houhai

We decided to try to catch a cab to our next destination, Houhai. We managed to find a “rickshaw” (I can’t stop calling them tuktuks, which is what they are.) This wound up costing twice as much as the 10 kuai a taxi would have, but he got to us first, and he entertained Yili on the way. Yili tells me later that he looked at me, and asked her “is he paying or are you paying? Cause if he’s paying, I’m going to charge a lot more.” Assuming I didn’t know about how far it was, or that taxi rides that short are the minimum ten kuai. Anyway, on the way, he was a chatterbox, and kept asking Yili about the number of Americans, and asking if she knew any American girls, since he thought marrying his son off to an American was a pretty good idea. She said she’d pass that along.

“Hai” is Mandarin for lake, and essentially, this is the lakes district that is to the west and north of the Forbidden City (no idea what “hou” means – I don’t know even know the tone, let alone the character, so my dictionary says anything from ‘monkey’ to ‘sorrow’. We could call it “sorrowful monkey lake”, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part. I will look it up.) So, what it is, is a road that’s mostly devoted to pedestrian (no guarantees on that in China), all the way around several different lakes, with shops/restaurants/bars around that. Alleyways lead off this road, leading to more of the same (these alleys are called “hutong”.) It’s not too awful for tourists, just a few touts trying to get you into their shops, until you hit the thick bar district. At which point, one bottle of Tsingtao is much like the other, so you’re just negotiating the price then. And seeing if the live music looks ignorable.

The incredible thing to me, is that since the lake is frozen, people stake off an area and rent skates out. I wound up not going, and it might be my biggest regret about Beijing (it has now warmed enough that the ice isn’t thick enough anymore.) Skating on the ice at Houhai is now on my life list of things to do. In addition to traditional ice skates, the vendors have gotten creative, and strapped blades onto all kinds of things, including what look like old school desks (you have ski poles to push yourself) and tricycles (you pedal a front wheel for locomotion, and skid where the back wheels should be.) I even saw something that looked a lot like bumper cars. The place was mobbed with people on a Sunday afternoon. At least several thousand people were on a lake much smaller than Greenlake in Seattle. We saw an old guy hack out a clear area from the ice and, after a crowd pleasing warm up ceremony of some sort, jump in. It wasn’t clear to me what the point of this was – was he passing the hat for change, or just nuts?

At one point, we found chou doufu, or stinky tofu. With some kind of spicy sauce on it. Awfully good on a very cold day. 5 kuai.

Our other coworker, Chris, got into town that night, so we met up with him and went out to eat. Where we learned that the vegetarian menu just means that it has vegetables in it. The lotus root stuffed with pork didn't taste like much.

forbidden city

The second day here, Yili and I did a tourist double play of Forbidden City, then Houhai. First, the Forbidden City. It’s directly in the center of the city. The city is going through huge changes as it expands rapidly (something like 16 – 17M people in the city. Biggest place I’ve been by a factor of 2. It’s a testament to the size of Mumbai that this is *not* the biggest place Evelyn has been.) But, when you look at a map, the forbidden city is still directly at the center.

This was the imperial palace for many centuries, and ordinary folk were not allowed in, hence the name. It’s huge, and very austere – perhaps it’s a bit more lush in the summer, but in the cold, there’s endless small courtyards paved in stone, with long alleys between them, and punctuated by buildings housing artifacts (these also all have the heat curtain thing I mentioned, but usually made of strips of clear plastic instead of a green army blanket.) It looks like a pretty cold place to have lived, but I suppose before central heating, life was a lot harder, even for the Son of Heaven.

That’s all around the edges. The center of the city is really large stone courtyards, with big buildings at the centers, that served variously as temples, living quarters, throne rooms, but the main thing about them is how they are named. You read the signs, and you see that this hall was named the Hall of Peaceful Harmony, but they was renamed the Hall of Scrupulous Behavior in 16xx, then renamed again in 17xx to the Hall of Preserving Tranquility. I’m not making these names up. I’m sure it’s entirely lost in translation, but it’s hard not to snicker a little bit at the seeming goofiness of some of the names in English. (This has led to a running joke amongst my coworkers who are here with me – one of us was commenting on the organization name changes that happened in our latest reorg (we have one every 6 months or so at work), and I pointed out that this is how you know someone is in charge, when they can rename things. What’s the first thing the new Emperor does? He renames the halls. What’s the first thing a new Vice President does? He renames the teams. Which is not entirely cynical – names are powerful symbols.)

But, I digress. The bulk of it appears to have been built by Emperor Yongle in about 1405 – 1420. So, old stuff. There must have been a hell of a stimulus package in the early 15^th century, as he built all of this, plus big sections of the great wall. Walls are all painted a red color (reminds me of terra cotta color, but not as dusty), with yellow knobs on the doors (doors are important, judging by their number.) The accents, the beams supporting the roofs, though, are painted in bright greens and blues. Interesting designs, but also paintings sometimes. I don’t think of those colors as Chinese colors for some reason, so it keeps surprising me.

You keep heading south (we went in the back door, to the north), and the plazas get bigger and bigger (if you’ve seen Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, it was actually filmed there, so that’s what it looks like), until you get to areas you could review troops in (and which remind you of the function of the Plazas de Armas in every South American town – no idea if this ever happened here, but it certainly looks like convergent evolution to me.) Then, you leave via the front gate, and you see a real Plaza de Armas: Tiananmen Square. It’s close to a kilometer square of concrete. Not as big as the Forbidden City, but no walls blocking your sightlines (just Mao’s mausoleum) – we didn’t go there that day, we just saw it across a very busy and wide street. You turn around, and over the gate, there’s a giant portrait of Mao. And a guard waggles his finger if you try to take a picture (so you wander a ways off and do it through your zoom lens.)

First day in town

The first day, after my run, I met up with Yili, who is a coworker who came out from Redmond to work on the same project. She's been out here about 2 weeks longer than me, and is a native Chinese speaker, so invaluable to have around. She's staying in the same apartment building we're in. She showed me where to find an ATM, helped me buy a subway card, etc. Then she took me to the supermarket, which was surreal. The sheer volume of people, the tons of workers there pushing one product over another, the hawkers with their microphones. Non-stop noise. I bought a few things, like air freshener for the bathroom - we've noticed that the bathroom occasionally has a smell coming up from the drains. The staff says it happens more on cloudy days (huh?), and they're trying to figure it out. So, until then, some air freshener. Also a bunch of staples for cooking - some oil, salt, noodles, some veggies, some water (Yili insists we can't drink the tap water - I should investigate this), some paper towels.

Yili told me she typically takes a cab in the morning, then takes the subway home at night. This is because everyone has to be in the office at 9AM for meetings with people in Redmond, due to the time difference, and the subway is really crowded in the morning.

We decided to go to the electronics area of town, to find some stuff we needed for laptops. This is a series of office buildings, which instead of housing offices, house stalls (think of a flea market) of people selling every part/cable/chip of a computer you can think of. We wanted to get cables to let our laptops display things on the teevees in the room, and an audio cable to route the headphones from the laptop through the speakers of the teevee as well. The problem is, we were close enough to Chinese New Year, that everyone was out of town, so many stalls were deserted. And we were there close to closing time, so even the people still in town were starting to pack up. We found one floor completely deserted (not even any stalls.) Yili asked a guard, and he told us to go to the office building across the street.In the second building, we (Yili) managed to negotiate the few cables we needed. This place was crazy - stocked full of the kind of stuff you find at Best Buy, but about a tenth the price, and all in plain plastic ziplock bags. It was pretty weird. (This would have been completely impossible without someone speaking Chinese, of course.)

This was also my first encounter with a common feature of big buildings - the heat curtain. Over doors where there's a lot of traffic, instead of traditional door that opens and closes, there's a curtain that hangs down, that you push your way through. Sometimes this is a clear plastic thing, that's divided top to bottom into many strips, but sometimes it's some sort of green quilted thing that reminds you a lot of an army blanket, only thicker (the military had to be involved in the production of these things somehow.) You push at one end or the other, and make your way through, keeping the heat inside. This is good, as it's pretty cold here. I had one day where I had ice in my beard after my run (it was 17F before the wind chill, and the wind knocked the satellite television for the hotel out.) I am waiting to see a collision through one of these things between two shopping carts at wall mart, since you are pretty blind going through.

(Beijing is on a flat plain, in a desert. It's very dry in normal times, and is now in the worst drought in 40 years. The wind blows pretty hard, and I've read that there are dust storms in the spring. There are mountains nearby, where the great wall runs (we'll see that one of these weekends - still in the planning stages.))

Then we went to a Taiwanese restaurant she had eaten at before with one of the MTC people (MTC is the acronym for the MS team here.) I found an appetizer and an entree to eat (Yili is a little amazed that we're willing to come here as vegetarians.) It was in a fun mall that looked expensive (there was a swatch store I'm sure Evelyn will enjoy, if I tell her about it.) At the end of the meal, for no reason I could discern, the staff gave us each a deck of cards. Decks of cards here are called "pokers". They sell them everywhere.

After getting back, we decided to explore the bar district that another co-worker (who did a rotation last summer) told us about (I think she's been wanting to go for awhile, and hasn't been willing to wander into a bar by herself.) We took a cab over to that, and the cab driver ripped us off a little by driving around a little, but the mimimum charge is 10 kuai, and he managed to run the meter up to 13. So, not really much of a ripoff. The minimum seems to take you quite a ways. We found the bars, and walked past them all, then to another shopping mall type thing, where we wandered around a bit, then back to the bars. The bars all have live music and touts out front. We had Tsing Tao beer, which was surprisingly good, at one place - very expensive. Bottles of beer run about 30 - 40 kuai (it's about 6.5 to the dollar.) The band was a cool rock-type with long hair and a hip t-shirt playing guitar, a conservatively dressed guy who did a lot of the singing and emcee-ing, and a woman in a dress doing some singing you could barely hear. Some older chinese guys came in and sat down and watched. For some reason, this creeped Yili out. During a break, for some unexplained reason, a belly-dancer came out and performed. Despite the belly dancer (which certainly fulfills my daily quota of weirdness), instead of having another there, we went to another bar (two or three doors down) for a second beer, where there was some boy-girl duo singing kind of syrupy songs, and the intervals were recorded BB King. We had another chinese beer (YanJing, the hometown brand - YanJing is an old name for Beijing), but we agreed it wasn't nearly as good. A pack of French guys came in, already several sheets to the wind, and went upstairs to the loft area, where they proceeded to discuss and yell a lot about something. Later we realized that they were probably negotiating over the price of beer - turns out you can do that here - you talk to the tout, and agree to only pay 25 kuai per bottle before you go in, or whatever. After that, we cabbed it home. An eventful first day.

getting around

The subway: is... well, it's a subway, it's awesome. What's not to like about a subway? The trains come pretty frequently (I've only ridden one line so far, the brand new line 10 - opened in July 2008 for the Olympics.) There are a ton more lines planned by 2012 - I think they realize the pollution isn't going to get any better unless they crack down on cars in a big way, and they can't do that without giving people a way to get around. The fare is 2 kuai, no matter where you're going. It's deducted from a little card you buy, that you tap on entry and exit on a sensor. So, they'll be able to start doign ditance-based fares whenever they get around to it. Our apartment is between the Liangmaqiao (LiangMa river bridge) and Sanyuanqiao (third ring bridge) stations on Line 10, and work is right at the ZhichunLu (ZhiChun road - haven't fininshed translating that one yet) station of the same line. Takes about 25 minutes on the train, plus about 15 minutes walking in the morning.

The subway signs are all in both Chinese script and in pinyin, which is the system used for writing Chinese in the western alphabet. Many chinese don't read pinyin, though it was developed by the Chinese government to allow quicker literacy acquisition. Awfully useful for us westerners who haven't learned out characters. In addition, all stops are announced in both Chinese and English (though sometimes well after the door has opened, so it's good to watch the little electronic display, showing you where you are.) Major street signs here have pinyin, but minor ones just have characters.

Money: the official currency is the renminbi, also called the yuan (which also translates as something like "unit"), but everyone calls it "kuai", which is kind of like our "buck". There are about 6.8 yuan per USD, I just think about it being about 7 when I do calculations in my head. A yuan is divided into ten units that I think are called "qiao", which are further divided into ten units called "fen". Fen are completely worthless, and I haven't see a coin yet. Qiao, I've only seen in a 5 qiao coin, which I got confused at, thinking it was 5 fen. Things here are either absurdly expensive, or trivially cheap. Nothing in between.

Food: real chinese food is nothing like american chinese food. The sheer variety astonishes me. Even eating only the veggie things that others are ordering, the other night at dinner I tried ten different dishes, about half of what was ordered.) It can be a bit heavy, and there are lots of deep-fried things, which is fine, since the portions are smaller. You come away full, but it's not the same kind of full you get eating in the U.S. Unfortunately, I have not been writing down the names of things I liked, so it's going to be harder to order again. I'll get it with time, and take my notebook next time. Even things on the vegetarian portion of the menu, though, you have to be careful with - stuffed lotus root was actually stuffed with pork the other day. Didn't taste like much. I will have much more to say about food, as it's a big part of daily life here.

arrival, first impressions

The outside of the airport is very nice looking - very pretty. Didn't spend very much time here on the inside, as customs is so fast. Customs consists of a big sign, saying, as of February 1st, 2008, if you have nothing to declare, get in the "nothing to declare" line. This was not a line, but a door, and on the other side was the taxi stand. That was easy.

Standing there was my driver, with a sign with my name on it. Stopped for a second to get some cash, and off we went. There is a highway leading all the way into town (the airport isn't actually that far out), and the buildings just got bigger and closer together as we went. The driver didn't speak much english, but must have seen my eyes getting bigger and bigger, and he laughed. I figured out how to say "Beijing is very, very big", and he laughed at that.

Checkin was, again, trivially easy, and they gave me the keys to the apartment. It's an actual apartment, with a full kitchen, and everything you'd need. It's on the 20th floor, so I have a nice view of the buildings next to us, and the sad looking dormant trees in the courtyard. It was also really hot. The thermostat was set to 25C (78F). I turned it down to 20C - no difference. The next day, I turned it down to 17C, then 16C, which is as low as it goes, and left the windows open all day. I finally must have turned something off, because now, four days later, it's a comfortable temperature (still slightly too warm, but bearable.) The office is also warm. I wander around in a t-shirt, and I've been made fun of, asked if I'm from Alaska - the test manager here told me that all Chinese buildings are this way in the winter.

The first day, I went for a run, to explore a bit. We're just outside the third ring road - this is a highway that loops the city - think if I405 went all the way around Seattle, instead of just one side. Now think of adding I505 and I605 outside that, and a few inside as well. So, I ran out a connector road between the 3rd ring road and the 4th, about 4 miles round trip. The populated part kind of peters out about a quarter of the way there, and much of the land is just future or stalled construction projects - fancy luxury apartment complex sites that are mostly the rubble of previous dwellings or scrub land right now. Decided to run the other way tomorrow, towards the center.

Traffic is surreal. There are no rules here, except "don't hit anyone" - so far this rule hasn't been broken that I've seen, but I gasp several times a day, thinking I'm about to see a tragedy. I am slowly becoming convinced that this "system" is actually not inferior to ours (though I'd like to see stats on number of pedestrian deaths.) Every person for themself - go when you can, and there are enough pedestrians and bicyclists that drivers have no choice but to be aware and looking for them. Ten years ago, when there were many fewer cars, I imagine it was different. The bike lanes are wide, but also used as merge lanes by cars. Somehow, it works. The bicyclists are of at least three types: people riding pedal bikes under their own power, people with these three wheeled trikes transporting cargo (sometimes a lot of cargo), and bikes/trikes with a motor. Not really a moped or scooter (I don't know if I've seen a traditional scooter), but a bike with an assist motor. This is sometimes a little putt-putt 2 cycle gas motor, but more often it's actually electric, and silent. I wonder if the government banned the gas motors for the olympics, to help clear the air, and if they subsidize the electric ones. They're pretty cool - hybrid electric and person power, and allow people to go along at a pretty good clip.

Punta Arenas again: Seno Otway Penguin Reserve

There aren’t a lot of good connections into Argentina from Puerto Natales. And, once you get down there and look at a map, you realize just how vast Argentina is (I think it’s something like the 8th largest country in the world.) We didn’t feel like a 36 hour bus ride to some point halfway to Buenos Aires, and weren’t quite sure what to do.

But, while in PA the last time, we had noticed all the signs for penguin tours. So, we decided to go back down and see some more penguins, while we took one more day to make up our minds about where to go next.

I tried to get a place to stay in PA that night, and couldn’t find anything – all hostels seemed to be fully booked. We asked the erratic rock people (hostel we were in our last night in PN), if they could call their local outfit in PA, and they said no problem, and we had a room reservation. On getting there, we discovered the town was nothing like full, and that it had just been a problem with the reservation system. The nice woman who had given us cups of tea on our last arrival was waiting by the bus station, trying to scare up business. She said something about how the reservation system must be broken, as she was nowhere close to full that night. Too bad, we wouldn’t have minded staying with her.

We were looking a map on the bus, figuring out how to walk the 5 or 6 blocks from the bus station, when another American couple in seats next to ours asked us if we knew how to get to Erratic Rock. We had two of the flyers with a map on the back, so we gave them one. Then, we get to the hostel, and discover they beat us there, and took our room. The people in charge of Erratic Rock are nice, but not the most organized bunch in the world – they figured: American couple, this has to be them. That’s what we get for being nice. So, not that big a deal - we slept in a dorm room, by ourselves (the town really wasn’t full, as nobody else showed up the entire day.)

Then, we headed out to get a spot on a Penguin tour. We had seen signs when we were in town last. There are two tours you can take – one takes you to Isla Magdalena, and requires a boat, more time, and more money. The other takes you to Seno Otway (Otway Sound), an hour’s drive away, to a penguin reserve with walking trails.

This was the best money we spent the entire vacation – it was the same price as the other penguin tour we did in Ancud (about 20 bucks a person total, with all the park entrance fees, etc.), but sooo much better. In the other, we saw penguins from a boat, 50 feet away. On this tour, you’re the one in the zoo – you stay on the trails, and the penguins are wandering around. They were close enough to touch, and didn’t seem to take much notice of us. And, it’s chick-raising season, so they all had one or two fluff-balls they were taking care of. I had no idea, but these penguins burrow into the ground to make their nests. There were networks of canyons and tunnels through the grass they had dug, and were kind of hiding in. The young penguins are kind of dark grey in color, and covered with really fuzzy down. They were almost the size of the adults, who were themselves about 18 inches tall (these were Magellanic penguins.) Mid to late December seems to be the best time to go to see the chicks.

They gave us an hour to wander around before taking us back on the bus (I didn’t get this, as we all would gladly have paid to extend for another hour – we had to run back to the bus, as we were afraid of it leaving us. The driver could easily have made another few bucks if all five of us on the tour had chipped in a little extra, and I don’t think any of us would have argued.)

We snapped many many pictures, and discovered the camera takes decent movies as well. We got a great movie, almost a minute long, of a group of penguins lining up to go under a footbridge, kind of eyeing us nervously (we had to back off from the bridge before they would go under), then heading under all in a row, and taking off away from the bridge. Then, Dick van Dyke comes in, and does a silly dance, and sings "Oh, it's a luvly 'oliday with Ev'lyn."… no, wait, that’s someone else’s movie. Anyway, I would post it, but it’s something like 100 megabytes, so I will wait until we get back, and see if I can upload it to youtube or something. (I'd post more pics, but the connection I'm on doesn't have great upload. You'll just have to find us in person to see the rest and see the movies.)

One thing penguins do that we didn't get on film is they walk up to each other and start sword-fighting with their beaks. Penguins can't do anything without being hilarious, so this almost made us fall down. They just go clack-clack-clack... until the dispute is resolved in some way only obvious from a vantage point of 18 inches. Other thing they do that I'd never seen is throwing back their heads and letting loose with the penguin call/song/craw - whatever you want to tall it. It's not a pleasant noise - imagine if seagulls tried to imitate crows - but, again, really funny. They also do this funny thing with their wings, where they flap them up and down rapidly, in what appears to the observer to be an attempt to take off. Sometimes this was combined with the noise they make.

Other than the trek in the park, this was the coolest thing we did on vacation (just edging out Buenos Aries, about which more later.) Make sure you have an extra day in PA to do this when you come down – the tours all seem to leave at 4PM.

Afterwards, we made some dinner, found a little bar in the basement of this really ritzy building off the Plaza de Armas where men were playing cards and there was a guard at the gate who ignored us. Looks like sailors have been coming here for a hundred years. And debated how to get out of town.

The next day, we decided to look up bus ticket prices to Bariloche, Argentina and plane tickets as well. Problem is that there are no direct flights from PA to Bariloche. Only back to Puerto Montt, Chile. Again, the plane tickets turned out to be only about 100 apiece more than the bus, and take two hours instead of days. So, we did it. But, the plane was leaving in about 2.5 hours from the time we bought the ticket, and the travel agent insisted on cash. So, I had to run out, find a cash machine, hope that wasn’t more than the daily limit the bank warned me about (it was, but they seem to ignore the limit, and I didn’t argue), and run back. Then back to the hostel to pack, and find a cab. Our plan was to spend a few hours wandering around Puerto Montt (the ugly town from the trip down), then catch the latest overnight bus to Bariloche. On getting there, we discover (at about 4PM), that the last bus to Bariloche leaves at 3PM, so we have to spent the night in town.

A nice woman kept bugging us to stay in our hostel, and so we agreed. Turns out it was the same woman that our Australian friend in Talca had told us about (“look for a woman named Mercedes in the bus terminal.”) Lucky we ran into her.

Day Five – Camp Los Torres to the park exit.

This went so much faster than we thought it would. We were nervous about getting down in time, but we beat all the posted times, sometimes by a factor of two. So, the times on the guide were inconsistent, to say the least. We did notice that as we went from day to day, we actually got less tired. My feet were aching at the end of day one, couldn’t even feel them on day four. Same with shoulders. I guess that’s the real secret to long distance backpacking – just do it every day, and by day four, you’re fine.

We had a running joke about the condition of the trails (that was interspersed with the jokes about the CONAF workers' parentage.) Ev decided that at some point, there would be no trail, and we'd just run across a frayed, knotted rope. We need to stop telling jokes.

One minor (possibly major) hitch is that something popped in Evelyn’s knee on the way down. From that point on, downhill was painful. So, we took lots of breaks to try to stretch things out. Even then, we were flying, and saying hello to lots of day hikers on the way up (including a horse team - I say getting to the towers doesn’t count if all it cost you was some oats and you messed up the trail for hikers. Goddammit I hate horses.) (One woman in particular saw fit to sing as the horse carried her – her fellow equestrians didn’t look as though they were enjoying this any more than we were – and as she came upon us on the side of the trail, stretching, made little “poor baby” noises at us, as if she were talking to a child with a skinned knee. She’s lucky I didn’t have any rocks in my hand. I suspect recreational pharmaceuticals. Nobody’s that weird.)

I had been wondering where all these day hikers were coming from. At the bottom, we found out. There’s a very ritzy resort someone has deposited there, where the rooms cost 300 dollars a night per person. (You have to admit, though, that there probably aren't many resorts in the world with a nicer location.) We snuck in and used their bathrooms, and washed up a little in the sink. Then we started hiking out the road to get back to where the buses were – my suspicions were confirmed and there’s a shuttle bus to take you the last 7 kilometers that only costs a few bucks. I was pretty much done walking after five days, so that was fine with me. We sat under a shade tree for several hours and waited with a bunch of other backpackers, including the Canadian couple again. I finished the issue of the New Yorker I was reading (we brought three issues along, and have read each of them cover to cover, and discarded them in hostels as we go.)

Back home, where the pizza place we liked before was open (on Christmas – sucks to live in a town full of tourists from the other hemisphere). We stuffed ourselves, and dropped off laundry at a lavaderia that was open on the day as well (18 bucks to wash two loads of laundry - we didn't even blink, as we really wanted to set our clothes on fire at that point.) On getting back to the hostel, the owner dragged us to his Christmas barbeque a few blocks away, where someone had made some mulled wine. We talked to another couple from Seattle, who’ve been touring/trekking for the last 5 months, and aren’t going back for at least a year, sounded like.

Debated about where to go next – this was the only event on the trip that was planned at all. Finally decided to go back to Punta Arenas, so as to see some penguins again, this time with a fully charged battery. And put off the decision as to how to get to Argentina one more day.

The hike was probably the coolest thing we’ve ever done on vacation – it was only 5 days out of the entire trip (plus another day of prep.) If we could do it over, we’d probably spend a few more days trekking, either in the this park, or in one of the thirty other Chilean or Argeninian parks that span Patagonia. So many glaciers and mountains down here, and we only looked at the most famous ones. And that’s just the southern Andes (and Torres del Paine isn’t even part of the Andes system, they say.) If we were a little harder core, we could spend a month doing this (and if we did it for a month, we’d certainly be that hard core – Evelyn’s knee notwithstanding – jury’s still out on that.) So much to see.

If you’re into birds, this is also the place to go, as even the little brown birds down here are different (one camp bird in particular – same niche as a sparrow – has a neat orange patch on his back, that makes him very pretty.) We say ibis on the lake shore, more condors than we could count, and there are always penguin trips to make. And, this park in particular offers every range of support you might need - from going it alone in the backcountry to staying in really nice places inside, to doing the mix we did, camping, but having a shower most nights. Plane tickets are only about 1500 bucks.

One other funny thing that happened on the shuttle bus ride out of the park, is that there's this bridge across some river, where the bridge is only just wide enough for the bus (they have to fold in the side mirrors, giving maybe an inch of clearance on either side.) They make all passngers get off and walk, so that only the driver is with the bus. I suppose it's nice they care enough to make sure that only the captain goes down with the ship, but it didn't inspire confidence in that bridge.

More pictures of the Torres

It's kind of all the same shot, since there's really only one place you can stand without a lot of serious climbing, but that didn't stop us from snapping a lot of shots.








We got up there just as the sun was tucking behind the big rock on the right - nice halo effect that washed out a lot of our shots.
















The now traditional taiwanese photo greeting:

Day Four: Los Cuernos to Campamento Los Torres, and the Torres themselves.

We made great time on this section. We marched straight up a very long hill, then down again, then up again, then down again (why they don’t just follow the lake edge when they make these trails is anybody’s guess.)
There was a fun, wide, boulder strewn river to cross, that the British couple had warned us about. There’s really no way across without getting at least one boot wet. Someone has strung a wire all the way across, which will hold you (and, I mean, a wire. About 4 gauge.)Mainly, there are so many people bunched up that there’s someone fairly nimble footed to help anyone who needs it. Again, walking sticks would have helped a lot. We kept catching up to a Canadian couple on this section, and sat with them a little under a rare shade tree and watched the river.
The terrain in general on this hike is far less forest-y than I expected (I’m used to the pacific northwest.) Mainly, it was open fields of scrub – the first day was pampas, but the rest is scrub. Occasionally there are groups of trees which give shade and a little shelter from the wind, but also harbor flies – the great thing about the wind is that there are no bugs. The trail conditions are: giant rocks, with a little dirt in between. Hopping from rock to rock was pretty common, especially on the inclines, where it’s a lot harder for a dirt trail to take hold. The dirt parts were the best, as they’re so gentle on the feet and joints. After five days, you can really tell you’ve been walking on an incompressible surface – like running on concrete.
There was a shortcut indicated on all the trail signs, but not on the map, that saved us an hour. This shortcut, though, appeared to just go straight up a hill, until we were waaaay above the trail that we were shortcutting. We could see people on the trail, way down below, and we were mad that they didn’t have to climb like us (they eventually did catch up to us in elevation.) We found another shade tree at one point and looked out across quite a landscape, and disturbed a little mouse/kangaroo rat thing who thought it was his patch of shade.
That was one of very few mammals I saw. I mentioned the rabbit earlier. No squirrels or chipmunks. Saw lots of birds, and especially condors, anytime you looked up the mountain, you could see them circling, riding the winds. Never could get a decent picture of them – they’re just the black dot in so many pictures of otherwise plain old scenery.
We finally crested the hill, and could see into the last valley (the last, rightmost leg of the W.) And we descended sharply for awhile, only to have to climb and get back most of the elevation again (CONAF – Corporacion Nacional Forestal or something like that, got some nasty things said about its employee’s parents right about then.) We stopped briefly at Campamento Chileno (many camps are named for the nationality of the person who first camped there – Italiano, we skipped Brittanico, but they’re both in Valle Frances, then Chileno, and we never made it to the climbers camp, called Campamento Japones.) Chileno is also nasty, fully of bugs, and crappy campsites. Onward another 2 hours to Camp. Los Torres.
Again, the trail was awful. Given the number of day hikers from the resort below, we’re bewildered at how they don’t do something to improve it. We’re also bewildered at how some of them make it. There were 60 -70 year old people on that trail, who looked like they would have trouble walking a mile on the flats. They were very carefully planting each walking stick and each footstep. It’s an eight hour round trip from the resort at the base. I just don’t see how they did the hike, let alone the scramble to the towers at the end. Quite impressed.
We were exhausted on getting there, but the camp was nice – it’s a free camp, so no amenities but a toilet. We dropped our stuff, set up camp, then put on day packs to ascend the final hour to the Torres themselves. Many people get up before sunrise to see the towers then, but we heard there were going to be clouds rolling in, and we figured there wasn’t much chance of us getting up that early. So, we went up. Turns out it’s only a kilometer or two, but it’s a scramble straight up over a boulder field. I know I said that the hikes before were scrambles, but I was exaggerating a little. Not this time. This climb was a 5.6, and our knees were tired at the end of the hour (much different from running, btw. I challenge anyone’s knees to hold up when it comes to boulder hopping. A day later after the hike, walking on sidewalks, I felt fine again.)
But, we made it, and saw the little bowl of a lake at the top. It was amazing, and well worth a five day hike. There are three towers, all of this reddish rock. They’re about 10,000 feet tall, and rise I would guess 5000 feet over the vantage point. There’s a glacier than just kind of drops off right across the bowl from the little lake. The wind blows like crazy. It’s like the little glacier we hiked to in Glacier National Park, but times 10 – the mountains in the background are just otherworldly. Wish I could do more justice to them in words, but it just kind of has to be seen to be believed. The pictures look neat, but the camera doesn't begin to capture it.
Getting back down wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Slept very well that night, Christmas Eve.

Day 3: to Refugio Los Cuernos

So, this accomplishes the leftmost lower part of the W, then takes in as much of the middle of the W as we think we have time for. We had decided to try to make the 3PM bus back to town on the last day, and we were finding that the hiking times indicated on the map were too fast for us by about 20 percent. We decided to hike some extra this day, along the bottom of the W, so as to make days 4 and 5 a little easier. And we know that today, we’re traveling with full packs again, and it’s the third day of hiking in a row, so we’re going to be slow.

The middle leg of the W goes up into the bowl formed by all the parts of the Paine Massif. There’s a huge glacier in there that you can watch form avalanches on a regular basis (this makes a loud rumbling, so you have time to look, and find the moving snow to look at from across the inside of the bowl.) It also takes you up to see the backside of the Torres themselves. We hiked up about an hour into this (it’s supposed to take 2 – 3 hours). This was far enough for great views of the glacier, and to see the Torres poke up above the closeby ridges. Pretty neat, looking at the towers, but we were more interested in the glacier and the rumbling avalanches, and the really cool river the glacier produces.

The water here is all glacial, and so has that weird pale blue color that rock milk gives things. The lakes, the rivers, all that strange color. The wind blows so hard across the lakes that it kicks up these walls of spray that you can watch travel across the lakes. Often, there are two wind gusts in different directions, so they patterns get really intricate, sometimes resembling little hurricanes. Not just the spray either, as the wave patterns are constantly changing on the surface, as the wind changes direction and strength from one minute to the next. The guy at the hostel urged us to abandon bottled water and just drink the river and lake water. Make sure you’re upstream of any camps, and just don’t worry about it. It all made sense, and I managed to suppress the brief thought that popped into my head: “you know, he says it all confidently, but there’s most likely nobody who’s ever sat in this room who knows more about drinking water than you.” Screw it, I decided, and the water situation got a lot simpler. We didn’t get sick, and the water actually tastes great (cold water always does.)

Campamento Italiano is where we would have stayed (not an actual refugio, just a campground), had we not decided to press on further. We’re really happy we did that, as it’s a really nasty little campground. Don’t stay there if you can avoid it. Toilets overflowing, steep slope to the ground. I expect it’s buggy at dusk. Really cool cable bridge over the river, though, with a few planks missing, and others not looking very safe (and unlike the other trail complaints, if this one fails, someone’s going to die, rather than merely get muddy.)

Pressing on to Los Cuernos: Los Cuernos refers to the “horns” – a particular rock formation in the Paine system. On the way, we found the strangest beach. The trail goes down to a beach made of smooth lake pebbles – maybe an inch or two in diameter – big enough that they hurt to walk on barefoot. This beach is only two or three hundred meters long. The funny thing was that I for some reason was thinking that it reminded me of the beach at the end of the movie “Contact”. A few minutes later, Ev says, “reminds me of the beach in Contact.” I guess we’ve been hanging out with each other and nobody else for too long. It looks nothing like that beach, but it has such an otherworldly feel that it must have sparked the associations in both our minds. The wind is fierce and variable on the lake (this is the closest we actually got to any of the lakes), and we sat for awhile and watched the weird wave and spray patterns racing across.

All the hikers who were backed up here managed to spread out across the beach and separate by 20 meters each, to give the illusion of privacy. You do see a lot of other people on the hike. We’re told it’s not nearly as many as you see going east to west, so that’s a side benefit. One thing we’ve noticed is that there’s a hikers’ etiquette, about standing down for people going the other way on the trail, especially if they look like they’re working harder. Typically, this is: stand aside if you’re going downhill, let the people going uphill keep at it if they want to. At the very least, say hello (here, this is “hola” – no matter what nationality you’re sure they are, hola is the lingua franca here, so say that, at least.) We found that not many other people believe in this. The first few days, we always got out of the way, no matter what. We always said hi. Plenty of people reciprocated at least the greeting, but plenty of others couldn’t even bother a grunt. Not to mention occasionally getting out of our way. By days four and five, we were a lot less willing to stand aside.

I was getting pretty grumpy and tired by the time we got to that beach (I think I was just really dehydrated and low on calories – when we finally got there and I drank a few liters of water and ate something, I felt fine.) We finally get to the refugio, and it’s kind of being run by teenagers who like to sit in the doorway and smoke, so you can’t actually get in to pay your bill (as teenagers will do.) (I figure this must be the place where the British couple was denied refuge.) Here, for our 14 bucks, we got a campsite, but no kitchen privileges. The campsites were rocky and sloped. The whole place did have a killer view, though. We picked our campsite during a rare moment when there was no wind, got all set up, then were cooking dinner when the tent blew away (it was held in place by the one stake we’d managed to drive into the rocky ground.) Okay, this is the only spot left, and it has no shelter from 50 mph winds, let’s try again. So, we redid the stakes by trying everything thing to big rocks instead, and throwing our gear inside. This helped, but it was still scary, and I was expecting a rip in the tent or a snapped tent pole that night sometime. (Despite my bitching about the campsite itself, let me re-emphasize: there has never been a better view from a tent than we had. Ludicrous view of the horns.)

(We discovered a pretty severe rip in the rain fly later, than must have happened earlier in the trip. We told the hostel about it when we got back, and were expecting to have to buy a whole new rain fly – it’s a Eureka tent, so I wasn’t expecting this to be an arm and a leg. The hostel guy took a look, said he’d let me know. He comes to me later with a solemn look on my face, I’m expecting him to tell me I have some disease or another –“It’s a pretty bad rip. I think our guy can fix it, but it’s going to cost. It’s going to be … five bucks. Sorry, man.” This on a tent that cost 15 a day to rent anyway. I suppressed, “why are you telling me this?” and managed, “oh, wow… Okay, well, let’s settle everything up then.”)

This leg of the hike, even though we cut a lot off of it, took us way longer than the guide indicated it should, so we were pretty nervous about making the whole thing and still making the 3 o’clock bus the last day (there’s a 6 o’clock bus as well, so it’s not that big a deal, but we wanted some time to decompress back in town afterwards.) So, we got going as early as we could the next day (this turned out to be about 815, by the time I went running, showered, we made breakfast, and packed everything up.)

Day 2: Day trip to Glaciar Grey and back

We decided to leave our stuff at the campground, and just take a day pack to the glacier. This is the first (leftmost) leg of the W, and since we didn’t want to camp up there, there was no point in carrying all our stuff. It’s a 21 km round trip.

The first three or four km is some steep climbing, to get from the valley we were in to the valley Lago Grey is in. The view once you finally crest is pretty amazing. There’s a tiny little interim lake that tricks you into thinking you’re at the real lake, but they you realize how small it is. A little more hiking (wind still blowing like crazy in your face), and you finally see the big lake, and you can spot little icebergs floating in it, sometimes beached. One little cove that the wind beats against in particular had a large collection of drift ice in it. We keep at it, paralleling the lake edge, on fairly level ground, then we finally catch a glimpse of the big glacier off in the distance. This glacier is huge (it’s the one in the post I referenced in my last post), and has several branches that split around an island in the lake. You can take cruises to get up close to the glacier and see it calving, from a completely different location in the lake – this would have been a multi day trip to accomplish this. Not for backpackers. A nice mirador, then more hiking to get a lot closer. The weather started to go downhill, and I started to feel a little rain.

We started heading steeply downhill, down a pretty poorly maintained/defined trail. This didn’t make us happy, as it’s kind of a downhill scramble more than a hike, and my knees don’t like downhill very much. A walking stick or two, which we’ve always hated, we decided would come in very handy (translation: we may finally be old enough to need walking sticks while hiking.)

The trails in general in the park are not up to snuff. We paid American national park admission prices, and American amenity usage prices every night, and the trails just aren’t maintained all that well, in my opinion. I think the government of Chile could probably get a lot of response if they posted ads about “internships” in various hiking friendly places in the US and Europe (Seattle, Boulder, etc.), and had people come down and work on trail crews (I did later see a crew of white folks with shovels, speaking American accented English, so perhaps they have done just this.) We found place after place where a small creek had re-routed itself onto the trail, and was turning it into mud. Then they allow horses, who churn it into foot deep mud.

(God, I hate horses. Could a smellier, dumber creature have been invented? It’s so much fun to smell horseshit when you’re on the trail. Anything that dumb and stinky ought to be kept in feedlots and eaten.)

Finally, we get to Refugio Glaciar Grey. Not nearly as nice as the one we were camped at, and we were really glad it was a day trip. It was cold and the wind blew, and it started raining in earnest. A very wet looking campsite, and no shelter for cooking, etc. We went to the close-up mirador, and looked at the glacier for a bit before being driven back. So, we’re now halfway through, we’re getting rained on, and we’re already tired. Remember that scramble down that was hurting my knees. Now we have to go back up.

Eventually the rain passed us over, and the wind blew us dry. We finally got back, made dinner, and passed out. At this point, I was a little nervous – I was pretty tired and grumpy after two days, and wet, besides (wind-drying doesn’t count in terms of warming you up.) I was wondering how much worse it would be the next day with packs, if it was that tiring the second day with only day packs.

It doesn’t start to get dark until 11PM, and we were never able to stay up that late, so we never did see stars in the park.

Parque Nacional Torres del Paine

First, read this, which is far better written that these posts will be, and was my original inspiration for wanting to come down here.
This is widely regarded as the best national park in South America. I believe it. It’s huge, it abuts other national parks (O’Higgins, I believe, picks up where this one leaves off), and it has glaciers and rock that will make you gasp. We got a start later than we thought, so we needed to knock out 17 km in our first half day.

Day One: Administracion to Refugio Grande Paine
Let me tell you about wind. You know how, every now and then in November or December, you get one of those really windy days in Seattle? The local news freaks out, predicting the end of the world, they shut 520 down, usually one person dies somewhere on the Columbia, having gone out in their boat. People have trees attack their houses, and we find out that Microsoft doesn’t have a secure power supply. For winds that are 40 – 50 mph, with stronger gusts. Now, imagine a big plain of grass (I think pampas is the proper word), with winds that strong, and you’re walking straight into them. All day.
The trail is a rut through the pampas, in places almost a foot deep. Wide enough to walk through with no problem (about a foot wide.) Unless the wind is blowing so hard that when you lift a foot, and you’re slightly off balance (that’s how we walk, after all), the wind will blow you around so that you aren’t quite sure where your forward foot will land. We were afraid of twisting an ankle, and we were walking on the flattest land you can imagine. It was that hard to keep your balance. Now, imagine that you’ve got a big backpack strapped to your back, to provide more of a sail for the wind to catch.
We saw very little wildlife, other than birds struggling to go the direction they wanted (if it was downwind, they were happy, and got there ahead of schedule. If it was any other place, they usually struggled, aloft, more or less motionless, for awhile before giving up and landing again.) I did see one rabbit. There was a camp/wind shelter about halfway, where we had some lunch. That was a nice break, and we met another couple who were in their mid 50s, I’m guessing. They had no gear, and had been hiking from refugio to refugio each day. If you have reservations, you can stay in these hostel-like accommodations, and so not have to carry anything more than a day pack (walks between refugios are about 10 – 15km on average.) But, you need to reserve these months ahead of time, I gather, if it’s high season (December – February.) WE had been thinking we would do one night in a refugio halfway through (it’s quite expensive), but when we saw the availability, we gave that up.
Anyway, this couple were British, and they told us that they try to take a few months off every winter, and go somewhere in the world. This year it was South America. Our eyes got big -we get universal pity for being Americans here – everyone knows the story of how we get essentially no vacation compared to the rest of the civilized world. We are the only people we’ve met who are here for “just” a month. She saw our surprise/admiration, and said, “Well, you’re a long time dead, right?” I’ve never heard this phrase before, but assume it continues with something like “and only a short time alive.” Good advice.
They told a scary story of being denied at one of the refugios, even though they had a reservation – apparently the place overbooked, so decided to honor only reservations that were pre-paid (nobody told this couple this in advance, I’m sure they would have been happy to comply with any rules.) So, they rented them a tent, but were out of sleeping bags. After huddling for warmth in the tent a while, and deciding it wasn’t going to work, they went back in and begged for something, so they guys rented them a few duvets and they made it through the night. Ass-clowns. I think if you’re the ones who’ve screwed up, at least let the people with a confirmed reservation sleep inside. For free. On a couch if you have to.
Towards the end of the plains, we finally got to hiking up and down some hills, but the wind didn’t stop – that kind of wind on cliff edges is even more fun. Finally, we got to the refugio, paid our 14 bucks for a campsite, and discovered that the camp was quite nice – they provide showers, bathrooms, and an enclosed cooking area, with a plexiglass-ed in shelter and picnic tables, and gas stoves to cook on. Turns out they also have a full restaurant and internet access if you’re willing to pay for it (we weren’t – we bought a can of cold coke for 3 dollars, and shared it. Tasted pretty good.) We set up camp, made dinner, cleaned up a little, and passed out.

Puerto Natales

PN is the gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. Torres means “towers”. Not clear to me what paine means. I think it might be someone’s name. It refers to these three towers of rock at one end of the park, which rise to 2800 meters. The entire mountain range is not part of the Andes system – according to the informational signs, it’s a chunk of granite that thrust up through the overlying sedimentary rocks 12 million years ago, and has since been eroded. It kind of reminds me of Mt. St. Helens, in that it’s a bowl with a lower opening on one side, that you hike into. It’s not volcanic, though, and it’s not a blowout that caused things to collapse, but erosion (wind, so far as I can tell.)

Anyway, more on that once we get there. PN is also the drop-off point for the Navimag ship south – this is passengers riding on a freight ship south through Chile’s version of the inside passage from Puerto Montt. It takes three or four days, and is on our list of things we will go back and do someday. Lots of glaciers, and a close knit atmosphere. The guidebook advises bringing an open attitude, playing cards, and plenty to drink – this is a real working ship that’s been half refitted as a cruise ship. You have to reserve in advance, and it would have cost about another thousand for two bunk beds in steerage, so we didn’t do it. But, it’s on the list. We flew instead, saving three precious days, and a little bit of money.

On getting into town, we decided we needed two nights to get ready for the trip into the park. We didn’t bring backpacking gear, other than packs, so we needed to rent tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and stove. We also had very little information about the park itself. The town has the feel of one of those towns just outside an American national park, with guide services, restaurants, hotels, and shop after shop full of touristy crap. We vaguely remembered an important thing that the woman we went on the wine tour had told us: go to the Erratic Rock hostel for the “three o’clock talk”. This is a talk given by the American owner of the hostel, about how to hike in the park, what to see, what to take, etc. This was invaluable. This guy (Bill is his name, I think), bills himself as a backpacker, not a businessman, and he does run his hostel that way, but he knows his shit. He’s done all the hikes hundreds of times, and told us exactly what to do.

So, there are two major hikes in the park, and tons of minor ones, and tons and tons of supported treks/boat trips/horse trips/etc. The major backpacking is either the “W”, or the circuit. The W consists of walking up one side of the Torres massif, then back down, doing the same into the middle of the bowl, the back down, then over to the other side, up and down. On the eastern side, you can climb up for a close-up view of the towers themselves (this is a spectacular view, and the one you see on all the calendars, but the others are pretty spectacular as well.) The circuit does all this, but also goes around the backside. Most people do the W in 5 days, east to west. Bill suggested we do this, but add a one day approach hike, and do it west to east. This way we avoid a pricey boat trip for the pick up at the end, and we see slightly fewer people (and we do the easy stuff first, and have a chance to walk off a few pounds from our bodies, and eat a few from our packs.)

We decided that although his gear rental prices weren’t the absolute lowest in town, we were so happy for the advice, and trusted him so much afterwards, that we rented from him, for about 15 bucks a day. The gear was decent, although they did give me a crappy old down bag instead of a synthetic bag, despite my request, so I was a little bit cold (check this before you leave.) So, if you’re taking an extended trip, just rent the stuff when you get down here instead of carrying it all the way. Maybe there’s a problem with supply in late February, but in December, it wasn’t a problem. If you’re worried about supply (as we were, irrationally, but in accord with what every other traveler told us), just email Erratic Rock and ask them to reserve some stuff. They also don’t charge you for the day you rent it, figuring you can’t use it that day – a nice touch that other gear rental places were not willing to extend.

Anyway, we spent the rest of the day running errands, trying to gather all the food we needed, etc. I really wanted to just sit at a coffee shop or bar and relax and write up some blog posts, but every time we turned around, there was another thing to do. We didn’t want to come back to the same hostel after the hike, so we needed to get packed, and drop our stuff off at erratic rock (where we’d reserved a room) before the evening was over. Of course, there was no chance of this happening, so it had to be dropped off early the next morning, before getting on the bus. We left a Toblerone bar to make up for the inconvenience, which got us nice treatment when we got back (people seemed to know who we were.) (By the way, you’ll need either matches or a lighter to light your stove, and since you don’t smoke, you probably don’t have one. The Spanish word for lighter, as a kindly shopkeeper told us after some farcical “Spanish” and pantomime on our part, is incendido. We donated the two lighters we bought to the hostel afterwards, and encouraged them to just include one with each camp stove from now on – their gear guy thought that was a good idea, so maybe that will happen.)

Puerto Natales has a brewery, and we found a nice pizza joint pouring their beer. After two weeks of no beer (we once tried a bottle of the national brew, Cristal, and it’s… not as bad as our national brew, but that’s not saying much), their pale ale tasted awfully good. It’s called Cerveza Baguales. There’s another little coffee shop/pub a few doors down the street from the pizza place that sells it as well. Right on the Plaze de Armas. It was fun sitting there and reading three or four year old Spanish language music magazines from Barcelona while Ev typed away. It's light really late here. The outdoor picture (of the Plaza de Armas) was taken about 11PM.

Anyway, we were up and waiting for the bus in front of our hostel at 715AM, like they told us. We figured, with a three hour trip, that we’d be hiking by 11. We didn’t read the guide very closely. The bus picked us up, and then proceeded to drive through town many times, past every hostel and hotel that exists. Many people were not ready, and so we waited for them to bolt some breakfast and get their shit together (I am particularly unenamored of a certain German woman with bad sunburn dandruff who made us wait, and then sat in front of me for three hours and scratched at her peeling scalp. Ten days later, as I write this, I still hate her.) We stopped at a gift shop at the edge of the park, for no good reason other than to buy stuff (like we’re going to load up on touristy crap on the way in - this was the same stuff you see in any store in any national park. DVDs, posters, little gimcracks you’ll never look at again.) We stopped in the middle of the road for 15 minutes, with no explanation. We were distracted by the antics of a guy who managed to get on the wrong bus and seemed to want the bus driver to do something about it (no sympathy for this guy, but it does seem like the driver could check the tickets before letting people on.) Long story short, I can’t claim that the other bus companies are better than Buses Gomez, but they couldn’t have been much worse. We finally got dropped at our particular trailhead at about 1215PM, and started hiking.

On the way in, I did see lots of wildlife. Lots of guanaco, and one rhea. Didn’t see any of this stuff again until the bus back out 5 days later. I guess the guanaco like the open plains where the puma can’t sneak up on them, and the rhea must just be rare or something. (This is from the window of the bus. I couldn't get the camera out in time to get the rhea I saw.)

Punta Arenas

First, the airport in Puerto Montt has three gates, but they seem to only use one. So, we were there about 2.5 hours early, as we were trying to account for any unforeseen things that might crop up, and none of them did, so we sat and read. Four other flights left from the same gate in that time, each time making us nervous that it was our flight, and we’d missed something in the announcements in Spanish.

But, we made it. When we got in, we experienced the first truly bad weather of our trip, as it was raining hard, and had been for days. We were in a place a long way from the bus drop off point. There’s no central bus terminal in PA, and each bus company has its own little terminal (typically a few parking spots on the road), which makes it hard to find stuff. We hired a cab to take us, and when we finally found the place, we found a nice little old lady who was renting out rooms in a rambling structure she’d extended from her house, and who tried to stick warm cups of tea in our hands as soon as we came in. She’s very nice, and can speak a little bit of English, and can help you arrange bus tickets, tours, etc. We stayed one night, before catching an afternoon bus to Puerto Natales (gateway to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine) the next day. The next day, it was bright and clear and windy, and the lakes of water that were standing on the roads the day before had somehow disappeared, so we explored. We tried to hit a few of the sights the guidebook listed, without a lot of luck.

Example: in Bruce Chatwin’s book In Patagonia, he visits the house his distantly related uncle lived in – this uncle had sent him a fossilized piece of giant sloth skin (the Milodon is big down here – just google “Milodon Patagonia” to learn more), which apparently inspired the trip to Patagonia in the first place. The guidebook mentions Charley Milward’s House as one of the tourist attractions. So, we went, found it, despite the wrong markings on the map, and it’s just a house surrounded by high hedges. No museum or tourist info except a plaque. I’m glad I was there, since when I re-read the book someday, I will remember standing in front of it, and being frustrated that there wasn’t even a brochure. The house is for sale, by the way – now that would be a fun piece of history to own, kind of.

Punta Arenas is a Chilean town, but was settled by equal parts Chileans, British, Italians, and Croatians – there is a Croatian consulate here that we stumbled across, and we’re told there’s still a Croatian language radio station. It was strange to see tourist info posted in English as well as Spanish. There is a series of touristy historical information plaques up around town, a large proportion of them having something to do with Ernest Shackleton (the plaque on Charley Milward’s house mentions Shackleton staying there, for example.) He apparently stayed in PA while regrouping to rescue the crew of his ship (which I didn’t know – I thought he took off directly from St. George’s island or wherever it was.)

The most interesting thing, which Lonely Planet for once got exactly right, was the town cemetery. They’ve run out of room, so part of it looks like a traditional cemetery, with graves and family crypts packed up against each other, the way you would expect to see in an American cemetery. But, for more recent graves, you see these coffin hotel structures, where there’s coffin sized crypts, six high, and right next to each other. Visitors access an area maybe 3 by 4 feet in a wall (big enough to shove a coffin into lengthwise, however big that is), which they decorate extensively. I don’t know if this is a catholic thing or a Latin thing, or both, but many of these areas were heavily decorated, not just with flowers, but pictures fading in the sunlight, yearbooks, medals, etc. I guess Catholics are against cremation, so you have to put the stiffs somewhere. And once you’ve put them somewhere, you can’t stop the survivors from turning it into a shrine. This whole thing was frequently behind plexiglass, to shield it from the elements. There were many many of these structures, six coffins high by maybe 50 or 100 long, on four sides. Most of the people here had Spanish surnames. In the more traditional section (not sure what else to call it), there were many English, Italian, and Croatian surnames scattered in – the older section had graves from the early 1900s or before.

In the morning, I ran the few blocks to the Straits of Magellan (Estrecho de Magallanes). It was pretty filthy with litter, and I could see Tierra del Fuego across the strait. We’re not going to make it over there this trip – there’s just too much to do, and it would be several more days. We need time to devote to hiking in the park, so that cuts out a few fun things. I think the main reason I wanted to go, though, was to see how far south I could go. Ushuaia, Argentina, bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. It isn’t quite, as Puerto Williams, Chile is farther south, but it only has a thousand people or something like that. Still, PA is very, very south. If you look on a map, we’re below New Zealand, way below the southern tip of Africa. It doesn’t really get dark here until about 11PM, and even then, it’s not really dark. At midnight, there’s still a glow to the southwest in the sky. Then it’s light enough to read again about 530AM. You can’t really see the stars down here, as it never really gets dark enough (and we’re so tired late at night, that we can’t stay up until 2AM, to see if that’s late enough.)

A word about names. Chile has a few founding fathers, and in every town, you find the streets named after them. There’s O’Higgins street, which is usually a main drag, there’s two different Montt streets, after two different presidents. There’s always a Baquedano, and so on. There are also occasionally streets named after holidays. September 11^th is big here, too, but not for the same reasons – something to do with a naval victory over Peru or something like that. You find yourself looking for addresses on the same four or five streets, no matter which town you wind up in.

We only spent the one night (we came back for another night after our adventure in the park.) We stayed up late talking to a british guy in the hostel who apparently was a stockbroker who one day chucked it all and has spent the last two years drifting from one volunteer project down here to another. He’s hoping to spend new years at the end of the world (Ushuaia, probably, unless he can get a cheap last minute ticket on a boat to Antarctica) before heading up to spend one last year one some project in Mexico before finally going home and getting retrained. He only knows how to be a stockbroker, and is no longer interested in that, so it’s retraining for him, he said.

We caught a bus the evening of that second day from here to Puerto Natales, which is the gateway to the park we’re here for.