or a permanent situation, so we were forced to spend the night and rethink our plans.  Next day we headed to the bus stop to try our luck hitchhiking back north, aiming for Chile Chico on the Argentine border.  We got picked up within the half hour by a pickup and loaded into the back, only to stop 500 feet later to pick up another couple with their bags.  Four people and four large backpacks in a 3' by 3' truck bed on a dusty gravel road is not comfortable.  We were incredibly relieved to hop out at the intersection with the eastward road about an hour later.

Eating dust on the Carretera Austral

Next stage of the journey was a hot, dusty, discouraging 5 mile hike up the road towards Puerto Guadal.  We finally got a ride for the last mile and spent the night there on the shores of Lago General Carrera.  Next day we had no luck hitchhiking and caught the evening minbus to Chile Chico, only to find that the ATM there was a twin of the one in Cochrane.  Morale was extremely low, to say the least.  We spent another night in a crowded campground and decided that in the morning we would make a break for Argentina.  If the ATMs there worked, we'd continue on into that new country; if not, it was back to Cerro Castillo with our tails between our legs.

To be continued...