Friday, February 12th 2016
The main goal for our day in town was getting our hiking uniforms washed. We accomplished this by taking our bag of dirty clothes to a local house that was recommended to us by the tourist office. We kept trying and failing to get the wifi at our campground to work so that we could come up with a new plan of action. We also walked up to a viewpoint above town, went grocery shopping and attempted to make ourselves a lunch in the midst of the food desert. The produce section in the grocery store had soft old apples, a few beat up tomatoes, onions, garlic and potatoes. Since we couldn't cook anything without access to a kitchen, our options were very limited. We came up with a lunch of French fries from the butcher counter in the store, boxed beans and vegetables and bread with jam. The day we get out of the food desert will be a grand day! It's kind of depressing to know that right across the border, 9km away is Los Antiguos, the Argentinean Capital of Cherries, the place where the cherries we ate in El Chaltén came from. We thought there would be lots of produce here, but sadly their is none!
Our next destination is Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo, where we want to do another 4-5 day through hike. It is supposed to rival El Chaltén and Torres Del Paine in scenic beauty. Its main attraction are the jagged mountains, the most spectacular of which is Cerro Castillo, Spanish for Castle Peak. It indeed does somewhat resemble a medieval castle.
We tried to gather information on how to get there and execute the trek, in what order, etc. This was a difficult task without Internet access and also without a forest service office to provide information. In spite of this, we learned that to get to there from Chile Chico, you must take a ferry across the big lake, Lago General Carrera and from there it's another 40 km north by bus over the road. However, we also learned it's only 80 km (48 miles) from the north side of the lake to the next big town, Coyhaique (koi-eye-kay). Since it's paved road on the other side, it wouldn't be a long drive. After many hours deliberating we decided on going to Coyhaique. After a day or two in Coyaique we can travel back south to the park.
We came to this decision for a number of reasons. There is no information in Chile Chico regarding the park, the local forest service office only provides information on Jeinimeni. We don't have a current trail map, just one printed in our trekking book almost 10 years ago, and we heard from the guys hitchhiking with us in Jeinimeni that some new trails have been added and that the start may have changed. We could have gone to the small town at the base of the reserve, Villa Castillo, but the bus from the Puerto Ibañéz on the north end of the lake doesn't go directly past there, as the lake is down a spur road and not on the main highway (Carrtera Austral) that Villa Castillo is located on. We would have been dropped off at the junction and would've had to walk 5+ miles south on the Carratera Austral (highway) or hitchhike, then hitchhike back north the next day to get to the start of the hike. The cost of the bus ride from the other side of the lake directly to Coyaique or to the junction with the Villa Castillo road are the same, no discount for getting off early. However, the bus ride only costs $7, so we figured we could go to Coyhaique, get park information from the local forest service office, find a hostel to store extra baggage in and not hike with it again, and also find me a pair of sunglasses, because I seem to have lost mine! We think I left them in the shelter at the campground the last day in Jeinimeni.
This is all information that continued to develop throughout the day, it wasn't until we got on the ferry at 5:30 PM that we really knew we would go all the way to Coyhaique. As a result we went grocery shopping in Chile Chico and bought all the necessary food for our camping trip, and we probably could have gotten it for cheaper and had a better selection in Coyhaique, which is a much bigger city with 60,000 residents, vs 3,000 and is also the capital of the region. Oh well.
The ride on the ferry was windy and rough, looking out at the swells, you would have thought you were in the open ocean and that's exactly how the motion of the boat felt. This is the lake that cost Doug Tomkins his life when he fell in after unexpected winds tipped his malfunctioning kayak. Now we understand why, it gets crazy when the wind picks up.
The ferry took about 2 hours and from there we immediately boarded a bus to Coyhaique. The drive was very scenic, following along side Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo and through a mountain pass for quite some time. We got to see many of the rocky peaks and glaciers. It has made us excited for the upcoming trek.
We arrived after 10 to Coyhaique with no accommodations reserved. We walked a few blocks to Patagonia Hostel, a German run place, and the only true hostel that we knew of. They had only 1 dorm bed left and when we asked if we could share it, they decided that Jeff could take the dorm bed and I could share a room with the reception girl. Apparently many people showed up looking for space, as multiple buses had left the ferry port at the same time. We feel very lucky, as we are quite tired! Tomorrow we will have our own room.
Saturday, February 13th 2016
We were treated to homemade whole grain bread and homemade lower in sugar jams for breakfast at our hostel this morning. Most of the jams sold in the stores here have more sugar than fruit! We didn't accomplish much today, it was really cold, cloudy, drizzly and windy out. After breakfast we spent a couple of hours wandering around in the two very large nearby grocery stores and marveled at all of the food. They have a full selection of produce and just about anything else we could want. Unfortunately our hostel doesn't have a kitchen for guest use, so we can only dream of all of the things we could be cooking and eating. We ended up buying a box of cereal and a carton of peach flavored soy milk and we each had two giant bowls of cereal with bananas for lunch. Cereal is not a very popular food here. I think it's seen more as an extravagant health food, and we don't often find soy milk, so it was a nice treat.
The Internet in our hostel is not working, which has made it hard for us to make plans. This town has free wifi in the central plaza, so we went there to check the weather and found that it's going to be bad for awhile. I guess the typical Patagonia weather has finally caught up to us and our lucky streak with no rain has come to an end! Some girls showed up to our hostel this afternoon, having just come from Cerro Castillo. They had intended to do part of the trek we want to do, but said the weather was terrible (cold, windy, rainy) and they had to turn back. So we have decided not to go there after all. We are now deliberating about what to do next.
We went in a few stores looking for sunglasses for me, but they were either all radical sunglasses from the future or prohibitively expensive designer brands.
For dinner we went out to eat at Mamma Gaucha, a restaurant and brewing company. It's the sort of hipstery place that uses local seasonal ingredients. Nothing on the menu was vegan, but we managed to convince them to make us a pizza and a salad with whatever the chef could come up with. They seemed resistant at first and probably thought we were crazy, but we ended up with a very nice meal. We also had a beer each, Jeff was excited that they had IPA, because that's not something we had yet to encounter down here.
<Our private dorm room.>
Sunday, February 14th 2016
For the first time this trip we have been affected by being in a town on Sunday. Most everything in town is closed today. We did manage to get some bus tickets though. We will take a 12 hour ride North to Chaitén, where we will visit Parque Pumalin, the Tompkin's other park project. Buses only go twice a week to Chaitén, and the next one isn't until Tuesday, so we are stuck for now.
We decided to move hostels, because the one we were in, although nice (Patagonia Hostel), is expensive and we want a kitchen. We found out about another option, looking in a free guide book called Get South that was sitting amongst the reading material at the first hostel. I think the guide book is made by some agency that wants to promote tourism.
We are now at Cinchao Hostel, just down the street from the first hostel and we now have a kitchen and it's less than half the price of the other place. This new hostel however is quite strange. There are 5 other beds in the room and none of them are occupied and the whole place just seems to be in a state of neglect, like the owners stopped caring about it weeks ago and the cleaning seems also to have stopped. There's trash and forgotten items all over the place and we haven't been given sheets and we can't tell whose really in charge here. There are two other dorm rooms, one of which seems to have quite a few Chileans in it. We are glad to have our own room, and don't really care that this is sort of a crappy dirty place, since we are able to cook.
We went grocery shopping again and this time we were able to do more than just admire the produce! We actually got to buy some! For lunch I made us abundant plates of boiled potatoes with black beans, cucumber slices, diced tomato and avocado. And for dinner we had vegetable and bean soup, with the first broccoli we have had on this trip! We were able to get a whole head of broccoli at the store for only $1!
We also found a pair of left behind sunglasses, so now we no longer have to shop for a new pair and that is nice, since neither of us like shopping. We especially don't like shopping when it feels like you're in a maze wandering the city streets, going in one tiny store after another looking at the dismal selections. The central plaza here is in the shape of a pentagon and the rest of the town is built out around it, which makes it a little confusing to get around. Everywhere else we've been the streets are generally always a perfect grid.
We stayed in the hostel all day, because we had nothing better to do and also feared being locked out, since there is no one here to let us back in. From about 3 to 11 we were the only ones here. During that time we had a look in the other dorm rooms and found that a few of the beds were still made up with sheets, so we took them and made our beds. The whole day we just couldn't get over how weird it all was, we feel like squatters! It wasn't until about 11 pm that some of the other hostel guests showed up and we determined that many of them had keys for the door. They were all young and stayed up all night drinking crappy beer, but luckily our earplugs provided us protection from the noise.
Monday, February 15th 2016
We decided we had better get out of this crazy hostel for a few hours today. We had heard that Mamma Gaucha, the brewery where we ate on Saturday night has another location called Casa Tropera. It's a little ways out of town, but we figured walking there would give us something to do. We went to the tourist information center to ask for directions and had the route highlighted on a map for us. The restaurant is further out than what the map shows, but it seemed pretty straightforward. We were told it would only be about 2 km. We visited a couple view points along the way, walking above the Río Simpson, then down into the valley, across the river and up a switch backing road on the other side of the valley. The road branched many times, but we kept to the main road. After about an hour of walking we reached an airstrip. We knew that the restaurant was supposed to be on the road to the airstrip, but it seemed we had been walking too long. We saw a guy coming out of a building and getting into a car. Jeff flagged him down and I asked him where the brewery was. He told us we'd already passed it and offered to take us back. It turned out to be down down one of the side roads. Oh well, we got some much needed exercise after a couple of lazy days in town!
We had a fantastic meal of burgers and fries and beers! The fries were so good that we ordered an extra basket of them. And they even had a nice veggie burger with a garbanzo bean patty and lots of vegetable toppings. It's days like this that we feel like average tourists, doing things that most people would consider a fine way to spend time in a foreign city and not feel the need to do any more in depth exploring and definitely not anything strenuous! So on these sorts of days, we are Señor Turista (Mr. Tourist) or as Jeff prefers Señor Visitante (Mr. Vistor). We came up with these names because they are always on the signs at public use areas and it always makes us chuckle. Example: Señor Visitante please don't litter, etc.
After lunch we walked back into town and went for a pot of tea and a slice of cake at Café de Mayo. And after that we went and lounged in the grass of the central plaza. The plaza was so full of people, you'd think it was a weekend. Maybe it's because they have free wifi, but I think in general Chileans enjoy and use their outdoor spaces more than people of the United States.
We had a great day being Señor Visitante. The sun even came out for awhile! The mountains remained stormy all day though, so we are still glad we made the decision not to do the trek.
We are now back at our hostel and have learned that it will be shutting down tomorrow because the owners possibly split up? One is in New Zealand and the other decided to become a traveling musician we hear. There is a strange hippie collecting the money from people who are currently staying here. We are unsure how he fits into the picture. Several other foreigners arrived this evening, and now the place feels a little more normal. It is still quite filthy though, they must have stopped cleaning it weeks ago! I couldn't take it anymore, and actually did a little tidying up in the kitchen and in our room. But I won't go near the poo paper cans in the bathroom! No toilet paper gets flushed down here. Apparently the pipes can't handle it. Anyway the wastebaskets have been overflowing and then getting soaked with people's shower water, so Jeff was a Good Samaritan and used an empty wine bottle to cram all the soiled paper and garbage a little deeper into the baskets.
We are all packed up for our early departure tomorrow. We will be getting on an 8 AM bus to Chaitén. The ride should take 12 hours. I have packed us a nice lunch box of veggie sandwiches (tomato, onion, avocado, cucumber), peanut butter and apples, dried apricots, dark chocolate and cookies.
Our breakfast is ready to go for the morning too. I took advantage of the kitchen one last time and made us some mote that I found in the kitchen. Mote is wheatberries that have been nixtamalized or alkalinized. It is a similar process to what is done with corn for tortillas and tamales in Mexican cuisine. You can not find wheatberries in this form in the US. Once cooked, the texture is similar to pearled barley. The mote is used to make the typical dish called mote con Huesillos (stewed wheat berries and peaches). I mentioned this food a few blogs ago, when we purchased some from a street vendor in Santiago. I have created my own version by cooking the wheatberries with cinnamon and mixing in the delicious canned peaches that we love so much.
(Here is a neat article about it for anyone who is interested: http://eatingchile.blogspot.cl/2009/10/mote-con-huesillos-chiles-favorite.html?m=1)
<One good thing about all our extra walking today and not taking the most direct route to the restaurant is that we got to see the maté monument! It was in a roundabout on the highway.>
<Río Simpson and pretty cliffs in the distance.>
<Delicious meal at Casa Tropera.>
<Casa Tropera.>
<Rock at top middle is know as Cabeza Del Indio/Indian Head rock. If you take a good look you'll see it really does resemble a human profile!>
Dear Señor y señora visitante,
ReplyDeleteLove the maté monument. Only in Argentina. Like the chicken monuments in every town of France. Every place has its "thing", I guess. Sounds like you could have taken over the B&B and run it yourself. Wonder if the couple who ran it actually owned it?
Señor Senior
Yes I think they were the owners and it sounded like maybe they had hoped to get someone else to run it for awhile, but that didn't happen, so they were forced to close its. Perhaps it will reopen in a year or something. I could definitely have run it better than the brightly clothed dreadlocked hippie! I think I would be good at running a hostel, but eventually the dirty backpackers not cleaning up after themselves would wear in my nerves!
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