Marcel Proust says that the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. My third time back in Huaraz, I'm wearing contact lenses.
Thanks to an idea hatched by my friend Angie (who I met on a trail in Patagonia last year) and one last grant from Stanford, I am no longer just here to climb mountains. Angie and I are teaching creative writing workshops for teenage girls in two schools. In our first school, an NGO sponsors free meals for children that come down from the hills and cannot afford food. The girls we work with are from that group. At home, half of them speak Quechua. The other is a private school where a teacher hosts after-school programming for underprivileged kids. We'll be working with that group as well. School starts today.
It took us all of yesterday to plan our first hour of class and purchase materials. Hat down to all school teachers.
I'm settling in fine to Huaraz. On the bus from Lima, I got offered a free place to live for three months, equipped with my own bathroom, a panoramic view of the sunset over the mountains, a half-pitbull that sometimes poops in front of my door, and an internet connection. The house is on the city's busiest street corner and I have made close friends with my earplugs. All this in exchange for English conversation practice over breakfast.
I almost took a job as a barrista two nights a week in one of my favorite cafe/bars 13 Buhos (13 Owls), but my fear of set schedules intervened. Angie did take it.
And I spent my birthday at Hatun Machay, my favorite sport climbing destination in the world. Angie brought a cake, and we made quick friends with all the eccentric Argentines.
My mom got me a book on mountaineering, which turns out to be the mountaineering bible. I'm waiting for luck to introduce me to a few capable mountaineers willing to drag me up mountains with them. Until then, I'll be playing guide to take us up some easier mountains. If the weather holds (which it might not, because of climate change), we plan to go up Vallunaraju this weekend.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Vamos Negro! Afirma! SACALE LA MIERDA! (quote from the bullfights)
My several days in Arequipa quickly turned into several weeks, involving bullfights, guinea pigs, rock climbing, mountaineering, canyoning, dancing, and much more.
Peleadas de Toro (Bullfights)
For Mother's Day, Michel's family decided to do what every good family ought to do. We went to a village to see the Sunday bullfights (Better than Sunday football!!). At the bullfights, the bulls fight each other, the same way they might fight in nature over territory or women. They charge each other with their horns, trading their massive weight back and forth through their heads, until one bull gives in and runs off. These bulls are the family pets and the family pride, carrying charged names ranging from Terror to Talismancito.
There is no separation between the fighting ring and the audience... the audience stands in the dust and flies in a wide circle around the bulls. But around the audience, there is a big plastic wall, to prevent un-paying guests from sneaking in, or perhaps to make terrified evacuation more interesting (dun dun dun!). Two bulls are brought into the ring at a time. The rest are outside in a field, tied to stakes in the ground and bellowing with their tongues out. Sometimes they throw up. They tug at their stakes, wanting to get free. Bulls are normally calm, but these ones are all drugged with adrenaline (or something) to make them more vicious in the fights.
As the bulls push each other around the ring, they sometimes get closer to the audience. The more sober members tense up as the bulls get near. The more drunk members (nearly everyone) do not seem to notice the danger. Some are passed out and have to be woken up by their family members to move out of the way. One old matriarch has to be woken up to receive a trophy -- her bull won one of the fights.
Finally, one bull enters the ring at the peak of its adrenaline drug rush and instead of charging the other bull, it charges toward the audience -- toward us. People run, and it tears down some of the plastic walls. Luckily, the other bull wants in on the action and charges the crazed bull. They fight and push further into the audience. Michel has a great video of people running in terror as the bulls fight where the audience once stood -- but the video is short because then we had to run too.
"I´ve only ever seen an audience member die once," Michel later informs me.
Ampato - Elevation 6,288 m (20,630 ft)
Michel is a mountain guide and he promised we could go on a big mountain together. I picked the biggest one I could find that we could arrange not-too-expensive transport for. How proud I felt to go up a mountain with my good friend, Peru´s "Mountaineer of the Year."
But going up a mountain that tall is a bad idea if you`ve done nothing to get acclimatized. It is also a bad idea if you only got three hours of sleep the night before because you went out dancing until 4:30 in the morning. Needless to say, I felt sick with altitude sickness at around 5,400 m and we decided it was unsafe to continue in my half-fainted state. Another group that went up that same day (they left an hour before us but we quickly caught up to them since they walked so slow!) went a little further than us but decided it unsafe higher up because of avalanche danger -- so I guess even if I hadn´t gotten sick we wouldn´t have gotten much further.
Canyoneering
Some of Michel's friends want to develop for tourism a narrow canyon with a waterfall going through it, so they invited us to check out the canyon with them. We rappelled down (just 20m or so) and landed waste deep in water. We explored the canyon for a while, deciding where to set up more anchors for rappels further down into the canyon -- the idea is that the tourists can rappel all the way down, then walk out of the canyon. But since we didnt have drills to set up the anchors with, we had to climb back out for the day. I learned how to climb a rope using two prussik knots and climbed back out. Julber (one of the friends we went with) is now in Alaska, climbing Mt. McKinley. I learned that he is sort of a hero because he climbed Aconcagua in 16 hours (a feat that takes most people 15 days). He and his partner from the climb hold the record for fastest ascent of Aconcagua.
Cuy Chactado (Smashed Guinea Pig)
To prepare Cuy Chactado, you put a lot of salt on the body and lay it out in the sun for a day. Then you smash it flat with a big rock and deep fry it in oil, with the rock on top. It comes out like a crispy cookie. Mmm mmmm delicious.
Climbing
Basically every day that we haven't been watching bull fights or eating guinea pig, we have been climbing. We took one trip to an isolated canyon where no one ever goes, except for an occasional climber (i.e. either Michel or this French guy, who is the only other person in Arequipa who climbs pretty hard). There, I did my first ever trad lead!
Closer to town, we taught a climbing class for girls, which is the reason I was in Arequipa to begin with. The girls really enjoyed it and I could see that they felt that climbing was an option for them too. On the last day of the class, a bunch of guys also came to boulder with us. There were a couple of boulder problems that I could do that none of the boys could do (they were probably tired). With upward of 900,000 inhabitants, Arequipa is a big city. But whenever a girl out-performs boys, word gets around fast. The rest of my time in Arequipa, I would meet people in clubs who would approach me and say "Aren´t you the girl that climbs better than boys!?" It was kind of odd, but it got me some free chocolate bars. And the important part was that the girls finally believed me that technique is more important than strength!!
Family life...
Michel's family has many reasons to celebrate, and one reason was the inauguration of a new piece of machinery for the family's wood-cutting business -- a machine that takes big chunks of wood and cuts them into smaller chunks, at your selected dimensions!! So there we were, 50 of Michel's family members and me, the only person whose last name wasn't Mendoza or wasn't married to a Mendoza. Michel's senile grandmother thinks that I am his German wife (that he is now divorced from), and it took a long time to dispel that rumor, especially because everyone liked the idea that they could tangentially be related to a Romanian-American rasta girl...
But in all, Michel and his family have been nothing but amazing to me, and I will miss them as I go off alone again to Huaraz.
Peleadas de Toro (Bullfights)
For Mother's Day, Michel's family decided to do what every good family ought to do. We went to a village to see the Sunday bullfights (Better than Sunday football!!). At the bullfights, the bulls fight each other, the same way they might fight in nature over territory or women. They charge each other with their horns, trading their massive weight back and forth through their heads, until one bull gives in and runs off. These bulls are the family pets and the family pride, carrying charged names ranging from Terror to Talismancito.
There is no separation between the fighting ring and the audience... the audience stands in the dust and flies in a wide circle around the bulls. But around the audience, there is a big plastic wall, to prevent un-paying guests from sneaking in, or perhaps to make terrified evacuation more interesting (dun dun dun!). Two bulls are brought into the ring at a time. The rest are outside in a field, tied to stakes in the ground and bellowing with their tongues out. Sometimes they throw up. They tug at their stakes, wanting to get free. Bulls are normally calm, but these ones are all drugged with adrenaline (or something) to make them more vicious in the fights.
As the bulls push each other around the ring, they sometimes get closer to the audience. The more sober members tense up as the bulls get near. The more drunk members (nearly everyone) do not seem to notice the danger. Some are passed out and have to be woken up by their family members to move out of the way. One old matriarch has to be woken up to receive a trophy -- her bull won one of the fights.
Finally, one bull enters the ring at the peak of its adrenaline drug rush and instead of charging the other bull, it charges toward the audience -- toward us. People run, and it tears down some of the plastic walls. Luckily, the other bull wants in on the action and charges the crazed bull. They fight and push further into the audience. Michel has a great video of people running in terror as the bulls fight where the audience once stood -- but the video is short because then we had to run too.
"I´ve only ever seen an audience member die once," Michel later informs me.
Ampato - Elevation 6,288 m (20,630 ft)
Michel is a mountain guide and he promised we could go on a big mountain together. I picked the biggest one I could find that we could arrange not-too-expensive transport for. How proud I felt to go up a mountain with my good friend, Peru´s "Mountaineer of the Year."
But going up a mountain that tall is a bad idea if you`ve done nothing to get acclimatized. It is also a bad idea if you only got three hours of sleep the night before because you went out dancing until 4:30 in the morning. Needless to say, I felt sick with altitude sickness at around 5,400 m and we decided it was unsafe to continue in my half-fainted state. Another group that went up that same day (they left an hour before us but we quickly caught up to them since they walked so slow!) went a little further than us but decided it unsafe higher up because of avalanche danger -- so I guess even if I hadn´t gotten sick we wouldn´t have gotten much further.
Canyoneering
Some of Michel's friends want to develop for tourism a narrow canyon with a waterfall going through it, so they invited us to check out the canyon with them. We rappelled down (just 20m or so) and landed waste deep in water. We explored the canyon for a while, deciding where to set up more anchors for rappels further down into the canyon -- the idea is that the tourists can rappel all the way down, then walk out of the canyon. But since we didnt have drills to set up the anchors with, we had to climb back out for the day. I learned how to climb a rope using two prussik knots and climbed back out. Julber (one of the friends we went with) is now in Alaska, climbing Mt. McKinley. I learned that he is sort of a hero because he climbed Aconcagua in 16 hours (a feat that takes most people 15 days). He and his partner from the climb hold the record for fastest ascent of Aconcagua.
Cuy Chactado (Smashed Guinea Pig)
To prepare Cuy Chactado, you put a lot of salt on the body and lay it out in the sun for a day. Then you smash it flat with a big rock and deep fry it in oil, with the rock on top. It comes out like a crispy cookie. Mmm mmmm delicious.
Climbing
Basically every day that we haven't been watching bull fights or eating guinea pig, we have been climbing. We took one trip to an isolated canyon where no one ever goes, except for an occasional climber (i.e. either Michel or this French guy, who is the only other person in Arequipa who climbs pretty hard). There, I did my first ever trad lead!
Closer to town, we taught a climbing class for girls, which is the reason I was in Arequipa to begin with. The girls really enjoyed it and I could see that they felt that climbing was an option for them too. On the last day of the class, a bunch of guys also came to boulder with us. There were a couple of boulder problems that I could do that none of the boys could do (they were probably tired). With upward of 900,000 inhabitants, Arequipa is a big city. But whenever a girl out-performs boys, word gets around fast. The rest of my time in Arequipa, I would meet people in clubs who would approach me and say "Aren´t you the girl that climbs better than boys!?" It was kind of odd, but it got me some free chocolate bars. And the important part was that the girls finally believed me that technique is more important than strength!!
Family life...
Michel's family has many reasons to celebrate, and one reason was the inauguration of a new piece of machinery for the family's wood-cutting business -- a machine that takes big chunks of wood and cuts them into smaller chunks, at your selected dimensions!! So there we were, 50 of Michel's family members and me, the only person whose last name wasn't Mendoza or wasn't married to a Mendoza. Michel's senile grandmother thinks that I am his German wife (that he is now divorced from), and it took a long time to dispel that rumor, especially because everyone liked the idea that they could tangentially be related to a Romanian-American rasta girl...
But in all, Michel and his family have been nothing but amazing to me, and I will miss them as I go off alone again to Huaraz.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Now that I am back in Peru (back to poverty, chaos, beggers, tricksters, things that are the opposite of what they say they are, dust, and dogs), daily life is a lot more of an adventure than it was in Argentina. I must say, I actually sort of enjoyed the general ease of daily life in Argentina. But on the flip side, now my blog posts will probably get more exciting.
I feel like Peru is like that puzzle where there are two doors and one always lies and the other always tells the truth, except sometimes both doors lie.
But despite all that confusion, I managed to buy a new phone! Including the country code, my number is 005154975762807. You might also be able to call at 0051975762807 (thats a slightly shorter version.) The good thing about getting my phone stolen is that my old phone was way too technological for me anyway -- now I am back to a contraption that I can handle.
I am staying at my friend Michel's parents' house. Arequipa is a desert and it rains so little here that some houses forgo having a roof, but this one is partially roofed. The house is basically several square concrete rooms on two stories, and the rooms on the second floor are connected by concrete slab walkways and ladders. Michel's room is red, yellow, green and pink. There is a loud loro (parrot) named Lorenzo. This house is awesome actually -- there's even hot water!
Michel and I went climbing at a local crag yesterday. Today and tomorrow, he has to guide some Germans up a new route on the biggest mountain around here, so I am left alone to traipse around. Traipsing around Arequipa today was fairly exhausting. Too. Many. People! There is a big search going on in the Canon de Colca for a lost person. Michel is on the search and rescue team, so if by Tuesday they dont find the guy, then it's his group's turn to go look for a few days, and I will be going with. I'm excited to learn about search and rescue procedure, although the man has been missing for over a month, which means the condors probably got to him by now...
I will probably be in this part of the country for about two weeks. Michel and I are organizing a climbing workshop for women, with the aim of getting Peruvian ladies interested in doing something other than having babies. After that is done, I want to go north to Huaraz.
I am having trouble giving up my Argentine accent. I know that if I made an effort to talk like the Peruvians, I could get it in a day's time. But to be honest, I like the Argentine accent, and it's so nice to be able to call someone "che" when I can't remember their name, and being as I'm white, it's not like I could blend in any better if my accent was more Peruvian. Whatever. Since Michel used to live in Mendoza, he gets kicks out of speaking like an Argentine too and so our conversations just go like "Che, viste, sos petiza, pero que se yo?" (Do my Argentine friends know that if they say petiza here, people will think they were born two centuries ago?)
I feel like Peru is like that puzzle where there are two doors and one always lies and the other always tells the truth, except sometimes both doors lie.
But despite all that confusion, I managed to buy a new phone! Including the country code, my number is 005154975762807. You might also be able to call at 0051975762807 (thats a slightly shorter version.) The good thing about getting my phone stolen is that my old phone was way too technological for me anyway -- now I am back to a contraption that I can handle.
I am staying at my friend Michel's parents' house. Arequipa is a desert and it rains so little here that some houses forgo having a roof, but this one is partially roofed. The house is basically several square concrete rooms on two stories, and the rooms on the second floor are connected by concrete slab walkways and ladders. Michel's room is red, yellow, green and pink. There is a loud loro (parrot) named Lorenzo. This house is awesome actually -- there's even hot water!
Michel and I went climbing at a local crag yesterday. Today and tomorrow, he has to guide some Germans up a new route on the biggest mountain around here, so I am left alone to traipse around. Traipsing around Arequipa today was fairly exhausting. Too. Many. People! There is a big search going on in the Canon de Colca for a lost person. Michel is on the search and rescue team, so if by Tuesday they dont find the guy, then it's his group's turn to go look for a few days, and I will be going with. I'm excited to learn about search and rescue procedure, although the man has been missing for over a month, which means the condors probably got to him by now...
I will probably be in this part of the country for about two weeks. Michel and I are organizing a climbing workshop for women, with the aim of getting Peruvian ladies interested in doing something other than having babies. After that is done, I want to go north to Huaraz.
I am having trouble giving up my Argentine accent. I know that if I made an effort to talk like the Peruvians, I could get it in a day's time. But to be honest, I like the Argentine accent, and it's so nice to be able to call someone "che" when I can't remember their name, and being as I'm white, it's not like I could blend in any better if my accent was more Peruvian. Whatever. Since Michel used to live in Mendoza, he gets kicks out of speaking like an Argentine too and so our conversations just go like "Che, viste, sos petiza, pero que se yo?" (Do my Argentine friends know that if they say petiza here, people will think they were born two centuries ago?)
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Yosemite, Wind, Buenos Aires
Part I: Yosemite/Cochamo
Chile!
No sooner did Fredo get to his home country than we were already heading out to leave it. With no map to follow, we walked across the Andes and made our way into Chile, heading towards Cochamo Valley -- known as the Yosemite of South America. For four days we walked seeing almost nobody, but never did we feel lonely -- Fredo has this thing where animals always come to him, so we met many white horses, pink pigs and a jabali (wild boar) that decided it would like to crawl into his lap. We supplemented our meals with moras (blackberries), murtas (mystery-delicious berry), and what we dubbed the fire nut, because it is good to eat toasted in the fire.
No water!
When we got our passports stamped for entering Chile (yes, there's a passport stamping place in the middle of the mountains!), we finally got a map, which was probably for the worst. The map showed that our trail would be right along a lake and would even have a nice campground for us. But as we walked on, we realized we had been deceived -- the lake was nearby but totally inaccessible because of dense forest and large cliffs below us. The light grew dimmer and we were left with no nice campground and absolutely zero water. We had recently passed an area where a house-sized boulder had broken off from a cliff and rolled down nearly to the lake, leaving a clear cut field in its wake. It looked like it happened last year. We left our bags in a small, tent-sized clearing in the forest and hurried to the landslide spot with our headlamps and water bottles in the last rays of light. Picking our way down the debris and then bushwhacking from the boulder, we were lucky to find that there was in fact a narrow spot of access to the lake. We filled up and returned by dark, relieved to find the path again and proud to have evaded a thirsty night.
Yosemite? No, Cochamo.
On the fifth day, we got to Cochamo town, a sleepy fishing town that sits along the edge of an estuary. From there, we kept walking to get into the valley itself, where we spent the next few days. The valley is fully in Valdivian Forest, which is basically a temperate rainforest, so we were in full shade of immense, dense trees as we walked through deep trenches carved into the soft soil by many decades of walking people and clunking cows. We couldn't see anything around us, and really we just assumed we were going somewhere nice because we'd heard rumors that the Cochamo valley is very pretty. Many muddy hours later, the thick forest opened up into grassy meadows cleared up by ranchers, and suddenly we were surrounded by massive monoliths of granite!! HUGE ROCK FACES EVERYWHERE! Low whispy clouds skirted their edges, reminding us that this is in fact a rainforest, not dry Yosemite. It's definitely not quite so big as Yosemite, but since it took several days of walking to get there, it felt much more deserved.
Mushrooms!
There was a nice campground in the meadow and even a shelter to hang out in at night. Around the valley, we bushwhacked, trudged through mud, crossed a river with a Tyrolean traverse, and swung on vines to discover nice waterfalls, boulders to climb (which were great... if they weren't in the middle of a swollen river), and edible mushrooms to have for dinner.
The Great Chilean Rescue!
Then the rain started. There were two Chileans at the campground too, and they decided to do a hike to El Arco. We did not go with them; it didn't seem like a good idea in the rain. As they walked out the door, they grinned and joked "If we don't come back, get worried for us." And so the hours passed... Fredo and I playing house in the refuge, reading, listening to the rain. Hundreds of waterfalls streamed off the granite domes. The grass outside the shelter turned into a wetland. Two other Chileans showed up. Then night fell. Then more hours passed. The other two Chileans were guides for the area (but on vacation) and said that hiking can get very dangerous when it rains because the rocks get very slippery. Hikers have died even when it isn't raining -- there is a popular hike called El Arco-Iris where you have to hold on to a rope to pull yourself up the last stretch, much like Half Dome. It was pitch black and pouring rain. Fredo and one of the guides took turns shining a light out of the shelter, in case they were nearby. We slept uneasily and woke up early in the morning. It was still raining. The two guides decided to go out and search for them, and we stayed home to get a nearly-impossible fire going (it's pretty hard to start a fire in a wet rainforest, but Fredo is now an expert).
An hour later, the hiking Chileans came back! Trembling, soaked all the way through, but otherwise in good spirits, especially happy to come home to find a hot fire. They told us that a small stream they had crossed when they started the hike swelled to a roaring river on the way back and they could not cross it. They waited by the river bank through the night, huddled under a plastic bag, and feeling the onset of hypothermia. The next morning, the river was a little lower, but still to their necks (but their Chileans, so their necks are not too far from the ground!). Dangerous as the fast river was, they managed to push through it, and ten minutes later they were home.
We waited a few hours until the two guides came back from their rescue mission to find that the hiking Chileans had made it back alone. The hikers recounted their story and the guides asked "Didn't you know there was a bridge?"
It rained some more. The next day the rain stopped and Fredo and I made our way back down the valley, playing hopscotch around big fields of mud. The streams were much bigger now than they were on the way up (but thankfully MUCH smaller than they would have been during the days of rain) and some of them were impossible to cross without just walking through the water.
We got back into Cochamo town, where we planned to wait with our soaked feet until the mystery bus would come take us to Puerto Varas, a real town. I say mystery bus because absolutely nobody knew what time it actually came through. We were eventually offered a ride by a man who was of the conviction that "Women are like flowers, and I am a gardner." He only gave us a ride on the condition that I sit in the front.
Part II: Wind/Mendoza
After getting back to Bolson from Cochamo, we watched Fredo's aunt perform Flamenco, said our goodbyes, then flew from Bariloche to Mendoza. We had the seats 26A and 26B on the flight, which didn't actually exist, so we just had to find empty seats in the back. But it turned out ok, lo pasamos bien.
Mendoza is a lot like Reno, biogeographically speaking. (Culturally? Whole 'nother story). Big mountains to the west, dry desert and sagebrush everywhere else.
There, we experienced the Viento Sonda, a dry wind that lowers everyone's blood pressure and affects their psychological states. Some people get migraines, traffic accidents increase, and so does the suicide and homicide rate. We spent the day napping. The dog of an infamous car dealer escaped and mutilated a family member of a rival car dealer. There is an analagous Foehn wind in Germany, during which it is illegal to perform surgeries.
We got to go climbing at a nearby sport crag called Portrerillos. Other than that, we spent our time in Mendoza watching music shows, hanging out with family, and getting fat. I got to check out L'Aguita, which is Fredo's grandpa's land, where he is building a school. The land goes straight to the base of the pre-cordillera -- that is, the foothills before the really big mountains. There's a lot more climbing areas that are easily accessible from Mendoza, and Aconcagua is only a few hours away. Mendoza is a large city with all the fun cultural things of interesting city life, and some really nice plazas and fountains. But it is not so big that it is overwhelming. It is easy to leave it in just a few minutes on the highway. It seems like a nice place to live.
Fredo's grandma also showed me her studio (she is a painter). That was an interesting exploration in pre-natal llamas, jesus imagery, and feminism. She even gave me two drawings from her special kama sutra collection.
Part III: Back to Buenos Aires!
...in Justine and Allie's new apartment in San Telmo! Debriefing and reloading before I head out to Peru on Tuesday.
Chile!
No sooner did Fredo get to his home country than we were already heading out to leave it. With no map to follow, we walked across the Andes and made our way into Chile, heading towards Cochamo Valley -- known as the Yosemite of South America. For four days we walked seeing almost nobody, but never did we feel lonely -- Fredo has this thing where animals always come to him, so we met many white horses, pink pigs and a jabali (wild boar) that decided it would like to crawl into his lap. We supplemented our meals with moras (blackberries), murtas (mystery-delicious berry), and what we dubbed the fire nut, because it is good to eat toasted in the fire.
No water!
When we got our passports stamped for entering Chile (yes, there's a passport stamping place in the middle of the mountains!), we finally got a map, which was probably for the worst. The map showed that our trail would be right along a lake and would even have a nice campground for us. But as we walked on, we realized we had been deceived -- the lake was nearby but totally inaccessible because of dense forest and large cliffs below us. The light grew dimmer and we were left with no nice campground and absolutely zero water. We had recently passed an area where a house-sized boulder had broken off from a cliff and rolled down nearly to the lake, leaving a clear cut field in its wake. It looked like it happened last year. We left our bags in a small, tent-sized clearing in the forest and hurried to the landslide spot with our headlamps and water bottles in the last rays of light. Picking our way down the debris and then bushwhacking from the boulder, we were lucky to find that there was in fact a narrow spot of access to the lake. We filled up and returned by dark, relieved to find the path again and proud to have evaded a thirsty night.
Yosemite? No, Cochamo.
On the fifth day, we got to Cochamo town, a sleepy fishing town that sits along the edge of an estuary. From there, we kept walking to get into the valley itself, where we spent the next few days. The valley is fully in Valdivian Forest, which is basically a temperate rainforest, so we were in full shade of immense, dense trees as we walked through deep trenches carved into the soft soil by many decades of walking people and clunking cows. We couldn't see anything around us, and really we just assumed we were going somewhere nice because we'd heard rumors that the Cochamo valley is very pretty. Many muddy hours later, the thick forest opened up into grassy meadows cleared up by ranchers, and suddenly we were surrounded by massive monoliths of granite!! HUGE ROCK FACES EVERYWHERE! Low whispy clouds skirted their edges, reminding us that this is in fact a rainforest, not dry Yosemite. It's definitely not quite so big as Yosemite, but since it took several days of walking to get there, it felt much more deserved.
Mushrooms!
There was a nice campground in the meadow and even a shelter to hang out in at night. Around the valley, we bushwhacked, trudged through mud, crossed a river with a Tyrolean traverse, and swung on vines to discover nice waterfalls, boulders to climb (which were great... if they weren't in the middle of a swollen river), and edible mushrooms to have for dinner.
The Great Chilean Rescue!
Then the rain started. There were two Chileans at the campground too, and they decided to do a hike to El Arco. We did not go with them; it didn't seem like a good idea in the rain. As they walked out the door, they grinned and joked "If we don't come back, get worried for us." And so the hours passed... Fredo and I playing house in the refuge, reading, listening to the rain. Hundreds of waterfalls streamed off the granite domes. The grass outside the shelter turned into a wetland. Two other Chileans showed up. Then night fell. Then more hours passed. The other two Chileans were guides for the area (but on vacation) and said that hiking can get very dangerous when it rains because the rocks get very slippery. Hikers have died even when it isn't raining -- there is a popular hike called El Arco-Iris where you have to hold on to a rope to pull yourself up the last stretch, much like Half Dome. It was pitch black and pouring rain. Fredo and one of the guides took turns shining a light out of the shelter, in case they were nearby. We slept uneasily and woke up early in the morning. It was still raining. The two guides decided to go out and search for them, and we stayed home to get a nearly-impossible fire going (it's pretty hard to start a fire in a wet rainforest, but Fredo is now an expert).
An hour later, the hiking Chileans came back! Trembling, soaked all the way through, but otherwise in good spirits, especially happy to come home to find a hot fire. They told us that a small stream they had crossed when they started the hike swelled to a roaring river on the way back and they could not cross it. They waited by the river bank through the night, huddled under a plastic bag, and feeling the onset of hypothermia. The next morning, the river was a little lower, but still to their necks (but their Chileans, so their necks are not too far from the ground!). Dangerous as the fast river was, they managed to push through it, and ten minutes later they were home.
We waited a few hours until the two guides came back from their rescue mission to find that the hiking Chileans had made it back alone. The hikers recounted their story and the guides asked "Didn't you know there was a bridge?"
It rained some more. The next day the rain stopped and Fredo and I made our way back down the valley, playing hopscotch around big fields of mud. The streams were much bigger now than they were on the way up (but thankfully MUCH smaller than they would have been during the days of rain) and some of them were impossible to cross without just walking through the water.
We got back into Cochamo town, where we planned to wait with our soaked feet until the mystery bus would come take us to Puerto Varas, a real town. I say mystery bus because absolutely nobody knew what time it actually came through. We were eventually offered a ride by a man who was of the conviction that "Women are like flowers, and I am a gardner." He only gave us a ride on the condition that I sit in the front.
Part II: Wind/Mendoza
After getting back to Bolson from Cochamo, we watched Fredo's aunt perform Flamenco, said our goodbyes, then flew from Bariloche to Mendoza. We had the seats 26A and 26B on the flight, which didn't actually exist, so we just had to find empty seats in the back. But it turned out ok, lo pasamos bien.
Mendoza is a lot like Reno, biogeographically speaking. (Culturally? Whole 'nother story). Big mountains to the west, dry desert and sagebrush everywhere else.
There, we experienced the Viento Sonda, a dry wind that lowers everyone's blood pressure and affects their psychological states. Some people get migraines, traffic accidents increase, and so does the suicide and homicide rate. We spent the day napping. The dog of an infamous car dealer escaped and mutilated a family member of a rival car dealer. There is an analagous Foehn wind in Germany, during which it is illegal to perform surgeries.
We got to go climbing at a nearby sport crag called Portrerillos. Other than that, we spent our time in Mendoza watching music shows, hanging out with family, and getting fat. I got to check out L'Aguita, which is Fredo's grandpa's land, where he is building a school. The land goes straight to the base of the pre-cordillera -- that is, the foothills before the really big mountains. There's a lot more climbing areas that are easily accessible from Mendoza, and Aconcagua is only a few hours away. Mendoza is a large city with all the fun cultural things of interesting city life, and some really nice plazas and fountains. But it is not so big that it is overwhelming. It is easy to leave it in just a few minutes on the highway. It seems like a nice place to live.
Fredo's grandma also showed me her studio (she is a painter). That was an interesting exploration in pre-natal llamas, jesus imagery, and feminism. She even gave me two drawings from her special kama sutra collection.
Part III: Back to Buenos Aires!
...in Justine and Allie's new apartment in San Telmo! Debriefing and reloading before I head out to Peru on Tuesday.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
¡Rage Against the Mallín!
Mallín (pronounced "Mazhine"), a district outside of El Bolsón, is known for its widespread use of permaculture, natural architecture, and other sustainable what-have-yous. Despite persistent drizzling and a snowline that is quickly sneaking down from the mountains, I´ve been enjoying walking around Mallín and sight-seeing all the chickens and optimism.
If southern Patagonia was like Nevada, El Bolsón is definitely like northern California-- the displaced space between Marin and Mendocino, transmuted to Argentina, dosed with artesans, and sprinkled with extremely loud, obnoxious exotic birds. I keep incidentally running into people I´ve met before in other parts of Argentina, but more so than that... so many people I see here look just like my friends at home. ¡Everyone! ¡Come meet your doppelganger in El Bolsón!
I´ve been following people-hunches and making some great friends. For example, I sat next to a guy and found out he´s a Peruvian climber who was a mountain guide in Huaraz and--¡what a coincidence!--used to live with my good friend Andrés. He´s been educating me about reading snow and crevasses and we have plans to meet up in Huaraz. I started talking to another guy and found out he´s a devout follower of Paramahansa Yogananda (writer of Autobiography of a Yogi) and carries his picture in his wallet.
I also hung out with a Romanian guy last night. I was excited for the chance to speak Romanian with someone, but in four hours I think I only slid in two sentences--the guy spoke a lot and said almost nothing. He also carries a lot of weapons because he´s afraid of latinos...
Soon I´m heading up to Bariloche to meet up with ´Fredo, life is good. (I hope there is less rain there, so I don´t have to spend so much time at the internet place writing blogposts!)
If southern Patagonia was like Nevada, El Bolsón is definitely like northern California-- the displaced space between Marin and Mendocino, transmuted to Argentina, dosed with artesans, and sprinkled with extremely loud, obnoxious exotic birds. I keep incidentally running into people I´ve met before in other parts of Argentina, but more so than that... so many people I see here look just like my friends at home. ¡Everyone! ¡Come meet your doppelganger in El Bolsón!
I´ve been following people-hunches and making some great friends. For example, I sat next to a guy and found out he´s a Peruvian climber who was a mountain guide in Huaraz and--¡what a coincidence!--used to live with my good friend Andrés. He´s been educating me about reading snow and crevasses and we have plans to meet up in Huaraz. I started talking to another guy and found out he´s a devout follower of Paramahansa Yogananda (writer of Autobiography of a Yogi) and carries his picture in his wallet.
I also hung out with a Romanian guy last night. I was excited for the chance to speak Romanian with someone, but in four hours I think I only slid in two sentences--the guy spoke a lot and said almost nothing. He also carries a lot of weapons because he´s afraid of latinos...
Soon I´m heading up to Bariloche to meet up with ´Fredo, life is good. (I hope there is less rain there, so I don´t have to spend so much time at the internet place writing blogposts!)
Sunday, March 20, 2011
hitchhiker´s guide to nowhere
Lately I have been busying myself with the middle of nowhere.
I did a nice eight-day hiking trip around Torres del Paine, in which I really got to know my shoes and my hiking poles. Hiking poles are great for many things, but especially for bracing against wind and navigating through shin-deep mud. There were a few other people on the trek, who I would usually see at the campsites. Along the way we hardly crossed each other and so I really got the chance to feel alone -- something I´ve been seeking borderline-obsessively for a while. You would think that eight days of near-solitude walking among the world´s most impressive scenery would generate profound thought and divine realization. But this is just about all I wrote in my journal:
Day 1: "Sometimes wind can be so strong that you cannot breathe -- it pulls the air out of your mouth."
Day 3: "A game of cat and mouse: what to do about food. When I kept my food inside my tent, kittens clawed holes in my tent trying to get in. When I kept my food outside my tent, mice got it. Food is a condundrum." [The kittens incident happened before my trek, when I was at a campground in the town Puerto Natales]
Day 4: "Rainy day in Patagonia. What day is today? Rainy day."
And then I stopped writing. Besides wind, mud, and rain, I also got a bit of nice sunshine and also... snow!!! Overall, the hike was much easier than I had expected. Each day I felt stronger and by the time I got to the infamous John Gardner pass on day 7, I was walking so fast and stepping so lightly that I did two and a half days of walking all in one day. And not a single blister the whole time.
The day after I got back from my trek, I started hitch-hiking up the historic Ruta 40 to get to northern Patagonia. The Ruta 40 is a long dirt road that takes you through the heart of desolate nowhere. I was hitch-hiking with a friend I made in Puerto Natales, Daniel the Russian. Our first day, we were picked up by some gauchos (cowboys) who took us about 10km out of Puerto Natales to their estancia (ranch). They had been driving around looking for their lost sheep. At their ranch, they served us mate and lunch. I ate cow tongue. Then they showed us their animals. They put Daniel to work to help them fix a door, but in the process they got too drunk to figure out how to take proper measurements and messed it all up. As for me, they wouldn´t have me doing man´s work (because a women couldn´t possibly know how to use a tape measure...) so I spent the day reading and watching their horses escape. I went to tell them that their horses were escaping but they didn´t take me seriously (because women don´t know much about escaping horses), and they had to spend the next day looking for their lost horses. They also fed us dinner and had us sleep in their house. The next morning, Daniel and I continued hitchhiking and crossed the border into Argentina. The border guard was astonished to see a Russian and an American traveling together, but I assured him that the Cold War ended a few years back.
The next five days are a blur, but it mostly involved spending many hours waiting in the flat, windy, desolate middle of nowhere for cars to pick us up. Sometimes four hours would pass without seeing a single car. Little by little, we moved forward in the 1,300 km of desert. Usually the cars that picked us up were going somewhere even more desolate off the Ruta 40 so they would drop us off at the intersection of nowhere and nowhere. We would wait hours by the side of the road, 100km from the nearest road maintenance outpost, or estancia, or any other of the few marks of civilization. We spent most of the time in silence, since Daniel´s main subject of expertise is different varieties of hard alcohol -- a subject that is exhausted fairly quickly. And I was not any more interested in hearing about that than he was in hearing about sustainable agriculture. But armed with dried fruits and nuts, a good book, and plenty of small rocks to throw at bigger rocks, we made it happily and patiently through our long waits. Daniel had a two-person tent which we used, but it was not a good one for the wind and we would wake up as the tent would collapse on to us with one wind gust and then pop back up with another. I have concluded that most of Patagonia looks exactly like Nevada, except without as much topography.
Yesterday we made it to El Bolson (a town south of Bariloche), where I am now. I quickly abandoned Daniel for other distractions that transcend beyond the world of booze and cigarettes. The last woman (Belen) to give us a ride was on her way to a 7 hour philosophical talk about education and global energetic changes and some other things. It sounded interesting, so I accompanied her and learned all sorts of things that I cannot begin to describe, but they fell in very well with what I have been reading about in the book Autobiography of a Yogi.
I´ve spent the day meeting fascinating people who have filled me to the brim with profound insights and paranoid conspiracy theories... I am now socially exhausted. It is a bit rainy.
I did a nice eight-day hiking trip around Torres del Paine, in which I really got to know my shoes and my hiking poles. Hiking poles are great for many things, but especially for bracing against wind and navigating through shin-deep mud. There were a few other people on the trek, who I would usually see at the campsites. Along the way we hardly crossed each other and so I really got the chance to feel alone -- something I´ve been seeking borderline-obsessively for a while. You would think that eight days of near-solitude walking among the world´s most impressive scenery would generate profound thought and divine realization. But this is just about all I wrote in my journal:
Day 1: "Sometimes wind can be so strong that you cannot breathe -- it pulls the air out of your mouth."
Day 3: "A game of cat and mouse: what to do about food. When I kept my food inside my tent, kittens clawed holes in my tent trying to get in. When I kept my food outside my tent, mice got it. Food is a condundrum." [The kittens incident happened before my trek, when I was at a campground in the town Puerto Natales]
Day 4: "Rainy day in Patagonia. What day is today? Rainy day."
And then I stopped writing. Besides wind, mud, and rain, I also got a bit of nice sunshine and also... snow!!! Overall, the hike was much easier than I had expected. Each day I felt stronger and by the time I got to the infamous John Gardner pass on day 7, I was walking so fast and stepping so lightly that I did two and a half days of walking all in one day. And not a single blister the whole time.
The day after I got back from my trek, I started hitch-hiking up the historic Ruta 40 to get to northern Patagonia. The Ruta 40 is a long dirt road that takes you through the heart of desolate nowhere. I was hitch-hiking with a friend I made in Puerto Natales, Daniel the Russian. Our first day, we were picked up by some gauchos (cowboys) who took us about 10km out of Puerto Natales to their estancia (ranch). They had been driving around looking for their lost sheep. At their ranch, they served us mate and lunch. I ate cow tongue. Then they showed us their animals. They put Daniel to work to help them fix a door, but in the process they got too drunk to figure out how to take proper measurements and messed it all up. As for me, they wouldn´t have me doing man´s work (because a women couldn´t possibly know how to use a tape measure...) so I spent the day reading and watching their horses escape. I went to tell them that their horses were escaping but they didn´t take me seriously (because women don´t know much about escaping horses), and they had to spend the next day looking for their lost horses. They also fed us dinner and had us sleep in their house. The next morning, Daniel and I continued hitchhiking and crossed the border into Argentina. The border guard was astonished to see a Russian and an American traveling together, but I assured him that the Cold War ended a few years back.
The next five days are a blur, but it mostly involved spending many hours waiting in the flat, windy, desolate middle of nowhere for cars to pick us up. Sometimes four hours would pass without seeing a single car. Little by little, we moved forward in the 1,300 km of desert. Usually the cars that picked us up were going somewhere even more desolate off the Ruta 40 so they would drop us off at the intersection of nowhere and nowhere. We would wait hours by the side of the road, 100km from the nearest road maintenance outpost, or estancia, or any other of the few marks of civilization. We spent most of the time in silence, since Daniel´s main subject of expertise is different varieties of hard alcohol -- a subject that is exhausted fairly quickly. And I was not any more interested in hearing about that than he was in hearing about sustainable agriculture. But armed with dried fruits and nuts, a good book, and plenty of small rocks to throw at bigger rocks, we made it happily and patiently through our long waits. Daniel had a two-person tent which we used, but it was not a good one for the wind and we would wake up as the tent would collapse on to us with one wind gust and then pop back up with another. I have concluded that most of Patagonia looks exactly like Nevada, except without as much topography.
Yesterday we made it to El Bolson (a town south of Bariloche), where I am now. I quickly abandoned Daniel for other distractions that transcend beyond the world of booze and cigarettes. The last woman (Belen) to give us a ride was on her way to a 7 hour philosophical talk about education and global energetic changes and some other things. It sounded interesting, so I accompanied her and learned all sorts of things that I cannot begin to describe, but they fell in very well with what I have been reading about in the book Autobiography of a Yogi.
I´ve spent the day meeting fascinating people who have filled me to the brim with profound insights and paranoid conspiracy theories... I am now socially exhausted. It is a bit rainy.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Livin La Vida Changa
As an environmentalist, it is my duty to hate global warming. So please don´t tell anyone that I secretly really enjoyed having the longest window of nice weather in Chalten´s local memory. I´ve spent the past few days (weeks? how long has it been?) climbing sport routes, bouldering, picking guindas (sour cherries) and hanging out in the sun with my friends Angie and Steve, as well as our new local climber friends, Numa, Tehuenche, El Negro, Victor and some others. Now the weather has changed and its back to wind and horizontal rain.
We were able to cut back on our campsite costs by carrying our tents across town and setting up in Numa´s front yard. People in restaurants stared through the windows as we walked by carrying our fully-set-up tents on our heads. We are thankful to have an extra key to Numa´s house and to sit at his kitchen table sipping tea while the rain stabs at our tents. Yesterday we climbed some five-star sport routes behind Numa´s house. The crag is in his backyard and we could belay from his window if we wanted.
Numa wants to do a climbing trip in the US this summer. We´re trying to convince him it is better to do it in the fall because the summer heat is so intense. But he insists "I want to climb big wall with no shirt." Here, climbing multi-pitch is always risky because the weather could change at any moment. What appeals to him about climbing in the US is the notion that you can climb multi-pitch without the concern that it might be your very last.
The bad weather makes me wonder whether I should move on to somewhere else, but there´s so much good climbing here, and now that I´ve made friends with the local climbers, it´s really hard to leave.
We were able to cut back on our campsite costs by carrying our tents across town and setting up in Numa´s front yard. People in restaurants stared through the windows as we walked by carrying our fully-set-up tents on our heads. We are thankful to have an extra key to Numa´s house and to sit at his kitchen table sipping tea while the rain stabs at our tents. Yesterday we climbed some five-star sport routes behind Numa´s house. The crag is in his backyard and we could belay from his window if we wanted.
Numa wants to do a climbing trip in the US this summer. We´re trying to convince him it is better to do it in the fall because the summer heat is so intense. But he insists "I want to climb big wall with no shirt." Here, climbing multi-pitch is always risky because the weather could change at any moment. What appeals to him about climbing in the US is the notion that you can climb multi-pitch without the concern that it might be your very last.
The bad weather makes me wonder whether I should move on to somewhere else, but there´s so much good climbing here, and now that I´ve made friends with the local climbers, it´s really hard to leave.
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