At World´s End

In the six days I´ve been off Antilco I covered some serious mileage. A bus took me along a narrow, serpentine pass through the Andes from Pucon to Bariloche, Argentina where I enjoyed two days of fine chocolate and even finer views of the stunning lake district. A day hike took me from the ski center at Cerro Catedral to a mountain top lake surrounded by austere granite towers where I warmed up in an electricity-less lodge full of mainly Argentine youth, who, but for their language, could have been any thruhiker on the Appalachian Trail. I sat reading, eating bran muffins the lodge worker had made, thinking what a beautiful example of convergent evolution it was. On opposite sides of the world trekkers and mountain lovers have built small, cozy lodges, filled them with photographs of their beloved peaks, and play chill acoustic music while hosting hikers. 

The Argentines chuckle when I speak. They are surprised a gringa speaks Spanish well, and they are shocked to hear such a strong Chilean accent. I didn´t think my speech was so colored, but the looks on dozens of Argentines faces has taught me otherwise. I returned to my linguistic comfort zone on Monday, making a dramatic, all-day crossing crossing of the border called The Cruce Andina, or The Andean Cross. In a seven stage journey, with four bus rides and three boat rides, I traveled from Bariloche, Argentina to Puerto Varas, Chile. Catamarans zipped us across emerald green lakes, so colored by the mineral sediment which runs down from neighboring glaciers, and we wound across the water in the shadow of green mountains which rise dramatically out of the water without beach or shoreline. The clear skies, forested mountains, and crystal water makes each horizon a stunning triptych of color that is not unlike the views in the Pacific Northwest. I spent the day with three young Colombian guys and together we marveled the lakes and volcanoes, and ended our night together lost and dripping, wandering the sodden streets of Puerto Varas trying to find our hostels. 

I spent the morning in Puerto Varas, a lakeside town with views of the formidable volcano Orsorno. It’s peaceful, natural beauty moved me, but more so made me appreciate Pucon, which is also a lakeside town with a view of a breathtaking volcano. Unfortunately, the towns I visit must all be compared to Pucon, and I haven´t yet found a place more "wow" provoking than my Chilean hometown. Uniformed school children crowded the central square armed with sidewalk chalk and youthful optimism to celebrate The International Day of Water. They drew pictures of responsible water use and wrote messages of varying usefulness, like "We will waste no more!," and the less practical, "I will never shower again!" 

In the afternoon, a 20 minute shuttle bus took me to the neighboring port city of Puerto Montt which sprawls northward from the Pacific Ocean. A stepped off the bus and immediately resolved to loathe the city, with its throngs and noise and pollution and traffic. Within minutes I found a quirky alley of two-story buildings which leaned in on each other. Small, repeating triangular windows lined the upper stories, while the lower levels opened into stalls where local artists sell their crafts. Unlike the ubiquitous wood, leather and wool products which are sold throughout southern Chile, theses stalls featured merchants with unique crafts and I wound through the twisting, weaving, narrow alleys looking at the crafts and talking with some of the vendors. One woman, a slipper maker, invited me in to show me her client book filled with sixteen years of individual slipper sales. “My slippers walk in many countries,” she told me proudly, showing me an ever-growing list of countries, to whose citizens she has sold her footwear. When I told her I was from the states, her eyes grew wide and she smiled, saying that the largest pair she ever made were for an American man. “He was a giant!”

          Another craftsman, a round faced, jolly man with dark hair to his shoulders and glasses that perch on the bridge of his nose, beckoned me in and within moments convinced me to sit down and watch him work. He took out a scrap piece of leather, turned on the heated metal tool he uses to draw on the leather and began to sketch. “For you: a special present!” he said. I am now the thrilled owner of a unique souvenir from Nestor in Puerto Montt who drew a sailboat on the sea under the words “Willa, Pte Montt, 2011.”
          To the west of the city center is the fish market Anglemo, which is filled with heaps of sea flesh... mussels, clams, crabs, salmon, urchins, and abalone. I ate fried hake in a small restaurant on stilts which extended over the water, and watched the simple, brightly colored wooden boats motor around the port. Although Puerto Montt is a busy, modern city, touches of its past remain in Angelmo where the boats are still small and every boat and building is slapped with a thick layer of bright paint. Primary colors are king, but orange, green and purple

In the evening I bussed to the airport and flew into Punta Arenas, where the frigid midnight wind let me know just how far south I´d come. This morning I wandered the city cemetery which is filled with anglo names and provides fascinating evidence of the city’s first pioneering inhabitants. A three hour bus ride north across wind swept pampas brought me here to Puerto Natales. The pampas were flat... flatter than anything I´ve yet seen in Chile and the change was startling. Rheas dotted the roadside, along with sheep and horses which grazed the coarse, shrubby plains.

Puerto Natales feels like a forgotten town at the end of the earth. Travellers come only to get to better places, like Torres del Paine National park, where I´m headed tomorrow for a few nights of camping. Trekkers wander the streets of tired, once brightly colored buildings with checklists in hand, and file through grocery stores, stocking up before they enter the park for extended hikes. Today the clouds hang close to the earth and all is gray and wind bitten. The mountains around Pucon give the area a great sense of ascension, but here I feel trapped between a flat sky and flatter earth. I´ll be glad to get into the park tomorrow and return to an undulating landscape and soaring towers of stone.

And so, there is a taste of my travels so far. I have glaciers and the quaint island towns on Chiloe to see before I return to Antilco, but I´ll be glad to go back when the time comes. Traveling here is thrilling, and the backpack culture of young, excited adventurous is contagious and exhilarating. But I am lonely traveling alone and look forward to being back on the ranch and eating dinner with Mathias, Karin, Remo and Mara every night.

True Grit

Three weeks ago I helped seven riders repel off a horse down a fifty-foot cliff into the crater of Sollipulli volcano. They gripped a lasso of crude leather and scuffled their feet, searching for firm footing among the loose shale and igneous rock. The inched their way down the nearly vertical drop and tried not to think about the very real possibility of the earth beneath them sliding away in an avalanche. Next to me, on the lip of the crater, Luis’ horse turned his back to the chilling wind, closed his eyes to the dust, and leaned away from the crater, anchoring himself against the weight of the multiple women who descended on the lasso attached to his saddle. One woman sat resolutely while the others silently prepared for the descent and said we were dumb, dumb and stupid for attempting such a dangerous stunt. Another rider dug out her cell phone, turned it on and thrust her arm vainly in the air, searching for nonexistent signal to call her kids and say goodbye.

We arrived to the rim at 4:00 in the afternoon after six hours of riding over the vast volcanic landscape of Sollipulli. It was at times arid, at times snow-capped, but always unforgivingly steep. Sollipulli is an amalgamation of several small, long-dead volcanoes and its geography is accordingly varied. Harsh conical formations rise to a flat top or a hollow crater; great undulating ripples of earth bend and flow, as if complex, monstrous waves of lava hardened to form this severe landscape. The high altitude keeps most parts of Sollipulli covered in snow through most of the year, but in some places the sun strips the cliffs, outcrops, plateaus, and hills of their white blanket and exposes feathery veins of hardened lava in the rock as well as red iron deposits. Through the morning and afternoon we cut tight “Z”s up mountainsides and even tighter ones down snowy slopes. We held our hats as the horses tiptoed across the five foot wide, razor’s edge summit line. I hauled a horse, an older gelding called Rebelde, off its knees when it fell in an ice patch and slipped dangerously to the edge of the earth. Then I watched in numbed shock as my own horse, Tornado, bolted wildly, galloping across the snow and skidding to a stop only inches from the edge of bottomless crevasse.

Such was our morning. But in my memories of that day I often overlook the first six hours. The climax of beauty, terror, danger and emotion was our descent into, and the time we spent within, the great crater. Once the women reached the end of the rope, they stepped off the sand and shale and onto the firm, snow-capped glacier which fills the crater. Luis calmly herded them behind an outcrop where they wouldn’t be able to see our next stunt, then struggled back up the cliff to me. He removed the lasso from his own horse and fixed it to the bridle of another, then turned to me with an inappropriately flippant grin and asked, “Ready?” I must have hesitated, glimpsing the cliff again and imagining what we were about to do, because he stared at me harder and said “Nervous?... Don’t be. This is easy.”

Luis is a wizard with horses, but his blind confidence comes not from faith in the certainty of a positive outcome. It comes instead from his inability to entertain the possibility of a disastrous outcome. It is his strength and weakness. When you are on the lip of a crater, in deafening wind, with ten horses you have to somehow get to the bottom of the crater, it is not an “easy” situation.

With seven riders and ten horses to care for, my worries flared ferociously at that moment. What if the snow in the crater was soft or hiding huge crevices? The landscape had been unpredictable all day, what if we couldn’t get back out of the crater? What if, in the struggle, I slipped off the cliff under the hooves of the horses, as had happened once earlier in the day? But my thoughts had to wait because suddenly Luis was standing halfway down the cliff, buried to his calves in the loose rock, hauling on the lasso and shouting for me to start. I moved behind the first horse, Palomo, and slapped him with all my force. Two minutes of slapping and tugging finally overpowered him and he slipped over the edge. I took advantage of horses’ herd mentality and pushed the next horse, Chocolate, over the cliff before he could figure out where he was headed. The rest followed, stepping off the lip before their self-preservation instincts set it, and stood watching ten horses plunge, slip, fall and slide their way down the rock river to the bottom. I lost sight of Luis in the eruption of sand and dust, and had to wait until the roar sliding rocks quieted before I could call out to him.

I was the only one left on top. I gathered the remaining ropes and jumped, surfing the shale to the bottom. Once on the snow I noticed the pervasive tranquility of the glacier. The women sat quietly, half-traumatized, half-exhausted; the horses stood calmly, only gently shuddering from shock; the wind was gone, the air was still and it was silent. It was as though we were in a vacuum. The glacier was vast, blindingly white and stretched out for hundreds and hundreds of meters before us. The sky too breathed tranquility, with an easy wash of baby blue and a few stretched cotton strands of cloud. And, but for a few bright drops of blood dribbled across the snow, fallen from the horses nicked legs, it seemed that everyone was safe.

In all, we rode for twelve and a half hours that day. Two weeks earlier Aldo and Luis successfully crossed Sollipulli on horseback- the first riders ever to do so. In an ambitious, and ultimately ill planned decision, we decided to cross it again with seven riders as part of their twelve day trek. The seven riders and I laugh now, and brag that we survived Sollipulli. But, it was the most extreme day of my life and I don’t want to forget that. Up there, on the volcano, it seems things are only given in vast dosages. It was too beautiful, too dangerous, too exciting, too steep, too magnificent, too stressful. I felt my insides compress and cried from the beauty. As a rider, I might do it again. As a guide… It is a changing, unpredictable landscape which changes quickly and intensely. I’m not convinced that the unimaginable sights we saw, the entire volcanic landscape of southern Chile stretching out in purple peaks and snow-capped cones before us, were worth the risk.

I have more to write about the rest of that day… (how we couldn’t get out of the crater, how we rode through the dark on exhausted horses…) and more to write about the past few weeks as well, including an eventful four day ride I led. But for now I’m leaving, taking a short vacation from Antilco to recharge and give my nerves a rest. I head today to Bariloche, Argentina and from there will continue south, deeper into Patagonia. There are links below to my pictures from Sollipulli which capture nothing, but are pretty. Check them out!

Hasta Luego!

From Chile to Argentina Part III: New Terrain and Rain

DAY 4: Flor de Valle to Huachalepun

The senora at Flor de Valle greeted me before the girls woke up with a round metal tub full of 30 fresh, steaming rolls. Aldo and I drank a cup of coffee while he told me about his long friendship with “the husband of the woman who makes the bread” and how it was because of that acquaintance that Mathias uses this campsite. I laid out a breakfast of bread, jelly, cheese, ham, and butter which the girls ate ravenously then quickly packed up their things (by Day Four they have a routine) and helped Aldo saddle horses. By 10:30 we were off, retracing twenty minutes of the trail to the lake before veering left and following a six-feet wide 4x4 road for most of the day.

It seemed we’d been riding deeper and deeper into the mountains for three days, further and further from any kind of town, but sprawling, cow-riddled farms appeared intermittently at every point of our trek. Slanting woods houses with one yapping dog out front; fences made of untreated wood verticals strung together with barbed wire; a few lonely horses; and the odd piece of farm equipment were the views of our ride. The ride wasn’t steep or boggy; we merely followed the path which in turn followed the curves of a shallow, rocky-bedded river. It was an overcast day and fog hung low in the trees giving everything a chilled, ominous feeling. The trees at this altitude are all covered in a mint green, delicate, sponge-like moss that hangs from the branches and trunks alike. It thrives in high altitude areas and is not picky about the species of its host tree. The locals call it barba de pino, or beard of the pine, and it was so gentle and beautiful and softened the feel of the forest.

The day afforded us magnificent views of Sollipulli and I snapped pictures of Aldo pointing at the crests with his goofy smiling, reminiscing about being on top. Shortly before lunch we passed under a black cloud and quickly put on ponchos. Luckily the shower lasted only minutes and we soon arrived to our lunch spot near a lonely hut next to the river. Unexpectedly, the owner was home but welcomed us to lunch in his field. No sooner had I laid out bread, salami and cheese, but a police truck and three mounted police officers came tumbling out of the mountains. There were five all together and had been up on a rural section of the Argentine border. They were all supremely friendly and cracked jokes while asking if they could take some pictures and film for official reports. The girls were equally impressed with them and we passed a long lunch talking with them and posing for pictures- the blond cowgirls and the official, upstanding officers. The man in charge assured me that whatever I needed, even if it was just a ride through town to grab a beer, he was eager to serve me and could be found in the nearest town where he’s Chief of Police. Aldo said it was a historic day: he’d never before met officers in the mountains.

Before arriving to our campsite, we stopped off at another farm where Aldo knew a horse was for sale. Mathias had charged him with buying it if it was good, so Aldo talked with the farmer, took a look at the horse and a half hour later handed over roughly six hundred dollars in exchange for the horse. I led Monona, a small creamed-coffee colored mare, the rest of the way to our campsite. We slept high in the mountains in a field next to a rarely-used hut and listened to the sounds of gentle rain on our tents which promised a wet ride to Icalma.

DAY 5: Huachalepun to Icalma

            It rained all day. The clouds sunk low in the trees and we rode through the wet gray fog and saw hardly anything. It rained gently through the morning, and we stopped for lunch next to a warm volcanic lake that the girls had had high hopes of swimming their horses in. Instead, Aldo built a roaring fire and we drank tea and thawed our hands while wind shook showers of water from the trees. The fire helped raise their spirits, but the warmth soon drained out of us once we got back in the saddle and continued trudging through the rain. I led the pack horse, Pepe, who walks slowly and I had to tug him along all day. It was a miserable day and the rain turned to a full downpour by 4:30 when we emerged from the mountains onto the dirt road leading to Icalma. We spent three more hours shuffling down the road, our bodies stiff, my hands swollen, cracked and aching, my shoulder burning from pulling Pepe, and my butt and inner thighs fatigued and saddle sore. Once you’re wet and riding there’s little hope of warming up, and we grew colder and colder.

            By the time we limped into camp at 7:30, we’d spent nine hours in the rain and everyone seemed about to cry. Mathias met us in Icalma with an asado feast and fortunately he’d put a huge tent over one of the picnic tables. It was small help. Our campsite was flooded, the wind howled and the rain continued to bucket down. We sat outside through all of it, the girls shivered together while I hurried to prepare dinner. We all ate quickly and went to bed as soon as possible to put an end to the ugliest of days and praying for a sunny morning.

DAY 6: Argentina!

When I rose at 5:00 a.m. to prepare breakfast it was pitch black and still raining. I woke the girls at 6:00, lied to them that it wasn’t so bad outside, and we ate, saddled and were off by 8:00. By the time we got on the horses the skies began to clear, and though it was still bitingly cold as we headed off toward the border, we saw the sun for the first time.  Icalma is a tiny border town and we passed through customs easily. From there we rode for two hours, first up through more green typical Chilean forest, eventually emerging onto the scrubby flats of the Argentine pampas. The sun grew stronger as we rode, banishing a bit of the ice morning chill and we were so thrilled to be clear of the rain that we charged into the day with high spirits.

I’ve run out of time and have to leave for an 11-day trek… unfortunately the last stories from the border will have to wait. For now I’ll say it was a dream to be up there with nothing obscuring the views, to gallop across the flats, and to the straddle the border!

From Chile to Argentina Part II: Into the Mountains

            My six-day trek, which extended to nine days for the riders who met their new guides and horses at the border and continued into Argentina, followed a general Northeast course away from Pucon toward the border town of Icalma. But the truth is that we frequently traveled away from Icalma and wound every direction around the mountains, into the forests and out, tracing a rather squiggly path on the map. Our route varied in condition and geography as we rose high and dipped low, entered the dense bamboo stands and emerged onto wide dirt roads, and eventually left the rainforests completely and encountered the Argentine pampas. The views surpassed all others I’ve seen in Chile, and everything reached an exciting pinnacle on the last day when we found ourselves high on the pampas, without a tree in sight, looking out over the lake district and the snow-tinged mountains beyond.

            Here, I’ll try to give a rough outline of the first half of the trip, and the rest will follow in Part III.

DAY I: Antilco to Geoppinger

            Our trek got off to a chaotic start as two of the riders missed their bus from Santiago and arrived two hours late to Pucón this morning. By noon we’d finally rounded up all four riders, Laura, Anna, Johanna and Nora, and fed them breakfast. By one o’clock they’d met their horses, put on chaps, gotten in the saddle and we were out the driveway to test the horses and riders. Tornado is one of our crazier horses; he prances and twirls, tosses his head and froths at the mouth with anxiety and excitement. He’s usually only used to guide but Laura was a very experienced rider so we decided to give her Tornado (after a switch with Anna). His presence agitated my horse Moro and together the two of them worked themselves into a sweaty frenzy, trying to compete for top guide horse status. When I stayed behind the others to close gates Moro pawed the ground and snorted, charged forward when I slackened the reins even slightly, and side stepped feverishly trying to break free.  After three hours of fighting with Moro in the broiling sun, I was covered in his and my sweat and was frustrated and exhausted enough to give up on him forever.

            While the girls lunched with Mathias, I led all the horses to the truck and rode with the driver, Don Hernan to Laguna Geoppinger where we spent the first night before heading out the next morning. The horses ride side by side, perpendicular to the road, in the bed of the huge truck and most are not happy about it. They struggle as the truck jostles along the pot-holed dirt roads and our ride through the peaceful, rural countryside was accompanied by the deafening growl and chug of the trucks straining motor and the gunshot thud of horse hooves kicking the side of the truck.  After an hour and a half, we reached the final mile and a half ascent to Laguna Geoppinger. It’s a steep, steep road that the truck can’t handle with seven or more horses. But we only had six, so Hernan shifted down to first and began to climb. We drove up and up, slower and slower until 100 feet into the ascent, the truck stopped. So we inched our way back down, hanging onto the side of the crumbling mountain road with the whole Huife valley spreading out in magnificent clarity beneath us, and tried again. We had no luck so we backed down again and took the last two horses out of the truck. The horses traveled with their saddles on, so I jumped on one (Rebelde) using only his halter and a rope as reins, led the other (Pepe), and followed the truck’s smoke as it roared and rolled its way successfully up to our campsite. It was a short moment, but I was stunned to find myself alone in the Chilean countryside, on the side of a nondescript hill, looking out over a sprawling valley and the rippled forests on all sides.

            We had a hot but enjoyable evening at the lake. Aldo, our other guide, lives nearby so he met us there and was ready to help me roast chicken legs in a disc over the fire. They came out oily but delicious and the four girls, still wet from a dip in the lake, marveled over the quantity of food and what a beautiful start to the trip it was. Aldo rode home to spend the night in his own bed, and we five stayed up late watching heavy gray clouds creep across the sky. At twilight rain looked certain, but then an eerie, diabolical red glow began to spread across the bottom of the clouds and it seemed to be a promising sign. Soon thunder tumbled through our valley and lightening fringed the sky but, aside from a few momentary drops, the rain never came. It was an intriguing night, of dry thunder, lightning over the water and scarlet rain clouds. And, at 2:00 a.m. I unzipped my tent to go to the bathroom and was literally knocked back by the brilliance of the stars which had emerged into a black, cloudless sky.

Day 2: Geoppinger to Isolde

            I rose early and made a fire before Aldo made it back from his house, then packed away my tent, prepared breakfast, and collected bread from the local farmer’s wife. The first day is always slow because the riders haven’t established a morning cleanup routine. Still, with me doing all the organizing and Aldo saddling the horses, we were cleaned up and off by 11:00. The first half of the day followed relatively flat easy trails down a dirt road further into Huife and the girls were excited and bubbling with energy and self-confidence. We passed Aldo’s house where he stopped to give his wife and daughter a kiss before rejoining us, and then stopped for lunch in a shady area of a field before legitimately heading into the mountains.

The next three hours carried us through dripping, green rainforest with Araucaria, manio, and arrayan trees so tall you had to tilt your head all the way backwards to see the canopy. Between snow melt and rain the mountain paths are persistently boggy and the horses plunge and slip their way up the paths, straining with every step. The last time I rode through, we went torturously slowly with the highly nervous English woman. I was surprised and relieved to find that we practically sped through the same sections with these four riders. None of them had been trekking before, and two had hardly ever been on a horse before, but besides a few wide-eyed “wows!” they never flinched. They kept their balance as the horse jumped two foot high tree trunks and rocked side to side in the mud, they dodged snapping bamboo and low-hanging branches and called for help only when they needed bathroom breaks. In this manner we moved quickly for four hours through rainforest and bamboo until we reached our campsite for the night, a clearing in the woods near Isolde lake.

After Aldo and Anna whooped and hollered and galloped around to chase a herd of cows from the clearing, we set up tents and put the horses within the small pasture made of mammoth, five feet in diameter tree trunks. The girls, who in the course of twenty-four hours had become comfortable, close friends, went off to explore the forest on foot while Aldo cut and cleaned bamboo to make a spit for the asado, and I prepared mashed potatoes and asparagus soup. With another cloudless night, we lay out counting shooting stars (I saw two ferociously bright ones) and listened to Aldo’s real life ghost stories from his solo ventures through these mountains.

Day 3: Isolde to Flor de Valle

After a granola and milk breakfast, we headed out of our clearing, back into the bamboo and toward Laguna Isolde where we stopped for a ten-minute walk along the beach before continuing our trek. The purity of the colors and the stillness of the water make mountain lakes an arresting sight. Only the green forests divide the light, crystal blue of lake and sky, and at Isolde, the view northward provides the first snowy glimpse of the volcano Sollipulli.

One more hour of downhill bamboo crashing brought us out of the mountain to the road. Instead of turning left toward Rio Blanco, we went right toward an area called Flor de Valle and from that moment, every inch of the way was new to me. The rest of the day’s ride was easy in that we followed the dirt road for four hours all the way to our campsite. But the few passing cars stirred up clouds of dust and I’ve never ridden in such heat. My shoulders and the back of my neck broiled and I could sense the four girls wilting behind me with each passing mile. I often had to ask Aldo to slow down, because his horse kept a fast walking pace that forced the girls to miserably trot in his wake to keep up. We wound up and down and around on the dirt road, past farms, local schools, and a cement mine. For most of the afternoon we rode alongside the length of Sollipulli and I listened to Aldo recount just how romantic it was to go off in search of a trail and find it, and how stunning it was to be on top.

Towards 4:00 we crossed a full river and the horses strained towards it, relieved to cool their legs and drink deeply. When we arrived to our campsite in the pasture of a local farmer shortly after, we were all dehydrated and exhausted from the heat. In spite of it, we quickly unloaded and put up our tents, then mounted again and headed off on a three-hour side trip to another pristine hidden mountain lake. The granddaughter and grandniece of the farmer decided to come with us to the lake and they rode together on the same horses, barely speaking but smiling sweetly throughout the ride. It was a painful hour’s climb for me- I struggled to find a comfortable position in the saddle and was sore and sticky. The lake did wonders to revive us all- although only Johanna braved the thick weeds and swam far out to the middle of the lake. I’m from the ocean- still water and lake plants freak me out so I just dunked my head and watched the dirt run off my body in black rivulets before going back to the shore and letting them enjoy their swim.

We returned to camp with newfound energy and I made soup, pasta and salsa for dinner. Aldo left us to drink mate with the farmer and his family we girls talked about the traveling we’d each done and exchanged suggestions and tips. The horses nickered and grazed, trotting around inches from our tents as we finished our wine and pisco and then finally, crawled into our tents and slept.

From Chile to Argentina Part I: Hacia Los Andes with Aldo

“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…

Photos: Daily Life at Antilco

Just a few pictures from January of daily life,

riding, and fun around Antilco

Carmen (Tornado), Me (Chocolate), and Monica (Moreno)

before the big race between the three fastest horses.

Tornado easily took home the title, with Chocolate in a

respectable second, and Moreno meters and meters behind.

Carmen at the Mapuche fair in Quelhue where we ate

mote con huesillos (the drink) and cheese empanadas.

A traditional ruka and field hockey game in Quelhue

Carmen, Luis, and the horses in the far pasture

Me, on Chocolate, Daffy, and the horses

Monica (on Rebelde) and Carmen (on Polca)

bringing horses back to the pasture after a ride.

**Posts about my Chile-Argentina ride will follow soon, but if you want a sneak peak at the unbelievable pictures, go to: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=Willa.Johann&target=ALBUM&id=5573529979204482977&authkey=Gv1sRgCKTb79-z36qPPQ&feat=email

Argentina Bound

I leave Tuesday for a six-day Andes crossing ride into Argentina. Once we reach the border on Saturday, I will return to Antilco with the horses and gear but my riders continue on with an Argentine guide and new horses for three more days through western Argentina. Because livestock cannot be transported across the border, we accomplish the two-country ride by partnering with Don Hernan, and Argentine rancher. I’ve never done this ride before, but Carmen’s and Monica’s pictures have given me a glimpse of the countryside to come and I can’t wait. The majority of the trails are unknown to me, and instead of Luis, another cowboy named Aldo will come as the guide. It’s back to learning as I go and improvising, but my riders are four young German girls, so I’m hoping they’ll be flexible and good humored about it all.

In the morning we’ll greet them for breakfast then do the half-day circuit to make sure horses and riders match, and eventually, like the Rio Blanco Ride, we’ll trailer the horses to Laguna Geppingue and eat a huge chicken dinner before heading out early the next morning. I’m thrilled to finally get out into territory I’ve never seen and to physically cross the Andes. They are magnificent and awe inspiring, and there is something excitingly primitive about tackling them on horseback.

I’ll be back in a week, with a full update, but before I leave, I wanted to put down a few lingering thoughts that never found a place in the other entries:

BROOM: There is a scrubby bush called Broom which is invasive in this area, but thrives in the arid volcanic sand and has taken over the river sides around Pucón. It doesn’t grow much more than seven or eight feet high but its thin green stems spray out like a miniature weeping willow, giving it width. In springtime it explodes with showers of incredible, buttery yellow flowers which obscure any sign of the plant beneath. They grow close together and our paths are narrow which makes riding in November and December seem like we’re brushing through clouds of tangible sunshine. Two years ago, I looked forward to the riverside stretch the best; I’d ride ahead and disappear into a sea of yellow.

By January the petals are gone and fuzzy, white, oblong seed pods hang in their place. By now, they’ve turned black and are hard and dry. When we brush between or beneath the sprawling branches the pods rattle and add a simple jangling soundtrack to the river’s churning. When I ride past, I like to snap the pods from their stem (a habit that does nothing to slow the invasive species’ spread). In a brilliant evolutionary development aimed at self-preservation, the pods forcefully burst open and empty their seeds when detached from the stem. It’s a surprise to feel idly pulled pods explode in your hand, but our rides are filled with the rattling and crackling of the broom plants striving for biological immortality, and I love the sound.

GAP YEARS: Today I rode with two mid-twenties Australian guys who have been in Pucón for two weeks learning Spanish at Karin’s language school. One spent the fall in the states finishing his law degree at Tulane, so he understood something of the difference between American’s university educations and the rest of the world. What he found incomprehensible is the USA’s complete lack of a gap year tradition. American students are expected to finish high school, go to college, and immediately enter the grind, while Australians take as a given that they’ll spend about a year, before or after University, traveling or working abroad and seeing a bit of the world. Their ability to take this time off has nothing to do with financial liberty, but rather with cultural liberty. In the U.S. activities are expected to directly contribute to a career and future gain. On the other hand, there is an innate prioritization of personal development in Australian culture, and getting worldly perspective by traveling is accepted as a positive. It is a broad cultural difference, but for Australia’s youth, it’s a freeing one, and I envy them and the cultural support they have to go adventuring.  

·         Karin, Mara, and Remo are back from Santiago and the house is again filled with food and noise, and stories about their adventures at Fantasyland (an amusement park) and the art museums. I’m thrilled they’re back. My time with Mara and Remo will lessen soon as I’m gone through February trekking and they go back to school March 1.

·         The raspberries and cherries are completely gone, but some early plums are deep purple and ripe. There is a tree outside my room of bite size, spherical, yellow plums which I eat by the dozens and can’t stay away from. Most delicious are the blackberries. I’ve only found a few ripe, black ones among the thorns, but the trails are lined with vines and in a few more weeks I’ll feast during every ride.

Now, I’m off into the mountains, to cross the Andes on horseback, and (hopefully) will return in six days. Luego!