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Chiloé: the end of Christendom

Monday, January 18th, 2010

The past six weeks in Patagonia, the Lakes District and Antarctica, while amazing, have all been pretty much about the same thing: nature. And the bases we’ve used to explore all that scenery – El Calafate, El Chaltén, Ushuaia and Bariloche – have all been touristy places unremarkable in and of themselves. So for our last sojourn into Chile, we chose a destination that we hoped would be a bit different and a bit more laid-back: the archipelago of Chiloé.

Castro ChurchDuring the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the subsequent religious conversion of the natives, Chiloé was referred to as el fin de la cristiandad – the end of Christendom. The locals built fine wooden churches but their religion fused Christianity with their ancient pagan beliefs, a practice that has continued down to the present to make Chiloé the most distinct part of Chile. In reality, however, a few days in Chiloé doesn’t really give you any sense of this fusion (one painting in one church aside), and it seems to me to be something that guidebooks and newspaper and/or magazine stories pick up and run with as an interesting way to introduce the region more than anything else. Regardless, Chiloé was certainly the most religious place we’ve been to since arriving on the continent in October, if the churches and other Christian paraphernalia are any indication. Sixteen of the wooden churches are UNESCO World Heritage listed sites, and we visited six of them in a span of two days (as well as one other that doesn’t have the UNESCO stamp), ranging from a completely unadorned and unpainted countryside church in Vilupulli to the half-neo-Gothic, half-neo-Classical edifice that dominates Castro, the region’s largest city. All are quite interesting and picturesque and, though they range from 100 to 250 years old, they all still dominate their respective small towns.

The other unique aspect of Chiloé is its distinct food and drink, and we successfully experimented on both fronts. The latter included licor de oro, something more like a potion than a drink, and various chocolate or dulce de leche concoctions. The former is dominated by seafood, and while the chupe de mariscos (a kind of seafood bake with melted cheese on top) was my favourite, the curanto is the dish most worthy of description. When it arrived, shells from clams and absolutely enormous muscles protruded from our bowls, with potatoes, another type of starch and a further festival of meat including sausage, chicken and beef all lurking underneath. Once you shell the seafood, you then pour soup from a separate bowl over the whole thing (or at least that’s what we did), and then it’s ready to eat – very filling and very unusual, but not something I’d be in a rush to try again.

PalafitosChurches and food aside, we spent the rest of our time in Chiloé admiring the residential architecture of the various towns, including some stilt houses in Castro known as palafitos, watching CNN’s coverage of the devastating earthquake in Haiti and continuing an eternally favourite pastime of plotting our immediate future, which is beginning to take shape. It was a relaxing and enjoyable few days and we were glad we made the decision to go. Plus, the archipelago defied its reputation of being a misty, cloud-covered land and was sunny most of the time, which always helps.

We arrived back in Argentina yesterday and spent today preparing for the four-day, three-night (including side trips) ‘Paso de las Nubes’ trek that we begin tomorrow around Mt. Tronador. Hopefully it won’t rain, the vistas will be as spectacular as advertised, and our tent and battered sleeping mats have one more trek left in them.

Trekking in Torres del Paine

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

After nine days of trekking/camping in Torres del Paine National Park, we returned to Puerto Natales yesterday, enjoyed a deserved bottle of wine and enormous hamburguesas completas last night, and reflected on a fantastic trip. I won’t go into a day-by-day rundown of how it went down, but will instead list a few highlights below:

Glacier PerrosThe Back Trail: We opted to do the full circuit rather than the abbreviated ‘W’, and were really glad we did, both because of the scenery on the back trail that, while not as famous as the must-see places on the W, was still quite stunning, and the lack of crowds (on the third day, for example, we did not see a single other person during the four-hour hike from one camp to another). Visual highlights of the back trail were the Dickson and Perros glaciers, the forest walk on Day 3, numerous picturesque lakes and trudging through the mud and snow to reach the John Garner pass on Day 4.

Glacier PumaBeing Inside a Glacier: On Day 3 we arrived at camp pretty early and one of the campsite staff recommended a one-hour side trip to the Glacier Puma, which we’d never heard of. Six of us went together and although the glacier was not nearly as beautiful as Grey, Perito Moreno etc, it offered something completely different that made it especially memorable: an ice tunnel that we could walk into, putting ourselves inside the glacier, surrounded by bubble-filled ice on three sides, with a glacial stream running along the ground and a vertical shaft leading up to the blue sky above. It’s hard to describe how awesome that was.

Glacier GreyGlacier Grey: After trekking slowly through mud and snow to the 1241m John Garner pass on Day 4, we caught our first view of the glacier that would dominate the trail for the next two days as we walked above it. Glacier Grey is enormous and as we sat on top of the pass (the best place to appreciate its vastness), it stretched far away in all directions, and we were even able to see part of the 350km long Southern Patagonian Ice Field (the Hielo Sur) to the north. On Day 5 we were lucky to catch a rainbow shining over the glacier and when we finally reached the ‘snout’ later that day it was almost as beautiful as Perito Moreno, which is not something you say lightly.

Hot Showers on Days 5 & 7: ‘Nuff said.

The Social Trail: Before we started hiking, we figured we’d spend most of our camp time huddled up in our tent trying to stay warm. But we made friends on the first day and the social aspect turned out to be one of the most enjoyable things about the hike. Our new hiking buddies ranged from married Canadian veterinarians to an American father-daughter combo (he admirably hiked the entire circuit at age 70) to a Belgian-Israeli pseudo-couple. But most of all we befriended a well-hiked New York history teacher named Darin, who followed the same itinerary as us for nine days and will now be a friend for life (or at least a friend in Ushuaia later this week…).

The Complete Absence of Wind: All we’d heard before visiting the park was that it would be the windiest experience of our lives and that we would return with all sorts of crazy wind-related stories (as long as we were lucky enough to actually survive the trek instead of being blown off the side of a mountain). And for the first half-an-hour or so after we got off the bus, it seemed like everything we’d heard would be true. But then a funny thing happened: the wind died down, and basically didn’t blow again for the next nine days. Compared with El Chaltén, Torres del Paine was a paradigm of stillness.

And, finally, the unfortunate disappointment of the trek:

The Torres del Paine: At sunrise on clear days, the four towers that make up the Torres del Paine and give the park its name are bathed in red in spectacular fashion. So, at 3:45am yesterday we duly woke up, rolled out of our tents at the Campamento Torres and trudged for 45 minutes in the dark and drizzle up to the look out point at the base of the towers. But to our great disappointment the granite peaks were almost completely shrouded in mist and there was no red light to be seen. Cold, wet, tired and pretty miserable, we walked back down once ‘sunrise’ had passed and went back to sleep in our tents. In the meantime, the sun came out, the fog cleared and Darin, who had stayed at the viewpoint despite the conditions, ended up with some great views and photos of the towers, albeit not red ones. It wasn’t the finish to the trek that we’d hoped for, and we considered staying an extra day to try again for the sunrise views, but in the end we decided that eight nights was enough, and we headed back down and out of the park.

Today is a scheduled rest day in Puerto Natales, but fortunately we are not as sore as we feared we would be. Tomorrow we continue our journey south by crossing the Straits of Magellan to the Tierra del Fuego and onto Ushuaia, the world’s southern-most city.

The curious charm of Valparaíso

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

I’m not quite sure how to begin an entry on the quirks and unorthodox beauty of Valparaíso, but here goes anyway: it’s somehow fitting that such an unusually shaped country like Chile should contain within it an equally unusually ... [Continue reading this entry]

The Atacama Desert

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

South America - what a continent! (Please excuse me while I gush like a child for a paragraph.) In many debates over the years with Wendy or other travellers, I have tended to choose Asia as my preferred continent ... [Continue reading this entry]