“The day shall not be up so soon as I to meet the fair adventure of tomorrow.”
-King John V.5
January and half of February have hurtled by and now I have exactly four months left here. Although, on days like Sunday, when I rode out of the green Chilean rainforests, climbed the mountains toward the scrubby Argentine pampas and stood on the border between the two countries, I find myself wishing this summer were unending. My days at Antilco are peaceful and contenting, saturated with the sincerity of this rural mountain lifestyle. My days trekking churn with excitement- both the stunning views and the extremity of the conditions and my responsibilities keep me pumped full of adrenaline. Throughout it all, and especially after the last few days, I float in some nebulous realm above reality and never fully believe I’m not dreaming. There is so much to tell about the Chile Argentina trek-I don’t know how to begin. I’ll start with the people, because they too were fascinating and describing them seems easier than tackling the Herculean task of capturing the majesty of the Andes in words.
On Tuesday morning I met the four riders with whom I spent the next five days traveling toward Argentina. Anna and Laura are German, Johanna and Nora are two friends from Switzerland, and they are all under thirty years old. In a matter of minutes they formed an intimate quartet and with their youth and German language in common they passed nights around the fire giggling and wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. They took shots of pisco, shared shampoo, and paddled around Laguna Geppingue together in a rowboat while lightening from a dry thunderstorm feathered the sky. On Day Five when they jumped off their horses for an emergency bathroom break and didn’t bother to check whether anyone could see them pee, they marveled at how quickly they’d bonded. Although they tittered about boys and dresses, they were strong and courageous riders, and because they rarely hesitated we kept a fast pace and moved easily through the boggy, dense forests.
I hovered on the edge of their group and entered it occasionally, but my role as guide and lack of German kept us from becoming a quintet. Instead, I found an amazing companion in my co-guide, Aldo. Aldo is what Chileans would call a masterful converser. He is tall and sturdily built, wears comically thick glasses and likes to prove that he is the ultimate gentleman by always helping riders get up, offering to fetch water and eating last. Unlike Luis, whose topics of conversations range from mares to geldings and not much further, Aldo recounts experiences from his youth, years working in Argentina, life as a farmer, horse adventures, and interactions with international travelers all in long, minutely detailed stories. But Aldo doesn’t only tell, he asks. He is curious and interested in learning from others and as many tales as I solicited from him, he asked just as many of me. We spent one morning discussing the cultural differences between Chile and the US, and in the afternoon switched to the reality of the Mapuche’s situation in southern Chile. He knows at least one tidbit of information about every farm we passed, and if the farmer happened to be outside he stopped to talk for a short while to, as he put it, “strengthen the friendship.”
It is a deeply rural area and often the distance between farms is several hours on horseback. This natural isolation encourages sincere friendliness among farmers; they see each other so rarely that they make sure to take advantage of contact when it comes. I found them to be happy, smiley people, proud of their goods and lifestyle and eager to share. When we’re not camping in a clearing in the middle of the woods, we spend the night in the back pasture of someone’s farm and from the farmers’ wives we order bread. When the senoras bring the rolls out in the morning, they show me the bag or bowl full and pull back the cloth they’ve wrapped them in to make sure I’ve seen how fresh and steaming hot they are. They’ve come straight from the oven and the women want to be sure I know it. Similarly, we spent time with another farmer, a diminutive man over sixty years old with dark, weathered skin and few teeth. Aldo had heard he had a decent mare and Mathias told him to buy it, if it was good. After Aldo decided to buy it, and the farmer led the beige colored horse with dark mane and tail over to us, he looked me deep in the eye and said “Take care of my mare. She’s a wonderful horse, responsive and smooth. You don’t even need a bit. He’s paying a great price or else I would never sell her. Take care of my mare.” I’m not sure whether it’s a factor of my being a gringa foreigner, but the people I’ve met have been easy to smile, willing to share, and eager to demonstrate the value of their possessions and efforts.
Although Aldo introduced me to locals and explained the criss-crossing family trees of the farmers, he talked most of all about the mountains. He and Luis recently returned from a trail-clearing and trail-finding trip. They cut open some narrow sections of trail, but more importantly searched for an elusive path across the summit of the volcano Sollipulli (so-yee-poo-yee) which sits in the middle of the terrain we ride through. They talked to local farmers, made educated guess, and began to climb toward the sandy, snow-capped peaks. To their own disbelief, they were successful. Not only did they find a traversable trail leading to the summit, they also crossed the upper ridge, found untouched hot springs, and circled the crater. For five days, as we rode around the base of the volcano, Aldo frequently looked up at the black sand and white snow on its crests and said, “Imagine! I was up there!” He turned to me once and, with a grin across his face and the views he saw from the top still locked in his head, said “I tell you it was a dream- the adventure of my life.” For the people who live here, the views that leave me speechless are commonplace. Whatever it was that Aldo and Luis saw, it must have been extraordinary beyond belief to leave them speechless.
In all, I enjoyed riding and guiding with Aldo tremendously. I found it harder to prove myself a capable guide because he is exhaustively helpful, but we found a natural, easy rhythm to working together. He made fires in the morning and at night while I prepared meals; he saddled horses while I packed away food and gear and organized tents and sleeping bags; we rode up front together on wide roads, and I fell to the back when we entered difficult mountain trails. I relayed messages from the girls and translated some of his stories for them. Together we put shoes on the horses when they lost them and helped the riders navigate steep cliffs, or slippery rocky twists and turns. And on Day five, when we awoke to fog and clouds that sunk lower all day, we did everything we could to keep the girls’ spirits up as the mist turned to a gentle shower, and later to heavy rain until eventually, nine hours after we set out in the morning, we arrived to our flooded campsite through sheets of the coldest, heaviest rain I’ve ever felt. Managing the miserable elements that day was our greatest challenge.
Aldo kept me laughing through it all, with his jolly, goofy manner and his exaggerated compliments and endless enthusiasm. I felt at ease with the girls, and except for our horror day of rain, we marveled together at the beauty of the trip. With the help of Aldo I met many people along the way, and the small adventures we had with them were just as exciting as the views we saw and terrain we covered. This trek was more than mountains; via Aldo, it was social and an intimate glimpse into the people within the mountains.
…More to follow on the trek itself, and the previous entry has a link to all my photos…
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