Patagonia

We spent several beautiful days in Patagonia, with the family of a Chilean friend. First we went to the city of Coyhaique. Coyhaique is the only commercial center in isolated Patagonia, but it´s not very big and it´s surrounded by beautiful mountains.

We visited our friend´s sister Coti and her family in Coyhaique. The kids, Gaby and Felipe, were super cute. Felipe learned to say "Are you happy?" in English, and amused us with all the funny things he said. Gaby is super helpful and plays the viola beautifully. After so much traveling, it is really nice to spend some time with a family.

From Coyhaique we took a bus 4 hours south along the gravel Carretera Austral, to Cruce Bahía Murta, or the intersection with the gravel road that goes 7 km to Bahía Murta. Our friend´s sister Olga met us at the intersection. Bahía Murta is a tiny, tiny town on the shore of Lake General Carrera, a huge lake that stretches into Argentina where it has another name.

Our friend´s mom, Chila, served us fresh baked bread that she had made, and hierba maté. Maté is a tea that is popular in Argentina. It seems that everyone drinks maté in Chilean Patagonia, too. Several people in Chilean Patagonia told us that they consider themselves separate from Chile, and that they identify more with Argentina. Although they are in Chile, they refer to the land north of Pto Montt as Chile, as if it is a separate country. Patagonia is separated from Pto Montt and the rest of the country in that there is no road, and to get here you either have to take a boat, a plane or a road through Argentina. This country is like Alaska in that it is so rough that there are very few roads, and there are many places that you cannot reach by land.

The Carretera Austral, the only highway that goes through this area (and is interrupted south of Pto Montt where you must take a long distance ferry) is an unpaved, narrow road through beautiful country. It was built in 1981 or 1982. Before that, there were just wagon tracks and boat travel was more important. In Bahía Murta there are the remains of an old dock where the ferry used to stop before the highway was built. In those days, it would take Chila two days to travel to Coyhaique. She would have to get on the ferry early in the morning and travel all day on the lake, stopping in all the villages until, at night, she got to a town that was next to a track, the precursor of a road. I get the impression that this looked like a wagon track, huellas in Spanish, with tracks from the two sets of wheels. But a bus traveled over it, and the next morning the bus would take Chila slowly to Coyhaique, taking another whole day. Now that the Carretera Austral has connected Bahía Murta to the rest of Patagonia, the trip can be made in 4 hours by bus. The bus runs several days a week. Few people here have cars or know how to drive cars, and so people depend on the bus.

Because Bahía Murta is so isolated, people make almost everything that they need. All of the furniture is hand made, of wood. Chila´s spinning wheel, that she uses to spin yarn for making socks, was made by her husband, of wood. Everything is made with only very basic tools. If you want to buy a piece of factory-made furniture that is too big to strap onto the top of a bus, you would have to buy it in Coyhaique and pay a freight service to take it all the way to Bahía Murta.

In Bahía Murta, we met Chila´s children and grandchildren, who served us home canned cherries, lamb from their farm, fresh bread, salmon empanadas, beef empanadas, sopaipillas, a lamb asado and more. There is a boarding school in Bahía Murta, and Chila´s children attended it up through eighth grade. Chila has been living in town lately because she has had an illness, but for most of her life she lived in her house in the campo, which is accessible only by horseback or a long walk. So her children stayed at the boarding school and came home to the campo once a month. Many of the children in Patagonia do that, as distances are great and transportation poor. The government pays for the boarding schools, as it´s the only way to provide education in the rural areas.

There is not much in the way of jobs here. It seems like most people have their own small farm with sheep, maybe cows, chickens and a vegetable garden. Many people have greenhouses so that they can get an early start on their garden. That would be the only way to get fresh produce around here. Many people leave Bahía Murta to work elsewhere. Jorge, married to Olga´s daughter Sole, works as a diver for a salmon fish farm west of Pto. Aysen. He works for a 20 day shift, living in floating housing on the open ocean. Then he comes home for 10 days with his family. Other people go to Coyhaique to work, or work in the fish factory in Pto. Chacabuco. Many of the men come to the U.S. to work as sheepherders.

Chila, Sole, Jorge and Gary and I went by foot to the house in the campo. We got a ride the first half of the way, from someone who owns a pickup. He took us as far as the road goes. Then we hiked by foot, about another hour and a half. Part of the hike was through a swamp, and we jumped from hummock to hummock to keep our feet dry. (Is hummock a real word, or just what I call those dry grassy lumps in swamps?) Chila loves her home in the campo, and she was beaming the whole way.

We ate a berry that allegedly if eaten will ensure that you come back to this place. And we saw huge orange bumble bees! Snowcapped peaks surround this valley. Chila´s house is below a snowcapped peak, overlooking the valley. There are chickens, a pig with six piglets and a cat. We didn´t see the livestock, but they were out there somewhere being cared for by one of Chila´s sons.

The house in the campo has no electricity, but there is a gas lamp and a big wood burning cook stove, brought in by cattle-drawn cart many years ago. We lunched on lamb from the previous day´s asado, and fresh sopaipillas that Sole made. Then Sole made fresh pan de casa, or home baked bread. After eating, drinking maté and resting a bit, we made the same hike back to Bahía Murta, arriving just after dark and in time for dinner.

Here in Patagonia in the summer, it gets dark well after 9 p.m. And everywhere in Chile, people eat dinner very late. With Chilean friends, we have eaten dinner as late as midnight. But there are plenty of meals and onces (snacks, like tea in Europe) in between meals so that you don´t go hungry in the evening.

Before we left Bahía Murta the next day, the family gave us gifts and lots of goodies for the road. I am touched by how warmly we were welcomed by this family, who gave us the best of what they have. We would have liked to spend more time in this area, but we underestimated how long it takes to travel in Patagonia, where the roads are gravel and sparse and the buses do not run every day.

We took the Navimag ferry from Puerto Chacabuco to Puerto Montt, north out of Patagonia. The trip takes 20 hours, but passengers must board the night before and can sleep until the morning rather then getting off at 2 a.m. when we arrive, so in total we spent two nights and one full day on the ferry. We traveled economy, in a cabin with 14 other people. You can pay more and have your own cabin or just share with two others, if you want to, but sharing turned out to be fine.

From the ferry, we saw penguins swimming! The ferry travels through a passage between the mainland and a series of islands, so for the most part we were not on the open ocean and we did not have to worry about sea sickness. In addition to people, the Navimag ferry hauls a lot of cattle trucks. We stood on the top deck and looked down at them. You can see that in some trucks the cattle are crowded together so tightly that they can barely move, and they must climb up on top of each other. In others, they huddle together to try to get some warmth. One had a bloody head.

Riding the ferry was a nice time to meet people; Chilean travelers and also other foreigners. We met several Europeans, a Brazilian, and a young woman named Brooke who took dance lessons from my aunt Kat in Colorado Springs years ago. She is now working for NOLS in Patagonia.

Check out our corresponding pictures on Flickr in the sets called Coyhaique, Bahia Murta and Navimag.