| Submitted by: Ehud Reiter United States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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There is no road link between Coyhaique and Chile Chico - one must take a bus to Puerto Ibanez, and then catch a twice-weekly ferry across Lake Carrera, from Ibanez to Chile Chico. I got on an Ibanez-headed van (a `collectivo') at around 5PM, and said goodbye to Coyhaique.
The road from Coyaique to Puerto Ibanez is a fairly narrow and bumpy but well-graded dirt road, with a traffic volume of maybe 2 or 3 vehicles an hour - I suspect this makes it one of the busiest and best maintained roads in all of Aysen! We passed lots of `homestead'-looking farms (ramshackle wooden buildings with lots of miscellaneous junk scattered around), as well as occasional people on horseback - real frontier country, I guess! The countryside was a bit disappointing, though, as it was a lot drier and less forested than the coastal land I had scene from the Evangelistas. I later found out that this is because the Andes in Patagonia are actually submerged, and run along the coast and nearby islands (i.e., all the pretty islands I had seen were actually Andean mountain tops), so inland points like Ibanez are on the dry pampa-like eastern side of the Andes, instead of the lush forested western side. The moral is, if you want to see forests and the like in Patagonia, you pretty much have to stay on the coast.
Anyways, we arrived at Ibanez at around 8PM (fortunately, the sun sets pretty late in Patagonia in December), and, after checking into the town's only open hotel, I started wandering around. I discovered a rodeo stadium by the lake shore (nothing scheduled - darn!), watched people bring their horses to the lake to water them (I've heard the phrase `you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink' many times, but this was the first time I had actually seen it happen), and then headed back to the hotel. It was Christmas Eve and I was wondering if anything special would be happening, but all I saw was a smallish Christmas tree in one corner of the hotel's dining room.
Tuesday: I woke up in the morning, and set out to explore Ibanez and its surroundings.
Puerto Ibanez is situated on Lake Carrera, the second biggest lake in South America (after Lake Titicaca). There are various other settlements scattered around the lake, some of them not reachable by road (except by crossing into Argentina, which is a bureaucratic nightmare for cargo trucks), and a boat, the Pilchero, regularly carries supplies and passengers from Ibanez to the other settlements. The countryside is best described as hilly scrub - dry, but not flat - and the dominating feature is the lake itself, with its incredible shades of blue and green. The town itself has about 1500 inhabitants, spread around a cove in the lake.
I spent most of the day wandering in the nearby countryside. I found a nice spot on the lake from which the town was invisible, and sat there for an hour or two, reading a book. I've always been fascinated by the idea of a frontier, of men taming and settling new lands, and with no signs of civilization or the hand of man visible from my lakeside spot, I could pretend I was a true pioneer ...
Back in town, I hung out with some of the other tourists at the hotel, and took a look around Ibanez itself. It had a nice frontier flavor, with its rodeo stadium, horses tied up besides houses, beat-up pickup trucks, 4WD jeeps, and general feeling of isolation. It was quiet, of course, since it was Christmas day, but there was a happy air to the place as all the kids played with their new toys. In my hotel, the owner's two daughters proudly showed off their new bicycle and dollhouse to friends and tourists alike, and we all made admiring noises about how wonderful they were.
The area was supposed to be a paradise for fishermen, with great fishing rivers just a few miles from town. I'm not into fishing myself, but some of the other tourists were, and they came back after an hour with a good 10 or 20 fish, plus berries the `womenfolk' had gathered while the men fished (back to caveman days, I guess - the men hunt and fish while the women gather!). They invited the rest of us to share their bounty, and we had a marvelous dinner of fresh-caught fish and cooked berries spread on bread - if this is living off the land, I decided, I'm all for it!
Wednesday: The boat for Chile Chico was due to leave at 11AM, so I had a lazy morning nibbling on left-over fish and berries, and then said goodbye to the fishing/berry-gathering group, and walked to the town's dock. The Pilchero was a small boat, and on this trip only carried one truck, a handful of cars, and 20-30 foot passengers. We set off exactly on schedule, and I really enjoyed the two and a half hour lake crossing to Chile Chico. The lake in particular was quite a sight with its constantly changing colors, and the brown hills made a nice contrast to the lake's blues and greens. I chatted to some Chileans who were also heading into Argentina from Chile Chico (they worked in an Argentinian mining town), and they assured me that transport across the border was no problem.
We arrived in Chile Chico at around 1:30PM, and I thought 'this must be the real frontier'! The cars were more beat-up, the horses more numerous, and the houses more `frontier-looking', in some sense. The wind was whistling through the air, and I half-expected to see tumbleweeds rolling around men armed with six-shooters ...
I probably should have hung around Chile Chico longer, but I was nervous about transport, so I decided to head across to Argentina as soon as possible. Chile Chico is only about 10 km from the Argentinian town of Los Antiguos, and I caught a collectivo across the border after wandering around town for an hour or two. My guidebook had said the collectivos had to drive across a nearby river at a ford, which I was looking forward to, but unfortunately a bridge had built a few months before. Rats - progress strikes again.
Los Antiguos was a real shock. I hope I have succeeded in giving the reader a feel for the remoteness and frontier-like atmosphere of Aysen, where, for example, getting to towns like Chile Chico requires first taking a boat to Chacabuco, then driving for several hours along narrow dirt roads, and then catching a small twice-weekly ferry boat across a lake. Los Antiguos, in contrast, felt like a modern little exurban town - the cars were newish, not a single horse could be seen on the streets, there were Greenpeace posters in the tourist office, and a paved road went all the way from Los Antiguos to Buenos Aires. Civilization, in short. Los Antiguos and Chile Chico were separated by 10km in space and at least 100 years in time ...
Thursday, Friday: Prices in Argentina were quite high, due to an overvalued currency, so I decided to pass through and return to Chile as quickly as possible. Besides being overvalued, the Argentinian Austral was also incredibly unstable - on Thursday, for example, it was worth A5200/dollar at 9AM, A5700/dollar at 2PM, and A5500/dollar at 5PM. A few weeks after I left, it fell to A9000/dollar - and for all I know, it then climbed back to A4000/dollar (I stopped following it after it reached A9000, but such a fall followed by a rise to an even greater value had occurred over the summer). No doubt adventurous souls could make (or lose) a fortune by buying and selling australs at the proper moment, but I much preferred the stability of Chile, where today's exchange rate was a good predictor of tomorrow's!
At any rate, Thursday was one of the more boring ones of my trip, as I took a 16 hour bus ride through the pampas from Los Antiguos to the town of Rio Gallegos. The Argentinian pampas are a huge area of scrub ranchland, mostly dry and flat, and get a bit boring after an hour or so - 16 hours is definitely a bit much! The people were very friendly, though, and when we arrived in Rio Gallegos one of the other passengers insisted on showing me around the town and then helping me find a cheap hotel.
On Friday, I wandered around Rio Gallegos a bit in the morning. It felt more Western than the towns I had seen in Chile, with lots of boutiques and delicatessens selling fancy bits and pieces. I really wanted to return to Chile, though, so I caught an afternoon bus to Punta Arenas, the major city of Chilean Patagonia, and felt my spirits lift when I crossed the border back into Chile, and caught my first glimpse of the Straits of Magellan.
Postscript: Of all the places I visited in South America, Aysen is the one I would most like to return to. It's not as spectacularly beautiful as some of the other parts of Chile, but nowhere else have I felt so close to a frontier, to an area where men are still settling and taming the land. I guess I've always harbored a secret desire to be a pioneer on the frontier, so maybe one of these days I'll forget all the computer nonsense and go stake out a homestead in Aysen ...
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Part III: Patagonia: The Voyage of the Tierra del Fuego
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Geographical Context: Patagonia is the southernmost region of South America, and includes bits of both Argentina and Chile. The Argentine part is mostly pampas, i.e., endless windswept plains largely populated by ranchers (gauchos). The Chilean part, in contrast, consists of a forested fjord/island region much like the coast of Norway. There is no road that traverses all of Chilean Patagonia, but there is a boat, the MV Tierra del Fuego, which transports passengers and trucks the length of the region, from Puerto Montt (in the Chilean heartland) to Puerto Natales, 200km north of the Straits of Magellan. The trip is supposed to take three days, but can take longer if the weather or tides are bad.
Thursday: After leaving Aysen, I had made my way to Magallanes, the southernmost region of Chile, which includes the Straits of Magellan and the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego. Magallanes is the kind of place one can easily spend weeks in, and indeed I spent almost two weeks there, mostly hanging around Punta Arenas (the capital of the region, and full of very friendly people), Puerto Natales (a smaller town north of Punta Arenas, in a spectacular setting on the `Gulf of Last Hope'), and the Torres del Paine national park (just south of the Patagonian icecap, with fantastic views of glaciers and mountains). When I finally decided it was time to head back north, I knew, of course, that I would have to take the boat, so I could get a proper penguin's-eye view of Patagonia.
The Tierra del Fuego was leaving early (5AM) Friday morning on its north-bound Puerto-Natales -> Puerto-Montt trip, and we were asked to board the boat the night before. I would rather have spent the night on shore, but decided to play it safe and stick to the rules, since alternative transport out of Patagonia was very difficult to arrange (all buses, planes, and future sailings of the Tierra del Fuego were fully booked weeks in advance), and I needed to catch an international flight from Santiago in a week and a half.
The main topic of conversation as we waited to get on board was the Tierra del Fuego's encounter with a rock 3 weeks ago, which (according to rumor) left a 40-foot gash in the hull and (verifiable fact) had forced the boat to spend a week in Puerto Natales being repaired. There are lots of narrow rock-filled channels around Puerto Natales, and the then-captain (now unemployed) had decided to go through one of these without waiting for high tide (rumor claimed he was was under management pressure to make up lost time). No one had been hurt, but we all knew that if the boat had a more serious accident and sank, we wouldn't last long in the ice-cold Patagonian waters ...
The Tierra del Fuego had four kinds of accommodation - cabins, bunks, class A seats, and class B seats. I never saw a cabin but heard they were quite nice. |
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