Patagonia January 2011 - Villa O'Higgins to El Chalten Argentina!

Now back to our posts on our travels South, summarised here. This post shows some of our photos from the technically most remote part of our trip South - Villa O'Higgins, and then onto our fun border crossing into Argentina. In Argentina we spent some time in the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares - sometime we'll put a link to the majority of the pictures of the glaciers we saw. They're quite mesmerising, but you don't really want loads of them in a blog post.

clouds gathering over Villa O'Higgins

From Chiloe we went back to Puerto Montt and took a short (1 hour) flight down to Coyhaique, the capital of the Aysen Region in Northern Patagonia. This is a very green part of the world, characterised by huge rivers, very popular with canoers and fly-fishers. Coyhaique itself is described by Lonely Planet as a "cow town" - it lives off cattle breeding. A couple of pics here, we'll try to link to a gallery of some others in a future edit.

a bit of Coyhaique

The region has also been the subject of recent controversy in Chile as the regional Council recently voted to accept planning proposals for a large energy company to site a series of hydro-electric dams in some of the region's rivers, which will inevitably have environmental consequences - not least because most of the power which will be produced is destined for the mining operations of the far north of Chile. This means that a huge power line will be built along the majority of the length of the country...Here's another link which has some really good professional pics of the region.

the Hidro-Aysen environmental impact report in the library in Villa O'Higgins, not bedtime reading

Needless to say, Chileans on the whole are not ecstatic about creating an environmental disaster in the South to fuel the ongoing environmental disaster in the North. The current education-related protests (which started again today, causing Struan to be subjected to a minor gassing before he decided that school administrative stuff could be prioritised behind escaping from a riot) were preceded a few months ago by protests on a similar scale about "Hidro-Aysen" (the energy company) - and, while they perhaps don't unite all Chileans, these are the issues since we've been here that have inspired very large numbers of people to take to the streets. (It turns out that it was good that Struan went home, the violence this week has been the worst so far - and the violent minority are causing so much mayhem and damage to public and private property that they are damaging the cause of the real protesters.)

We only spent a short time in Coyhaique before getting on a tiny bus packed with locals to head down the Carretera Austral to a tiny town called Cochrane. As we said in our summary post (linked above), the Carretera Austral is the Southern Road - Pinochet's great project to link the whole of Chile. We were really lucky to be able to get buses on the schedule we had planned as there's only one a day, seating about 20 people (like sardines), and for many locals it's the only available mode of transport. Through national parks, along a gravel, almost two lane, road with a sheer cliff on one side most of the way, after two 10-12 hour journeys in two days, we made it to Villa O'Higgins. 

at one point our bus had to wait for this, pulling up from the gorge...

this...eeek

Villa O'Higgins is a small town of around 500 inhabitants, sitting at the southern end of the Carretera Austral. Here, and the next place we went to, Candelario Mansilla (more on that below), were definitely the most remote places we have visited in the sense that they are not easily accessible. Before the Carretera Austral was completed in 2000 it was basically only possible to reach here by boat or plane (we mean like those two seater ones). Now you can drive (for a long time) or cycle (for an even longer time). The only places in Chile that are more remote are some of the islands in the Magellan Strait or somewhere like Isla Robinson Crusoe - the tiny island near Easter Island, and the islands in the Patagonian Fjords. Our definition of remote means places that are far away from other places, but excludes places which can be reached by regular passenger flights - although that suggests we don't consider Easter Island remote, which is silly, but hopefully you know what we mean, it was nice to go somewhere where you have to make a real effort to arrive. 

Chi-Chi-Chi-le-le-le!

Villa O'Higgins from the hillside

Villa O'Higgins is so remote because it's located in the cordillera just north of the huge Southern Ice Field which divides Northern Patagonia from Southern Patagonia. This icecap is unpassable, the mountains to the west are only passable on foot by one particular route, the north and east (to the coast) are passable insofar as there is access to the Carretera Austral. It does however have internet, powered by satellite dishes throughout the town. Here's a pic of that, and a couple more of the library, which we became familiar with as a) it was warm and dry, and b) had a reliable internet connection which became essential when we realised we needed to urgently contact the outside world (something predicted by sod's law - you will need to make urgent contact with someone when it's unusually difficult to do so). 

not that remote - the awesome Stieg Larssons' have made it to VoH

Here's some pics around Villa O'Higgins:

some of the original settlers' buildings - now preserved as monuments

view of the central plaza

"keeping the peace..."

the town hall

wilds on the edge of the village

We stayed in an excellent hostel called El Mosco (some more photos here), run by a friendly Spaniard - extremely comfortable with an awesome breakfast (in the upstairs guest house part anyway - if you've made it this far you might as well go for the most comfy accommodation, particularly given what's to come...)

the comfy breakfast room in El Mosco

One thing about travelling down the Carretera Austral and spending time in places like Villa O'Higgins is that varied food is quite scarce, because they can't really grow fresh fruit and veg, and there's probably only a weekly delivery from Coyhaique. For about a week we basically ate the Chilean "rustic" classic of thick sliced roast beef (cooked all the way through) with some form of potato, lunch being pasta with a sauce of concentrated tomato paste and frozen peas and sweetcorn. And, until we got to El Mosco, we had gone back to powdered milk which we hadn't had since we left the hostel that we stayed in when we first arrived in Chile. We also had the meat and potato combo at the farm we stayed at the night before we crossed the border and, despite having eaten it several nights on the trot, it was gorgeous.

our obliging host during one of our meals out, Renato - mainly he asked questions, stared, then kicked a cardboard box across the restaurant. Then had a tantrum when we left. We are fans.

Some more pics around the town, and then some from the surrounding wilderness (gotta love the rolling mists):

a hen with her family

The photo above shows a very small part of a very big Patagonian problem - in the early 20th century the Chilean government tried to encourage settlement of southern Chile by passing a law which granted land title to people who cleared land. There's a logic in there somewhere, in that they were trying to incentivise people to claim land and then do something with it, such as farm it or maybe log it. From a modern-day perspective (thinking about the public reaction to the Hidro-Aysen proposals above) that sounds like a sacrilege - an invitation to exploit a pristine wilderness. Unfortunately it's even worse than that - one particular company came and chopped down the trees, took title to the land and then didn't do anything with the majority of it. Its clearance policy included clearance by fire, many of which raged out of control and took years to burn out. So vast tracts of Patagonia look like this, with long dried husks of tree trunks lying forlornly having been killed for nothing. Wherever you stand on the political/ economic scale, defending this mindless, wasteful, poorly-executed and destructive land-banking for no purpose must be difficult. 

almost like purple scottish heather, but it's the colour of the underlying rock

Our earlier summary post gives a fairly good idea of the first part of our journey from Villa O'Higgins into Argentina - a boat took us from O'Higgins to the other side of Lago O'Higgins to a farm called Candelario Mansilla. We'll focus on the farm a bit more in this post, but here's a couple of pics of Glacier O'Higgins which we visited on the way: 

from the boat

We arrived at the farm, spectacularly perched on the cliff side overlooking the lake, with an eclectic mix of Europeans, a French couple, an Israeli couple (who had camped at El Mosco - alright they're not Europeans but they're in the Eurovision Song Contest), a Swiss couple (cycling the length of South America), a German guy (doing the same), and four Germans - who we became very friendly with but initially, as one of them had been here before and went straight for the best rooms in the actual farm house, the situation was a bit like this (except we didn't have a bouncing bomb style towel so they got the rooms). The majority of us were put up in the farm outhouses, pretty cold but dry and sheltered. 

view back across the lake from the Candelario Mansilla embarkment

the side of our house

Anna putting on more layers in our outhouse

The family that runs the farm is lovely, extremely welcoming - there seemed to be about four generations of them living there, though not all the time. We've mentioned before that it seems relatively common for parents in rural areas to leave their kids with grandparents, while they are away working in one of the larger cities. On this occasion the resident "orphan" was the extremely energetic and charming Antonella, who showed us around the farm when we arrived: 

Anna and Antonella

 

That night we ate with the family and the group of Germans in the farm house - really tasty food. Antonella was particularly proud of the flowers in the garden that you can see above, and she continued to entertain us at dinner, ending with an inevitable tantrum when she had to go to bed. protesting that she was "playing with the [niños]"! This word literally means "children" - it occurred to us that, as the Germans were all middle-aged, she must have thought we were their kids!

the farm kitchen

One of the great things about living here in Chile is that in most situations (mainly shops) we are referred to by one of the various words referring to a young person, like niña or señorita (for Anna), or joven (for Struan). It's difficult to translate these meaningfully back into English as, while literal translations exist, they are almost meaningless in context. The easiest is señorita, which is like saying "Miss". A niña is a female child, and a joven is literally a youth, or "young man", which sounds super-formal, or like an exclamation from a Carry-on film. The nearest equivalent in context we can think of is a genial northerner saying "love" or "duckie" or something - but even that's better styled as something like the Chilean "mijita", which is an affectionate greeting to a female.

The best however, in shop or market contexts, is "mi Reina", which Anna gets at the fruit and veg market in Santiago - "my Queen"! The addressing someone with one of the various words meaning "young person" is either because we look young, or it's a form of politeness (the latter is the theory of one of our friends here with very good Spanish).  It's very interesting how differences in culture are reflected through language in many ways: in English the word "youth" seems to only have negative connotations, for some reason bringing to mind "young offender" or "yob" or something like that (as opposed to "youthful" which is entirely different). It doesn't have that connotation in Spanish (Chilean Spanish at least), but it does have another cultural function in that it usefully distinguishes a young male from a Señor or Caballero - literally "Mr" (but better understood as "Sir") and "Gentleman". Whenever Struan is in a 50/50, "who will the shop assistant serve first?" situation, the one who looks older will always be served first, and addressed as Caballero, while the other (usually Struan) will be put in his place as a joven. Life in Chile is swings and roundabouts.

Anyway, we're fairly sure that in the farm house with Antonella is the only time we've been called niños in a literal, rather than culturally figurative, sense, probably. Back to Antonella's tour:

one of Antonella's toys

Antonella: "there's a dead chicken round this corner." Us: "we don't want to see it" A: "you have to."

 

you've been spared the dead chicken, and the rainbow lulled you into a false sense of security, here's some guts and organs hanging on trees to feed birds

phew, a nice waterwheel

and some nice dogs

After that fun and hospitable stay, after breakfast everyone's backpacks were loaded onto a packhorse and we set off on foot for the Argentinian border, a 22km hike:

what a start to the day! View onto the lake from the cliff beyond the farm

another view across the lake

Naturally we got lost straight away. The road was eventually quite easy to follow, at least to the border, at which point it disappeared completely, but, like with those route finder things, the problem is finding the starting point... eventually we found the tracks of the packhorse (who left about an hour before us) and were able to follow those.  

Suffice to say, the scenery was amazing, here's some more pics en route:

so you know you're in Chile

The next pic is of the cyclists crossing a river - they had a tough time, quickly overtaking us at the beginning but ultimately taking about 2 hours longer to do the border crossing, as after this river things only got harder...

click pic to expand

at the border, leaving Chile behind

The border is high up in the cordillera, and the gravel road on the Chilean side stops dead at this marker, turning into forest and mud...

... the joke is that the road is only on the Chilean side because the Chileans want to get to Argentina, but the Argentinians aren't bothered about going to Chile, so they didn't bother to build a road...

into Argentina

in case you're just wandering around, now you're in Argentina

the cyclists enjoyed this bit too...

and again...

The final part of the border crossing is another boat ride, across the Lago Desierto, and this was our first glimpse of what was to come:

From there it just got more beautiful, we really got lucky with the weather:

It's a pretty amazing view! Then, on the east shore of the lake you reach the location of what must be the best gig in the Argentinian police force, the Lago Desierto border post: 

Where our backpacks were waiting for us and, having done the hike in about 5 and a half hours, we had time to get our passports stamped and then have a rest, and watch the sky change...

and this cat pull ever more ridiculous poses

Later in the afternoon the boat came to pick us up to take us and the various other Europeans over to the west shore. The cyclists had been troopers and made it all the way, and the Israelis, to save money, had carried their full packs and tent all the way themselves. Then the view got even better:

that, is the Fitz Roy Massif, from Lago Desierto

Our ultimate destination was a small mountain town called El Chalten, and we finished our journey with a minibus into the town. We feel really lucky to have traveled through this part of the world.

After all that, we arrived in El Chalten, found our extremely comfy hostel, and got up the next morning and did an 8 hour round trip up a mountain to the Tres Lagos, three high altitude clear blue lakes.

El Chalten

This post probably has enough landscape photos now so we'll try and add a link to a few of the photos from that hike another time. For now we'll finish with one of the things that we most enjoyed in El Chalten, the food - there are few places better to end up, after a solid few days of walking, than El Chalten!

Anna in a really good hot chocolate house

Okay, a couple of pics from the hike:

yay!

Struan, frikkin' freezin', in front of one of the three lakes!

After that, back to the warm:

loads of wine

loads of meat and cheese

Struan enjoying it all!

On this little series of our January journey South we're now in the heart of Patagonia - we'll try and do one more post like this about some of our time even further South, on the edge of the South American continent, on the Magellan Strait.

In real time, we're sitting in Santiago, a day or so off flying to the furthest flung and most unusual part of Chile - Easter Island - which we hope will be a great cherry on top of our travels!

Chao!