Travelogue: Emerging from Cagalandia

Five days ago I left Cagalandia for good.  My departure marked the end of 42 straight days of what I would consider "roughing it."

I am having to acclimate to sleeping in beds, using regular showers, being indoors, and not being able to pee anywhere, any time.  Despite these practical matters, I largely attribute my "out of sorts" feeling to the fact that my activities are no longer so restricted by my surroundings. Freedom brings alternatives and demands decisions.  What to do, what to eat, where to go...its a bit of a shock.  I am still decompressing after what was in many ways a dramatic experience, and, despite several attempts, am not sure how to relate all that has transpired.  I am stalling trying to process it all and so will just catch up on my recent travel.  Pictures of Cagalandia are forthcoming.

After two straight weeks of rain, the sun came out, on Sunday, and I left.  Thomas took me to town on the catamaran.  At one point our left front tried to submarine, along with my bag, and I thought we were goners. He pulled us out of it, though, and I manned the jib as we landed without incident in Raul Marin.  Early the next morning I took a minibus, a new service run by a local man, to La Junta, another tiny settlement slightly larger than Raul Marin.  I spent the night at Tia Lety's Hospedaje and had a thrillingly hot shower, watched Spider-Man 2 and Yo, Robot in Spanish, chatted with Tia Letty about her arrival 30 years ago as one of the initial settlers of the village, and hung the contents of my bag all over the room in an attempt to dry these victims of the prior day's sailing trip.   

At 5AM the next morning I hopped on another minibus to Coyhaique, capital of the Aisen region. It's a six hour ride along one of the world's wildest roads, the Carretera Austral, which lumbers unpaved through glacial river valleys beneath snowcapped peaks. For hundreds of kilometers you see nothing but landscapes, and then, amazingly, a city.  Bursting out of an isolated and deserted countryside, Coyhaique boasts 50,000 residents, traffic lights, public transport, two supermarkets, a North Face store, and a beautifully designed public library where I now sit using free wireless internet.  Despite its big-city aspirations, wilderness is still a walk away and wood-stoves reign.

I am using Coyhaique as a base from which to provision and plan for the next stage: continuation towards the southern tip of the continent.  The weather has become a factor, as it is now the beginning of winter, and I want to take stock of what I can realistically do given my equipment and the conditions.  Attempting to be intrepid and thrifty, I pitched my tent my first night here--I paid a nominal amount to a local hospedaje for use of the yard, kitchen, and bathroom facilities, but have since moved into the house.  Despite the conditions, I have it stuck in my head that, being this close, I should go all the way.  The next big stop is the epic Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, in summertime a trekkers Eden.  Afterwards I will explore what I can of Chilean and Argentine Tierra del Fuego, probably bottoming out at Ushuaia.

 

Travelogue: Cagalandia

Six hours bus from Puerto Montt, at the Southern tip of the island of Chiloe and the terminus of the Pan-American Highway, lies the port of Quellon.  A nighttime ferry named Alejandrina departs Saturday evenings for more Southerly ports situated amidst the fjords of Patagonian Chile.  Most passengers are fisherman or other laborers heading for extended stays of work down South, so three Americans and one grizzly-looking Dutchman draw a few stares, but not as many as you would expect.  We claimed as many seats as we could in the indoor cabin as it was raining outside and watched "Runaway Bride" until departure at 1 AM.  Next day around mid-morning we navigated narrow channels between lush green mountains and lumbered into Puerto Raul Marin Balmaceda in a gray drizzle.  We unloaded all 21 boxes and bags into a wooden shack near the docks, all the while counting and keeping eyes out for locals that might be bold enough to commit a crime of opportunity (Thomas assures us they would.)  Thomas' contact Jaime could not take us in his boat out to the land, so we had to camp the night.  We pitched tents by the docks, painstakingly started a fire with wet wood and cooked a not-bad dinner of soup and crackers with pate.  

Arrived by Jaime's boat the next morning...pure beauty.  Cagalandia--688 hectares and named jokingly for the Spanish verb cagarse, which means to make a mess (literally to shit on onesself), and reflects the constant state of disorder and disaster at Thomas' place--is 688 hectares of temperate rainforest and has a river that roars when it rains, a beach that affords daily sightings of dolphins and sea lions, and a views that make me gasp time and again.  It is wet, wet, wet, and pretty cold, but we always have hot tea and sometimes hot baths.  So far I have helped fortify a muddy path in camp, cleaned a fish caught in the net, built and deployed an amazingly successful crab trap, chainsawed planks out of tree trunks, harvested mussels from nearby rocks, started hacking a path by machete through dense bamboo forests to a lake, made bread, built a kitchen table, taken a japanese hot bath powered by wood fire, sat in a canoe amidst a colony of yelping sea lions, tended to three unruly goats, made the forest my toilet, burned leaches off my legs, learned how to charge an iPod with water power, stepped in mud up to my waist, and submerged myself in freezing cold water beneath a star-filled sky.  My hands are cut in dozens of places and perpetually dirty.  My clothes are dirty and always damp.  I am, however, generally comfortable and well-fed to the point that I may have gained weight here.  

This afternoon I canoed with two others 2.5 hours in a misting rain to Raul Marin to drop off a volunteer who is heading North.  It is my first chance in 3 weeks to use internet and, amazingly, to be inside anywhere.  

I am probably going to stay at Cagalandia another two weeks or so, then head south and try to tackle Torres del Paine and the Southern reaches of this continent despite the harshness of winter down there.  I may not return to the U.S. until late Summer, but am still playing it by ear. 

JS