Ciao Chile y Sus Torros Locos

Barring anymore wild circumstances, this should be my last post in Chile.  Sunday we are set to take off for Argentina.  Our visas expire in a week, which is crazy, because we never planned to be here this long.  I guess that is the beauty of this trip--that we have the flexibility and willingness to change plans as we see fit and as is necessary.  A few days ago it seemed as though we might be here for considerably longer again.  I will relate the following story and hope that it does not cause too much alarm.

Last week we took a trip to the "big city" of Coyhaique, where we flew into three months ago.  We went to do some errands for Mary Ann before we left, and we spent a frenzied few days running around.  We returned on Saturday afternoon tired from many many hours in the car on pot holed filled dirt roads, but we at least we got to see tons and tons of baby animals (piglets, lambs, goats, calves) on the side of the road throughout our drive.  On Sunday we were out working on the ranch with Mary Ann when we heard the dogs barking wildly.  She ran out to see what was going on.  Then we heard what sounded like shouting, but we thought she was just yelling at the dogs.  We had been inside of this yurt that is on the property doing some work in there.  Luke ran out just to make sure everything was okay and I stayed in the yurt.  A few minutes later again I heard what I thought was shouting and got concerned.  This happened once before, as some of you know, about a month ago when one of the dogs viciously attacked another one.  I never wrote a blog post about this, but with the crazy wind here and the large expanses of space, it's sometimes hard to tell what is legitimate shouting and what is just yelling at dogs, excitement, whatever.  Anyway, I stepped out of the yurt and a bull charged right by me.   I was very confused, but it happened so fast it didn't really scare me.  I could tell things were not as they should be, and I ran out to see what was going on.  Luke came running and told me we had to go.  Mary Ann had been charged by the bull and was very hurt.  One of the neighbors had been crossing her property with his animals, and a bull had gotten loose.  The bull was already angry, and then the six dogs had gone up to it and surrounded it.  Mary Ann tried to call off the dogs, and the bull charged her, ran her down, and plowed her into the ground.  Fortunately Luke ran up and diverted its attention and the damage was not worse than it was.  What ensued was a rather insane eight hours or so.  Her finger was broken very badly (I won't go into too much detail, but it was really bad, as in bone sticking out) and her back was also in a lot of pain.  She sent us to find the neighbor, and unkind words were exchanged, which I also won't go into.  We then had to try to get her into the pick up, which was very difficult considering the back and torso problems she was experiencing, and drive an hour along pot hole filled dirt "highway" to the town of Cochrane to go to the nearest hospital.  I use the word hospital loosely.  The doctor there was not equipped to deal with her injuries, and we experienced an absolutely ridiculous lack of adequate medical care.  Her finger looked like an accordion and you could literally see the bone, and the doctor tried to tell us it was not broken.  Anyway, it was a horrible experience for her.  We went and got some friends of hers in the town, and we decided that she was going to need to go to Coyhaique, which is a five hour drive (where Luke and I had just come back from) to go to the hospital there.  Luke and I went back to the ranch, packed a bag for her, and waited for two hours by the gate for her friends to come back with her.  When she arrived back after dark, she informed us that she was not going to Coyhaique, and was going to take her chances healing at home.  This concerned Luke and I a great deal, (as well as her friends Nela and Carlos), but she was adamant.  The next morning she was in tremendous pain and made the decision to go to skip Coyhaique entirely and go to Santiago.  This was the right choice.  We have heard from her and she is going to be fine, but she had a bad blood infection from her finger, and broken ribs that were pushing on a nerve.  We offered to stay and help her for as long as she needed us to, but her sister is coming from the states.

Needless to say, it's been a crazy few days.  We are taking care of the ranch until she gets back, and then she is insisting that we still head to Argentina on Sunday.  So that's the plan for now.

On a lighter note, we will be spending our first spell in Argentina in the El Bolson region, working with a group of old Mapuche women who have just reclaimed some of their land and are beginning to farm.  The Mapuche are the native people of this area.  So far, despite joining wwoof Argentina, we will be working off the wwoof grid.  We got this opportunity through a wwoof farmer that we contacted, and I think our next stop will be in Mendoza working with a small farm that is also not part of wwoof but that we got through a wwoof contact.  It's interesting how this is all working out.

We have spent an incredible three months here, and we are ready for our next adventure.  We are so relieved that Mary Ann is okay, and of course we gladly would have stayed as long as necessary (although this would have involved having to get an extension on our visas) but we're really excited for the next step and to move on to a new country.  Chilean Patagonia is so completely isolated, and although we will still be in Patagonia for a few weeks in El Bolson, the Argentine side is completely different.   We will be entering a land of phone service, internet service, mail, and possibly paved roads.  The food will not consist only of torta, white bread deep friend in animal fat (which actually tastes pretty good, but you eat one piece and that about does it) and meat.  Don't think this is all we've been eating here, because it's not, but there have been times when these are the options, and when we were in Coyhaique, the regional capital, our options for eating out consisted of meat, french fries, meat and french fries.  The little hospedaje where we stayed included breakfast, which consisted of Nescafe, hamburger bun like giant pieces of cardboard white bread, and a slice of bologna and American cheese.  This is what people eat here!  I kid you not.   Here we come Argentina, with your delicious food, locally brewed beer, and phone service.  We're ready!

Back to Civilization?

So much has happened in the last month or so.  I know it’s been a very long time since a post…possibly longer than a month.  It will be difficult to describe the last few weeks, but I will try to.

Luke and I got back a few days ago from two weeks at the Sol de Mayo, a ranch that is owned by Jonathan, Mary Anne’s ex husband.  The Sol de Mayo is the most remote place I have ever been and probably one of the more remote places left on earth.  In order to get there, you have to drive (or ride a horse) about two hours through ranch land that winds through enchanted looking forests, past wild horses, through mud and over rickety bridges.  Once you reach the end of the car journey, you take la balsa, which is a wooden raft attached to a cable that uses the current to transport people and supplies from one side of the river to the other. 

We spent one night camping on the other side of the river because it was nightfall by the time we arrived.  It was Luke, myself, Jonathan, and a Chilean man named David, who is our age and from Santiago, but who had recently done something similar to Luke and I and decided to leave his life there in search of something else. 

The next day, our journey began.  We hiked sixteen miles through deep mud, up steep hillsides, down others, and through a land that it felt like time forgot.  We passed through three ranches, each of which seems to hail from another era.  We stopped for lunch at a ranch belonging to Julio, who is about seventy and lives outdoors with his animals.  He has no connection to the outside world, other than Jonathan and his troops passing through to get to the Sol de Mayo.  At the end of our hike, we had to cross, barefoot, a river of glacial runoff, which had freezing cold water up to my waist.  It was almost dark by the time we made it to the river, so needless to say it was pretty darn cold.  We arrived at the Sol de Mayo after about eight hours of walking.   There is no other way to get there.  It sits at the edge of an ice cap, surrounded by glaciers, and the beauty and intensity of the view around us was truly stunning.   There is a radio that you can use to communicate with other ranches, but other than that, you are completely cut off from the rest of the world, with no way to access anything or get out other than this same sixteen mile journey on foot.  A couple of days ago (after we got back) something called a glof (glacial lake outburst flood) happened, which is when a lake drains through a glacier due to the rapid glacial melt, and the rivers and lakes in the areas flood.  People’s entire ranches, animals and all, can go under water if they don’t get the news on their radios and get to higher ground in time.

I can’t go into all of the happenings of those two weeks right now, but I will say that we have stumbled upon a world here that is much more complicated than it originally seemed.  We worked our tails off for the next two weeks, hauling five gallon buckets of water from the flowing river for all of our water needs a few times a day, building things, taking things down, weeding, shoveling shit, and cleaning what had become a pretty disgusting place.  The man who takes care of the ranch lives in squalor, and what we found when we arrived there was pretty gross, especially against the backdrop of such a beautiful place.  The buildings at the ranch are quite basic.  Rotting panels of wood that you can see the ground through make up the floor, and in the winters there it gets to be 0 degrees F.  We were woken up by eight roosters every morning at 4, which was trying.  By the time we left, the place was fairly transformed.  It was a very interesting experience, albeit one fraught with certain tensions and difficulties that were beyond our control.   We were offered a full time job there to live at the ranch and take care of it for as long as we wanted, and we seriously entertained the offer.  The idea of having that place as something of our own for six months or so was truly tempting, but there were many factors that contributed to our ultimately turning the offer down.  We feel sure about this decision, and we know it is nearing our time to move on.

We are now back at Mary Anne’s.  We have stayed here longer than planned, and will probably be here for another week or so, but we really love being here with her.  The spring is a very busy time here, and there is lots to do.  We were out of email contact for so long that we missed our chance with a few farms in Argentina, but we are hoping to get something nailed down in the next few days.  Time is flying.  I can’t believe we have been gone for two and a half months.  We have already seen so much, and it’s hard to describe the world we have become a part of here.