Brett's Southern Crossing

I’ve been asked a few times about traveling in Chile after the earthquake, damage I’ve seen, etc.  The bottom line is that during a month in Chile I didn’t see any.  I heard the Belles Artes museum in Santiago had some damage to it’s face but I didn’t visit there.

In Pucón, when we visited the waterfall, we were given a lift back to town by a couple from Concepcion who were living in their summer-house in Pucón due to the damage or destruction of their house in Concepcion.  From what I heard, the majority of the damage was located in the area around Concepcion although some places as far as Santiago were also damaged.  I didn’t visit Concepcion because I heard that the bridges were out, electricity and water were spotty, and generally the situation was focused on rebuilding.

I had also planned on trying to arrange a trip in Valparaiso to Robinson Crusoe Island, more correctly known as Archipelago Juan Fernandez.  These islands supposedly have some great scuba diving available, and it’s possible to visit by making arrangements with the Navy to go out on one of their supply ships (or you can just fly, but where’s the fun in that?).  Unfortunately, every building on the island was destroyed by a tsunami caused by the earthquake.  The story of how almost all the inhabitants were saved by a 12-year-old girl is amazing, if you haven’t heard it.

When I went to visit the Chuquicamata Mine, which I’ll talk about a few posts from now, I went to the mine with two local residents of San Pedro who worked at a luxury hotel.  My hostel was $16 a night, their all-inclusive hotel is $2200 for 3 days.  So it’s used a bit by travelers looking for top class accommodations, but mainly by corporate groups on retreats (often US companies).  They told me that lots of groups were canceling their bookings and that the hotel was only about 20% occupied despite it being high season.  I would have to think that the state of the economy is playing a role here, probably a big one.  But one example they gave was LAN Airlines, which canceled a booked conference to move it to Argentina.  This is especially absurd in San Pedro…it’s incredibly far north and probably didn’t even feel a tremor from the quake, and even if it it did the attractions around San Pedro are the desert, which is impossible to damage!  And for LAN, an airline based in South America, it seems especially inexcusable.

My advice if you’d like to help out Chile would be to visit.  Everything you want to see is fine, and it would help to offset the lost tourist dollars from people who have been scared away for nothing.

An hour west of Santiago is the port city of Valparaiso, with a nice harbor and steeps hills skirting the coast.  I liked this city, because the houses were painted bright colors and built into whatever nooks and crannies the geography of the hills allowed.  Murals were painted everywhere, and one part of the city even has an “outdoor art museum” of murals painted by local art students.  The naval headquarters is also located here, which leads to the interesting sight of submarines sitting next to freighters in the harbor.

It’s also dirty, crowded, and sometimes smelly, but for whatever reason I liked the feel of the place…it had character!  Just north of Valparaiso is a town called Viña del Mar, much calmer and skirted by nice beaches.

My next stop after Pucón was Santiago.  I had heard a lot about Santiago from people who were heading south, and it seemed to me that people either love it or hate it.  I would probably fall in the “hate it” camp, although really that’s too strong a word.  Santiago felt very comfortable to me, and I realized that it seemed just like a big American city…say, Dallas.  Lots of new buildings with tons of glass, kind of sprawly, wide streets, everyone seemed to have a car, and fast food and malls everywhere.  It seemed like the opposite of Buenos Aires, which is older and more classical, with taller buildings, more narrow streets, everyone seems to use the bus or taxis, and with more one of a kind businesses.

Santiago Fish Market

Still, there’s nothing negative to say about Santiago.  It’s perfectly pleasant.  I had the misfortune of spending most of my time there with a toothache and searching for a dentist.  I spent all day Friday on the bus coming from Pucón, then Saturday couldn’t find any dentist open including the emergency dental clinics.  Finally on Sunday I went to an ER, and was promptly seen by a maxilo-facial surgeon, who took and x-ray and said “yep, it’s infected.”  He drilled a little hole in the back, flushed it out with some saline, plugged the hole with cotton, and told me to come back on Tuesday for a root canal.  If you’re curious, the cash cost of an hour with a surgeon in the ER plus an x-ray at a private hospital in Chile was about $130, and a root canal is $65 (for the first of 3 necessary appointments).  A few Chileans I mentioned this episode to gave me funny looks and asked why I didn’t go to the free hospital.  Both Chile and Argentina have free state operated hospitals that are by most accounts decent…I just went to the place I saw walking down the street.

In the end I didn’t do much in Santiago, so all of this combined has probably affected my view a bit.  In the end I went to the central market, which is a huge and very cool seafood market with little seafood restaurants packed into every corner of the building.  Around the edges are huge piles of slimy fish and squid for restaurants to buy from.  I stopped by the President’s mansion, which is big although kind of boring looking.  And I went to Cerro San Cristobal, which is a tall hill that has nice views of the city and lots of stairs and terraces to hang out in.

Entrance to Cerro San Cristobal

One nice thing about Santiago is that if you love it you can just stick around, but as soon as you get bored you can get a bus at any time to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar since they’re just an hour away.

I would say that I’ve enjoyed Argentina a little more than Chile overall, but my two favorite places so far have been Torres del Paine and Pucón, which are both in Chile.  After leaving Bariloche (Argentina) I spent a night in San Martin de los Andes (Argentina), which is a relaxed little ski resort town.  There are some parks nearby, but no good transit and since it wasn’t ski season I immediately caught a bus over the mountains into Chile to see Pucón.

Pucón is known as an adventure town.  You can white water raft, white water kayak, rappel, rock climb, canyon (rappelling down waterfalls), and do canopy tours (zip lines in the trees).  The main attraction is Volcan Villarrica, an active volcano that many people come to climb.  My timing was perfect…the guides were saying that for the past 2 years the lava hadn’t been around, but only a week earlier the volcano had become more active and lava could be seen from the rim of the crater.  Apparently only a few volcanos in the world have visible lava from the rim.  At night I could see the sulfur gas glowing red at the peak of the volcano, and the town has an evacuation alarm that is tested daily at noon along with “Volcano Evacuation Route” signs that I sadly forgot to take a photo of.

I had booked a dorm in a hostel called El Refugio.  This is a can’t-miss hostel I’d recommend to everyone.  The owner is a dutch guy named Peter who is very helpful and the hostel itself only has an 8-bed dorm, a 6-bed dorm, and a double room.  It’s one of the smallest I’ve stayed in, and with only 14 people it had a great community feeling.  We all knew each other, and it helped that everyone comes to Pucón to do the same thing:  Climb Volcan Villarrica.

I spent most of the time here with Matthias, from Germany, and Sofia, from Sweden.  Peter arranged for us to use a small guiding outfit called Sierra Nevada, which was a great choice.  There are a few well-known guide companies in town that take groups of 30-40, but we always had more like 6-8 and it was a better experience that way.  The best thing was that our guides were willing to recommend not trying to climb on a bad day without charging a fee.  It took 3 days of attempts for us to make the summit, and we saw the “big” companies trying to push ahead on awful days, probably charging their full $45000 CLP fee even as we watched dozens of people being forced back by the weather.  Our guides were relaxed cool guys and I would highly recommend Sierra Nevada!  The first day we drove in a van to the base of the volcano, but the guides recommended we not attempt to climb.  It was foggy, extremely windy, and bitterly cold…a truly miserable day.

Matthias, Sofia and I were happy enough to try again the following day, but two other people from our hostel who had to leave decided to try it anyway.  As it turns out they almost made it.  The crater had too much gas around it to go the last 100 meters, and another guide with a French tourist went all the way but got very sick from breathing the gas.  Our hostel-mate seemed exhilarated by having made it as far as he did, but he described his face as turning blue from the cold and being covered in snot from a constantly running nose due to the wind.  I wasn’t looking forward to trying again at this point.

But our guides felt the weather would be better the next day, and so Sofia, Matthias and I got up at 5am to try again.  This time when we arrived the guides seemed happy with the weather and the look of the gas hanging over the peak, and we rode to the base of the volcano again.  We set up our gear and started to climb.  It was a bit windy and cold, but manageable.  The first third of the climb follows some chair lifts installed in the base of the volcano, which operates during the winter as a ski area.  It was miserable, very steep and on a lot of loose dirt and gravel so that with every step I slid back halfway.  We took shelter in a small building at the top of the lift to rest and have a snack.  But our guides weren’t happy, they told us the wind had shifted direction and was holding all the volcanic gas at the peak.  We could continue if we wanted, but they didn’t expect us to reach the top.  We waited for an hour to see if the wind would shift again, and then returned to the bottom to try again the following day.

Taking a Rest

The third day was do-or-die for all of us, everyone wanted to continue moving and we weren’t going to stay to try for a fourth attempt.  When we got up at 5am again things didn’t look good.  There was wind whipping through the trees outside our hostel and it seemed to us that the situation would be as bad as the earlier days.  Fortunately our guides knew better and told us that conditions looked great and they were very confident that we’d reach the top that day.  We were still skeptical but we rode to the base of the volcano and were shocked to find that it was absolutely calm without so much as a breeze.  It was even possible to hike in a t-shirt, whereas the earlier days had required as many layers as I could put on.  Since the wind was absent, the ski resort was running their lift and we had the option to skip the first 400 meters of vertical climb (for a fee).  None of us were too proud not take advantage.  From the top of the ski lift we climbed several hours up the volcano until we reached the beginning of the ice and glaciers.  We put on our helmets and crampons, and the guides taught us how to use our ice axes for extra stability and to stop a slide in case of falling.  From there we took another few hours of climbing on the ice and finally reached the crater.

Sofia says "we made it!"

It was really a spectacular sight.  Every few minutes bright-red lava would shoot up from inside the crater, bubbling and splashing against the sides.  There was a slight breeze carrying the sulfur gas away from the crater, so we were able to stay as long as we liked.  It was barely even chilly, despite the fact that we had ascended 1400 vertical meters.  I thought back to the guy who had pushed on to the top the first day, turning blue, covered in snot, with people getting sick, and was very glad we had the time and patience to stay and follow the advice of our guides.  Most people have no trouble getting to the top the first try, so I would definitely recommend Pucón!

The return trip to the bottom may be the most fun of all.  Instead of hiking back down to the end of the snow/ice line, we slid down halfpipes worn into the steeper hills, using our ice axes as rudders and brakes.  It was like extreme sledless sledding, and I began to wonder why you can just go to ski resorts to sled!

Matthias, Sofia and I did one other amazing thing while we were in this town.  Our first day we tried to climb Villarrica we wound up returning to our hostel by mid-morning since we didn’t even start to climb.  We were looking for another activity, and Peter (the hostel owner) mentioned a waterfall he knew of that we could hike to.  It was definitely an off-the-map type of place that wouldn’t make it into any guidebook, and the instructions were roughly like this:  Take a taxi collectivo to a certain road, walk 2km up the road until you find the gate of an abandoned housing development.  Hop the gate and walk to lot 17, then look for a little trail into the woods.  Head down the trail until you see a horse fence.  Climb the horse fence and follow the ravine until you find a path heading down into it.

This kind of local knowledge is unbeatable and it turned out to be amazing.  When we got to the bottom of the ravine, we found a little semi-circular sheer rock cliff with a waterfall at least 150 feet high crashed down into a pool at the bottom.  The walls of the cliff were covered in intense green moss and vines.  I’ve never seen anything like it, and I loved that it seemed a bit like a secret, just for us.

The easiest activity near Bariloche for tourists is to climb one of the many cerros (hills) near the city.  Most of them are easily reachable on the main bus routes, and quite a few even have chair lifts for those that don’t want to climb them.  The peaks give some really nice views of the surrounding lakes and valleys.

I also took a trip out to some caves north of the city, the name I can’t remember.  There are a lot of caves in Argentina that have hand paintings, the most famous being Cuevas de Los Manos.  I didn’t visit that one because it’s so far away from…well anything.  It would have meant a 2 day detour just for that cave, and I hear it’s expensive.  So I decided to try out this one, and it honestly was underwhelming.

The caves are very small, essentially just little overhangs in the rock and a few small holes in the side.  The paintings are very difficult to see, because they’ve faded considerably over time.  All in all, something that can easily be skipped.

Hiking in Bariloche is easy because there are tons of refugios which are cabins in the forests that offer a place to sleep and eat.  They’re mostly run by Club Andino, the local mountaineering club and it’s a great service because it allows you to hike for the day, spend the night, and hike out the next morning.  A lot of places that couldn’t be managed as a round trip in a single day can be done by taking advantages of the refugios (important since I’m not carrying any camping gear).

Most of the hikes are easily reached by local bus from the city center, but on the advice of my hostel I decided to take a bus a few hours away to a park near Monte Tronador (Mount Thunder).  This mountain is on the border with Chile and is named for the glaciers on the mountain which calve pieces off over a cliff.  The sound of the ice falling down the cliff echoes through the valley as a low rumble that sounds just like thunder.

The climb to the refugio took about 7 hours and was up the whole way.  I had sat next to a Spanish guy on the bus from Bariloche and we decided to hike to the refugio together.  The path was a nice change from other hikes where it seems like every time you ascend 20 meters you then walk back down 10.  The first 4 hours are a gradual switchbacking trail through a beautiful old forest with massive trees, wildflowers, small waterfalls, and lots of moss and lichen.  Daytrippers can enjoy this area too because a local estancia (ranch) offers horseback riding and there’s a side path over to a glacier that still leaves time to hike back the same day.

Eventually we reached the caracoles (literally translated “the snails”) which is a 30-minute section that is extremely steep and made me glad my pack was nearly empty.  Past this is the tree line and a couple of hours of hiking, marked by paint splashes, over large boulders and shale to the refugio.

The refugio is still a few hours from the peak of the mountain.  It’s located in a gap between two glaciars and has some really nice views.  From here there’s a menu of guided tours available to ascend higher on the mountain.  We could have gone to the peak, to another refugio higher that has a descent route that cris-crosses the border (requiring advance permission from Chilean immigration), or just for a hike on the glaciers.  These all require crampons, ice axes, and guides to prevent you from falling into crevasses though.

From the outside the refugio looks like a decaying shack, but inside it’s pretty nice.  It has lots of wood paneling, almost a log-cabin look.  It turned out the only other people that came that night were two German guys, so we had 4 visitors and 3 staff!  The staff made made me a huge tenderloin steak with mushroom sauce and roasted vegetables, and I swear it’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  The four of us also split a bottle of wine, so it was kind of posh for being so remote!  The winelist had prices up to $450 ARS (about $115 USD).  Dinner was $50 ARS ($12.50 USD) and to sleep was $40 ARS ($10).  A bit expensive for Argentina, but given the challenges of operating the refugios it seemed fair.

It was interesting to talk to the staff about the logistics of running the refugio.  They bring in supplies (including food) mainly by having horses bring them up the main part of the trail, and then having the staff carry them in packs through the caracoles and across the rocks to the refugio.  I think the staff can probably do one packful in about 4 hours.  Occasionally the Argentine military drops supplies by helicopter (fuel, building materials, etc) because they use the glaciers near the refugio to train for Antarctica.  Hard work!