Chile
Hola amigos,
Now that I´ve been in Chile over three months I suppose its time to get back in touch with the world, if anyone still remembers who the hell I am. I started to write a mass-email and I got a little carried away, the next morning and a few edits later, live got something like a book, so if you care to read on my story…
Chapter 1
Living upside down
I departed from the States on a sweltering Carolina summer day in mid-July destined for Latin America with vague notions of a place where it’s hot, the people smile all the time and dance salsa, where they play soccer in the streets, where life is relaxed and everything is different. I arrived the next morning in Santiago with no luggage, a pair of Rainbow sandals, and a cold winter day to deal with…and that was pretty much the story with Santiago, one giant disappointment.
To make a long story short, since that time I’ve: managed to sneak through Chilean customs without paying the $100 for my visa, gone to my Spanish orientation classes drunk, had my bike and shoes stolen a knife point, sandboarded in the shadow of an enormous volcano in the Atacama desert, skied and mountaineered in the Andes, gotten tear gassed by the riot police at U Chile, learned a bit of Spanish, dropped out of my study abroad program, and started a job in the remote Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia (from which I write).
Have you gone mad? What do your parents say about these shenanigans? So you’re a dropout? Will I ever see you again? All legitimate questions one might ask, but I don’t feel particularly inclined to answer because, as far as I’m concerned, life could hardly be better at the moment. So instead of concerning my first-ever blog entry with such mundane matters as my future, I’ll merely tell the tale of how I´ve finally become a drifter.
Chapter 2
The Land of Neruda or the Waste Land?
This story begins, of all places, in McDonalds. I had just finished class for the day and I was waiting for the bus when, for some strange reason, I got a craving for the golden arches. I was pretty sure I’d be leaving Santiago at this point and I wasn’t going anywhere without the cultural experience of eating a Big Mac in a foreign country. And cultural experiences can be quite hard to come by in Santiago. As I finished my last few bites a mass of students came running up the street, the manager locked the door, and I witnessed my first full scale riot. The situation was too perfect: here I sat safe inside the very symbol of all things American and evil watching the U Chile students´ annual protest of the Sept 11 anniversary (for Chileans, the anniversary of the American-backed coup which left Chile under almost two decades of brutal military rule).
Outside, the masked students launched Molotov cocktails (small explosives), rocks, and glass bottles at the police, who in turn responded with raids upon the student stronghold in tank-like machines with water hoses and tear gas canisters. Normally, the smiling clerk told me, the police never get permission to enter the university and the madness goes on for hours. The protests always draw quite a large crowd because there´s rarely anything better to do. So I calmly ordered a McFlurry and walked outside to get a closer look.
Watching riots was probably the most interesting thing I did the entire time I was in Santiago. My first impression when I stepped off the plane with shivering toes was not, as I had expected, how different things are, but how similar. I tried not to have expectations, but I expected things to be different at the very least.
My only previous foreign travel experience involved walking across the bridge to Mexico where, upon crossing an imaginary line, everything immediately changed. I reasoned that 5,000 miles further south would be the same idea, amazingly it wasn´t. If I was to sum up Santiago in a sentence it would be: A cheap imitation of all things North American.
Chile is the most industrialized country in Latin America; Santiago being the most number one city for business on the continent. The people, as a whole, enjoy a relatively high standard of living and a relatively safe environment, but at a cost.
In the early 70s, Chile was a different place. Salvador Allende (the world´s first democratically elected socialist) was president. The Chilean national poet, Pablo Neruda, had just won the Nobel Prize for lit in 1971. Musically, Inti-Illimini and Quilapayún (a mixture of communist lyrics and ethnic Andean music), Violeta Parra, and Victor Jarra (among others), combined to give Chile a musical climate rivalled only in the States during that period.
On September 11, 1973 an American-backed coup ousted Salvador Allende (who committed suicide) and left the country under Pinochet. Neruda died the next day. Milton Freedom and a group of free market economists from the University of Chicago were called in to impose pure soulless capitalism on Chile. It was the first time such a strategy had been employed on a developing country. The result was immense economic success, in Friedman´s own words, Pinochet ¨has supported a fully free-market economy as a matter of principle. Chile is an economic miracle" [Newsweek, Jan, 1982]. In the process thousands and thousands were tortured or ¨disappeared.¨ Victor Jarra was murdered and Inti Illimini (and many many others) went into exile for the years to come. Those who stayed lived in a perpetual state of fear, a very real fear that anything they might do or even any opinion they might have contrary to Pinochet´s plans for the country might get them killed.
Today in Chile, things have stabilized. Ricardo Lagos, the current president, is a socialist with a conservative legislature keeping him in check. The country is once again democratic. But the legacy of Pinochet, at least in Santiago, is everywhere apparent. After I arrived at my host family, with pride, they whisked me away to an enormous shopping mall to buy shoes. I might have as well have been at home. Everything is corporate in Santiago. The people seem to have a sort of ingrained business-like mindset.
Walking down the street you are more likely to see someone wearing a Yankee´s logo than that of any Chilean soccer team. After three months, I´m still not sure what exactly Chilean food might be other than fatty slab of meat, mashed potatoes, and little or no flavour or spicing. Hip hop and American 80s retro hits rule over the clubs and if you can translate the lyrics of any song, you´re sure to win friends, even if you can´t dance. There is next to nothing authentic or distinctive to be found. Such are the horrors of globalization.
While living in Santiago certainly has given me a greater appreciation for things distinctly American, like hip-hop and baseball (which I had little appreciation for before hand), I had quite a lot of trouble rationalizing why the hell I came to such a place. I´d given up a semester at UVa for this? I chose Santiago because of its proximity to both the Andes and the beach, but the harsh reality of the situation was that I had to spend the other five days a week in a cultural wasteland.
Chapter 3
Life as a gringo
My study abroad program started with two weeks of Spanish orientation classes. These were absolutely boring and not at all helpful. Thus, I resorted to drinking hard at lunchtime and going out pretty much every night to make life bearable. My bank account was spinning fast out of control. Chile ain´t cheap like the rest of Latin America.
In my study abroad program (IES) of 30 students, for some reason there were only five guys and the other guys either had a noose around their neck or didn´t really go out. Thus, I was left to be ¨el mujeriego¨ (da playa) for these first weeks. Walking around as the only guy with up to ten gringas immediately gave me mad street credit. I often wore sunglasses at night. This quickly lost its lustre however.
But I was content with life because my host family happened to have a halfway decent bike I could ride. I fixed the thing up with a Ukrainian mechanic who used to ride pro, ironically, out of Richmond. I put my pedals and shoes on her and life was grand because not 10 min from my house was Cerro (mountain) San Cristobol, the biggest park in Santiago. A full 6km climb always filled with local riders, great views of the Andes, and some pretty sweet mountain bike trails. The only catch being that the higher you get the worse the smog gets. (For you UVa cyclists, imagine Afton mtn dropped in the middle of LA).
It seemed too good to be true…It was. On my third ride, going up some switchbacks on the far side of the hill, (which I later learned was right above one of the poorest sectors of the city) I was greeted by three punks with switchblades and left with a bloody face and no bike or shoes. Fantastic. It was also interesting talking to the police for about an hour with, at that point, horrible Spanish skills, no identification whatsoever, and not even knowing my address. I was left with a healthy distrust for everyone,; but also a rather good impression of the people a whole on account of the kindness of the park maintenance, nurse, and police were to me after the incident.
Back in orientation classes the next week I was getting pretty damn restless. Imagine going all the way to the other side of the world only to spend your days in the presence of twenty something American girls blabbering about shopping trips or their escapades the night before. I needed to get out, badly.
On a cold rainy Thursday I went to the Pre-columbain museum in Santiago and saw all kinds of Incan and Mayan artefacts. In the gift shop as we were about to leave, I was leafing through a travel guide to San Pedro de Atacama (in the north of Chile) and rather liked the pictures of open warm-looking spaces and volcanoes. I packed my back that night. The next afternoon I was solo on a bus 24hrs north with little knowledge of where I was going other than the photos.
Chapter 4
Backpacker ¨Freedom¨
I wasn´t disappointed. The landscape around San Pedro is like nothing I´ve ever seen. The desert itself is similar to something you might see in Utah or Arizona, but off to the east, the immense Antiplanic region rises into Bolivia. The Antiplano is dotted volcanoes, the largest of which being the Licancabur which towers about 6000m above San Pedro. There are no paved streets and there are Indians. I finally felt like I was in South America.
But San Pedro is probably also the most touristy place in Latin America. Even in the off season when I went, there were more tourists than natives. The narrow streets and adobe buildings are crammed full of tourism agencies, hostels, and restaurants boasting the Visa logo out front.
It´s ´the backpacker mecca´ for good reason. Right outside of town is the Valle de la Luna (a windswept desert canyon with eerie rock formations) and, of course, the antiplano (rising high with llamas, Indian pueblos, salt lakes, volcanoes, and ´El Tatio´--Chile´s version of old faithful). And it´s madness at night. Everyone crowds into the same bar with a bondfire every night and breaks it down to an interesting mix of native Antiplanic music and hip hop.
I went out pretty hard my first night there and ended up talking about anarchy and anthropology until dawn with some Chilean kids in a punk rock band at the hostel (it´s amazing how much your Spanish improves under the influence…). Probably due to the alcohol, dry air, and climate change (it´s HOT by day and COLD by night) I found myself without a voice the next day.
Still, that day, I hiked out of town to sandboard the dunes in the Valley de los Muertos (another interesting rock formation) with the Chileans who insisted on more substance use at the dunes in spite of the fact that that we were in the middle of the desert. We hitched back to town for another night out…
The next day the Chileans left and I rented a bike. A Spanish girl came with me in search of Laguna Cejar, a blue salt lake which the hostel owner assured us was no more than an hour´s ride. He even drew us a map. Once we got out of town there were no road signs and the map proved useless. We asked everyone we saw where the lake was, most having no idea what the hell they were talking about, but all giving us directions in one way or another none the less. It was HOT. We did eventually get there, after 4 hrs on gravel and sand, probably past the point where we should have turned around for lack of water. But it was well worth it floating in the cool blue waters gazing at the volcanoes off in the distance. Life was good. Luckily, an Austrian couple with an RV gave us a ride back.
Back in San Pedro, the Spanish chic passed out and I set off again for the Valle de la Luna. It was a spectacular sunset, then the tour groups and buses departed and I had the whole canyon all to myself to look at the stars. A month in Chile and finally I saw the Southern Cross. I rode an hour and a half back to town on the main road without seeing a single car.
My voice was still pretty much gone and going out every night wasn´t helping things. After my day riding I felt horrible and passed out. The next day I woke up sick as hell. Luckily for me, this pretty much put an end to my plans to try and ride two or three days up to the Indian pueblos/high antiplanic lakes which was likely a prescription for failure, altitude sickness, or death. Thus, I was relegated to accomplishing my aims by taking a ridiculously expensive photo safari with sweaty Europeans.
It was Wednesday, I´d planned on staying for the week but I felt so bad that I decided it wasn´t worth staying any longer and hopped on the next bus for the long haul back to Santiago. I was coughing my lungs out for the better part of two weeks afterwards.
Chapter 5
(I can´t get no) Satisfaction
(the Rolling Stones at UVa this very week and I´m about as far away as one can get)
After missing a week´s worth of classes, I wasn´t left with much time to choose my courses when I got back. I had to choose first between U Catolica and U Chile (in IES you pick a university and take a mix of classes there and at the IES center). Catolica was rich, conservative, and supposedly a better school. U Chile, on the other hand, possessed a campus adorned with large murals of Che Guevarra, where the majority of the students were long haired and unshaven, and either communist or anarchist, where classes had been cancelled for a full two months the semester before because of student protests. With no intentions of attending the ¨UVa de Chile,¨ I choose U Chile, ¨the stone thrower´s school,¨ without hesitation.
I first signed up for the typical classes a foreigner might be interested in: the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Garbriella Minstral, Latin American Politics, Chilean history… But all of these ended up being filled with other foreigners on an isolated campus. I wanted to be where the action was. I came to be a foreigner and not a semester long tourist, so I changed all my classes to the insubordinate Gomez Milla campus across town.
There, I was the only foreigner in some of my classes and I was guaranteed to be right in the middle of whatever ruckus might go down. Here was a challenge, I was going to become Chilean, I was going to study my ass off and make this work, it was going to be the hardest thing I´d ever done, but I´d find a way somehow. The only problem was that I still possessed only a rather pathetic command over the Spanish language. The whole experiment acquired a sort of Billy Madison-like quality as all I had to do was find some way to pass my classes and the credits would transfer.
But the hellish city didn´t make it easy for me. There was only one bus going from my house to the university, thirty minutes away, and sometimes I´d have to wait up to another half hour before the bus even came by. This, combined with my historic inability to get myself the hell out of bed before 10am, made it next to impossible to get to class on time (or get there at all).
My classes themselves proved to be duds as well. My ¨Ensayos Literarios¨ class, for example, was taught by a femin-nazi and turned out in fact not to be about literary essays, but radical feminism. This was interesting for about a week, thereafter I amassed more and more absences.
A typical day involved rising around mid-day and eating the tasteless meal my host mom had prepared me for lunch (host families, in my opinion, are way overrated) then either taking the bus to the university or the IES centre for Spanish class (in which case I was relentlessly bombarded with the woman jabber…). Then back to eat dinner with my boring host family and maybe go out.
(U Chile is a genuinely interesting and unique place and I think I would have like Santiago a lot if I´d been allowed to spend all my time there, but the nature of the IES program prevented me from spending enough time there to really immerse myself in it. For the record, to anybody considering study abroad, I do NOT recommend IES.)
I searched in vain for some way enjoy my life. Pastries are everywhere in Santiago and I became all too fond their sweet goodness. A sugar rush to ease the pain, more and more frequently… Everybody smokes in Santiago. Soon enough, I rarely objected when offered a cigarette, a small buzz amid my boring and meaningless life.
I found it hard to believe that just a few months before I´d been winning bike races, in the best shape of my life, still managing to go out and play quite hard, and keeping a respectable GPA in the process. To quote Hunter S. Thompson, I felt like ¨I had life by the balls¨; now I was failing the hell out of all my classes and I had descended to the realm of the pathetic slob.
I got the hankering to do something hard once again so I got off my ass and shelled out the $50 a month to join a gym. Next thing I knew, I was masochistically hammering through spinning classes nightly and lifting weights. Even step and ¨rhythm¨ (b/c I had none) classes as well. While sweating and stepping with what I thought was some degree of rhythm, I felt almost happy.
Fitter, happier, more productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week) -Radiohead
Yes, this was my study abroad experience.
In an attempt to clear my head, I joined a very eastern type yoga studio and began attending classes regularly there as well because this is what you do in South America… Eventually I had to face the facts: the horrid smog-ridden capital was quite simply kicking my ass and as much as I tried to fight back, I was defenceless against her relentless punches and blows.
One evening, at a sushi restaurant with a bunch of people I hardly knew, I found myself eating copious quantities of pure wasabi until my eyes teared uncontrollably and they begged me to stop. It was the highlight of my day. I was that bored.
Perhaps drugs or rioting could provide some sense of satisfaction for my adrenaline deprived soul, but this had the smell of filthy South American prisons and a sore ass all over it. I would have given anything just to be back at UVa or at home even. I had three months remaining in Santiago. Yes, I had to find a way out.
Chapter 6
God Exists
Originally, I´d come to Chile ¨Motorcycle Diaries¨ inspired and with the intention of taking the spring off to travel. San Pedro had taught me that if I was going to get to know this continent it was going to be on my own terms, preferably on a bicycle. I sure as hell wasn´t going hostel to hostel passing my time with the influx of disrespectful Israelis fresh out of military service and bent of jipping Latin America for all it´s worth or the British gap year crowd in the midst of their around of the world ticket ¨doing¨ all of Latin America without even speaking a word of Spanish. No disrespect to anyone, but the majority of the time I spent with other foreigners in Santiago or San Pedro proved to be some of the most boring time of my life. Where are you from? Where are you going? ¨I did this, that, Lonely Planet¨…the same goddamn things over and over again.
In the midst of all this Santiago was thrashing my bank account and the possibilities of even having anything left to realize my dream were looking dimmer and dimmer every day. So one afternoon at the IES computer lab I got to researching about maybe finding a job for the summer (December to Feb here). Patagonia, consciously or subconsciously, was probably what attracted me to Chile in the first place. Something has always attracted me to all things extreme…So I searched through different travel companies hoping that maybe somebody would be desperate for an English speaking guide even though I really had no qualifications for such a position.
I sent out e-mails to various companies, but one in particular caught my eye. It was started by two guys (American and British): one hitched all the way down around my age and decided to stay, the other rode his bike all over the continent and settled on Patagonia. Ten years later they had the most established company in the region. So I sent these guys a message basically saying that I´m 20 years old and I´m looking to take a significant of time off of school, I´m already in Santiago, I´d be willing to work in whatever menial capacity, perhaps you could offer me a job or help me get my start in the ¨uttermost part of the earth¨…
After a few e-mails and phone calls back and forth I received a message saying that there was work to be done with various construction projects in September continuing through the start of the tourist season. The message concluded, and I have to quote this because its simply too good to be true, that ¨If you wanted to live rough, have some work to do and get your food paid for then this could be something to do during the second half of Sept and Oct.
If things work out and you want to stay then there would be the chance to move south in December to do some portering, assisting either on the river or trail. You need to understand that the first part is rough - you will be alone quite a bit, no phones, email or easy way back into town. You will either love it or hate it. Give me a call sometime if you´re still interested. We can sort out some money along the way but your coming down must not depend on getting paid. I look forward to hearing from you.¨
Chapter 7
I May be Going to Hell in a Bucket, But at least I´m Enjoyin the Ride
I got that message about two weeks after I returned from San Pedro. I knew from the moment I read those final words that, one way or another, I would be taking the job. However, rationalizing this decision proved to be quite difficult as IES refused to refund me a penny of the semester´s tuition fee.
To complicate matters even more, my parents informed me that they had just received my financial aid grant money from UVa for the semester and, since the check was made out to me, and they had already paid for the semester and they´re awesome, they were simply going to deposit this rather large sum of cash into my bank account. Thus, if I were to quit IES, this stipend would all have to be returned to UVa. So all I had to do was finish the semester and I´d have enough money to do pretty much whatever the hell I wanted for the spring. How the hell could I turn down a prospect like that?
How the hell could I tell my parents, who had been so good to me, that their oldest son, formerly doing as he should and making them proud, attending such a ¨prestigious¨ university and travelling down the road to what is generally referred to as success, was now instead going to take a sabbatical, or even a break indefinitely, from such a benevolently gifted tour through life, that he was instead going to willingly throw himself into a large amount of debt and throw away a large portion of free money—all this in order to take a job where he had already been guaranteed not to make any money and in which there was no guarantee that he would even have a job for any significant amount of time at all.
Indeed the prospect was ridiculous. It was absurd and foolish even to entertain such a possibility. Calmly and wisely this is what my parents advised me. I obviously had quite a few cards on the table in this deal. Surely I could find a way to finish the semester if I wanted to, I knew this. I had never even met these people at the end of the world, and I´d already learned my ´healthy distrust´ for everyone in this foreign land the hard way. And of course my parents were completely and absolutely right, I should put my head down and finish the semester.
But at the same time I was tempted to ask them what the hell exactly they thought was going to happen when they spoon feed me Tom Sawyer, Davie Crockett, and the Lone Ranger from as far back as I can remember. I was a weird little kid: I wore camouflage pants and cowboy boots to school, I spent my time playing in the forest and whittling sticks—I was myself, the most eccentric little fucker the rest of my suburban neighbours had ever come into contact with. My dad took me to the mountains at practically every opportunity, sometimes the two of us taking a day off school and work to make it possible. And this is the upbringing for which I´ll be indebted to them for the rest of my life, the upbringing for which I´m most thankful.
Somewhere along the line though I got the hankering to be someone else, and I proceeded to spend the better part of my free time engaging in such bullshit as dribbling a soccer ball through orange cones, actually listening to some dumb ass tell me to move my feet faster. I wasn´t forced into this, I wanted to spend my weekends in a constant state of proving I could do it because that´s what ´you´ wanted to do—you wanted learn the holy virtues of doing as you´re told, proving that you´re better than other people, and not a quitter. I spent the better part of my adolescent days with AP classes and organized sports piled up so high I hardly had time to think about why the hell I was doing all this in the first place. And all the while having the catechism stuffed my throat every Sunday morning for good measure. But I did it, year after year.
In the past I´ve quit numerous sports teams, I transferred high schools (twice), I quit my frat—always because I had the feeling that life is too short and whatever I was doing wasn´t worth my time any more. And I´d quit every single one of them again if I had the chance. And IES Santiago certainly wasn´t worth my time.
Perhaps it was merely because I was twenty, and you only get to be twenty once, that I had this absurd desire to follow the blind luck or folly of fools; but, I also had this eerie that feeling for some reason, apart from all things sensical, this was indeed the right thing to do. So I fucking took it.
Back at U Chile, right before Sept 11, I was caught up in the riots once again. Walking across campus to meet some guys for a soccer game, I was swept up in a huge mob running the other direction. This time the police were on campus. Tear gas stung my eyes as I made it into the safe refuge of the social sciences building. When the smoke cleared, I saw a large group of people gathered around something under a tree near by (in the area where I had been just minutes before). It was some poor girl who took a tear gas canister straight in the back of the head, unconscious and loosing blood. The police helicopter flew overhead. I don´t think I´ll ever forget the image of that girl being carried away on the stretcher, eyes open, not moving—it all seemed rather pointless. If ever there was a sign that I should leave, this was it.
Chapter 8
Fare thee well, to the wretched life…
During my last month in Santiago, I´d joined the U Chile Mountaineering club, a group of personas remarkably identical to those I´d known in the outdoors club back at UVa, but who happend to possess the world´s second highest mountain range in their backyard.
After a few long day ascents, they invited me to come on their first real trek of the season during the Chilean patriotic holidays, which happened to be just a few days before my appointed date of arrival in Patagonia. I figured it would be good preparation for whatever lay ahead and cancelled my original plan of taking a bus trip through Argentina.
A super-nice New Zealander turned Chilean loaned me quite a bit of equipment and helped me understand what was going on (because it´s rather necessary to understand such things on high mountains). So we went three days up Cerro San Ramon, one of the high snowy peaks towering above Santiago which had been taunting me the whole time I was there (at about 3500m, its high enough to feel the altitude, but not ridiculously high).
The final night, from our summit camp, I crawled out of the tent for one last look at the view. San Ramon is in the pre-cordilleria, the mountain range just before the high Andes to the east. The moonlight reflecting off the snow made it possible to see everything in this barren land: to the east were the high mountains on the Argentine border, and to the west were the sprawling city lights of Santiago, for all its ugliness in the daylight, it´s truly a spectular sight at night. I took a piss in its direction as my farewell salute.
Chapter 9
A(nother) Dropout in Patagonia
Forty-eight hours later, with my life in my backpack, I was on a bus headed south. Naturally I was a bit nervous about this whole thing, but I figured that one way or another, things would work out because they always seem to. I slept soundly and woke up the next day in Puerto Montt, the last place truly Chilean before the Andes begin their gradual descent into the sea, thus leaving a land of fjords, glaciers, snow-capped peaks, fierce winds, temperate rain forests, and the blue-ist lakes you´ll ever see.
Little did I know it then, but this place has a history of attracting all sorts of outlaws, dropouts, and gaucho ¨hard cases¨ from the time it was finally colonized by westerners in the late 19th century.
To arrive on time, I had to shell out the cash for a flight from Puerto Montt farther south to Coyhaique, the capital of the Aysen region. Life is different here. I didn´t realize how callous I´d become to others until I rudely blew off some super nice people trying to help me find my way from the airport. In Santiago it´s more or less necessary to assume everyone is trying to rob you because, especially as a foreigner, they usually are. But here I´ve relaxed. In my first weeks here I ate dinner with numerous families, rarely slept in the same place two nights in a row, and became accustomed to drinking mate (the local herbal drink) out of a gourd with a straw in it several times daily. EVERYTHING really does stop from 1 to 3 in the afternoon for lunch/siesta.
The boss lent me his bike to explore the gravel roads and valleys outside of town. The I got sent off to work on building a cabana way the hell out an hour on pure gravel and one street towns in the country. I spent the better part of three weeks with a crew of five natives and a cook, all chill as hell, in their 20s, and who spoke no English. I became quite well versed in the Patagonian vernacular. The job site had views over two lakes, one Lago Paloma with massive cliffs and pure blueness. I didn´t mind that my job pretty much entailed digging holes all day and coming back to bread fresh out of the fire and a big slab of meat (we stayed in a shack in the middle of a sheep pasture). And I still had the bike to explore farther out whenever there was a chance.
Our only neighbours were the old ¨Gaucho¨ Don Jon (who had about two teeth and had lived in the same shack his entire life) and his son (and of course their sheep and horses). When there was time I went fishing with the crew and ¨Juanito¨ and near a waterfall down the road, with the catch being dinner.
How the fuck did I get here? I often wondered. How much do I own my parents? I don´t care.
I returned to Coyhaique for the weekends sleep in the company office and blow my earnings in clubs and bars. Coyhaique has one main club, el Piel Roja, which turns into absolute madness on the weekends. There´s no university anywhere near here and everyone 18-25 shells out the ridiculous cover charge out of their earnings for the week… The three nights I´ve gone out here were definitely my three best in Chile thus far.
Chapter 10
The Beginning of the End
Coyhaique, however, is slowly changing. The cabin I´ve been working on the past few weeks is for an American client. Foreigners are buying up all the land around the city and constructing expensive log cabins amid the shacks of the colonos. Coyhaique has a large super market, a home super-center is in construction, and their´s talk of mall sometime in the near future. One wonders how long the town will still have its charm.
But my time here is over already. Tomorrow morning I´ll be headed further south to Puerto Beltrand (population about 500) where the company operates on the Rio Baker. From there I´m headed into the Parque Nacional San Rafael for some trail maintenance at least until mid-November. After that? No clue. This is probably the last I´ll be seeing a computer for some time, I´d still love to hear from people though (if anyone´s still reading…) for whenever I might be able to read it.
Also, for more about where I´m at, there happens to be a feature article about the company in Outside Magazine this very month (October 2005) which actually is about the very trail I´ll be working on and some of the guys I work with. Look for the article about the ¨Aysen Glacier Trail.¨
All for now,
PB
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