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