The Global Guy

The past week in southern Chile and Argentina have been nothing short of amazing. Before I’d come down here, I was expecting the weather to be marginal at best. Patagonia is known for it’s unpredectiable and constantly changing conditions, but I did’t expect unpredictable to include nothing but blue skies, and perfect temperatures without a single raindrop! We’d talked to friends who had done this area in previous years, and they spent days waiting for a break in the clouds to photograph some of the moutains. We never had to wait for more than 10 minutes for a perfectly clear view!

After getting off the ice, a group of seven of us rented a couple of jeeps and headed down the road to Torres del Paine national park. The roads were a mixture of both dirt and tarmac, both of which were in pretty good condition. We were making pretty good time, except for the wildlife along the road. There were all sorts of new birds that we hadn’t seen before including some amazing hawks perched on fences on the side of the road, and some wild niandus, which were what we’d call rheas in English. They were wild, and we’d see them in groups of two or three wandering around the landscape grazing on the grasses. By far though, the best animal we saw were the guanacos. These are fairly shy llama looking animals that we’d see at all times of the day, but the biggest herds by far were out in the early mornings.

When we got to the park, we split off into a couple of different groups I’d have loved to have done the most popular trek which was a four or five day hike around the highlights of the park. We were on a pretty tight schedule though, so I had to be content with just doing the best trail in the park which was the 11.2 mile trek up to the towers lookout. The hike wasn’t that bad, but for legs that hadn’t been doing any distance hikes for a while it was tough going in parts. It started out with a steep uphill leg for about an hour, and then smoothed out for the next 45 minutes to a refugio and rest stop. The group caught up with each other here, and then we headed out again. The next couple of hours were really nice with great views of the towers and some glacial lakes. Eventually the trail steepened up and we had to clamber up a rocky area for the last half hour. This was probably the hardest section, but when I got to the top the view was simply amazing! The three granite towers that the park is named after were right in front of us, separated only by a deep glacial lake colored the most amazing shade of green. Everyone from our group, and we spent about three hours up there eating lunch and enjoying the view. The downhill trek wasn’t bad, but our legs were getting pretty rubbery by the end of the steep downhills.

After sleeping like the dead we decided to give our legs a break and work out our arms on a two day kayak trip on the Serrano river. (more details later)

We stopped overnight at a town called El Calafete to see the Puerto Mereno glacier. This particular piece of ice is one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen. The face of the glacier stretched nearly three kilometers, and is one of the few glaciers in the world still advancing. It’s moving forward at a rate of about seven centimeters a day which is like an Indy car for a glacier! The whole thing is constantly creaking and groaning, and it is always dropping small pieces of ice in the lakes on either side of it. Every once in a while a house sized piece of ice would break off and drop into the lakes with a huge roar, causing massive waves to spread down on the lake. The glacier was so big that it was hard to really get a true feeling for its size until we spotted a tour boat cruising around by the base on the lake. The boats looked so insignificant that it was hard to believe that there were people inside!

Our final destination was the northern side of Los Glacerios park near the town of El Chalten. We spent a couple of days hiking around here to see some of the most difficult rock climbing in the world. The first day was a fairly easy 12 mile hike to see the Fitz Roy formations, and then the next day we took horses out on a six hour trek to see a formation called Cerro Torre. The pain in my legs from the first day of hiking was nothing compared to the pain in my butt from the horses on the second day!

After a slight mishap with the vehicles on the way back, we finally arrived back in Puenta Arenas, and had one last dinner together before some of our group headed for home. There are still five of us left, and we’ll be heading to Easter Island. It’ll be great!

Six days on Easter Island (or Isla de Pascua as the Chileans call it) is just not really enough time to fully appreciate everything that there is to see in this magical place. I gave it my best shot though, and I really think this is one of the most special places I’ve ever been to. I’d known about this place from countless National Geographic articles, and even a bunch of Far Side cartoons, but I had always assumed that getting here would be outrageously expensive. Luckily some friends and I found a great deal on the LanChile web site that got us here from Santiago for only $378.00! The trick was to only look for tickets on the Spanish language site; if you searched on the English language page, the cheapest flight advertised there was nearly $800.00!

We were met at the airport by the lady who owned our hotel with gorgeous leis that she draped around our neck. She drove us down to where we were staying, and frankly I was stunned at our proximity to the ocean. The property was right above the beach, and although the rooms were a bit spartan, the atmosphere more than made up for it (especially for $20.00 per night!).

After we got set up in our hotel, we set out to explore the town of Hanga Roa. We went and talked to the local dive operators, and found out that there was definitely some worthwhile things to see under the surface. We also got our first glimpse of one of the giant statues (called Moai in the local language) standing on a platform near the local beach. That evening we witnessed one of the spectacular sunsets we’d get very familiar with while eating one of the best pieces of tuna I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying.

The next day we got up early to take a guided tour of the island’s major archaeological sites. We started out at a few coastal ahus (rock platforms) where there were great sea views, and a few statues that had been toppled over. Actually, all the statues on the island that were erected at one time had been toppled by either inter-clan warfare, or tsunamis. There was apparently one tsunami back in the 1960s that tossed 30 ton stones backwards several hundred feet! Anyway, looking at these fallen statues was impressive, but you really got a feeling of waste, like something really significant had happened there, but had since been destroyed and nearly forgotten.

After we saw a few of these sites, we moved on to the really exciting stuff. The first really impressive site was called Ahu Tongariki which was fairly near the quarry where all the statues were extracted from. This was a huge platform with 15 moai standing erect. They had all been knocked down by the tsunami in the 60s, and had laid on the ground like all the others until sometime in the mid eighties when a Japanese crane company offered to fix the site in exchange for a little free publicity. One of the strange things about this site is that only one of the statues is wearing it’s topknot style hat. Apparently there was a disagreement between the locals and the archaeologists who were in charge of the restoration about whether these particular statues had ever had the topknots. One night, the locals decided to hijack one of the cranes and lifted one of the 30 ton topknots up to the top, and the archaeologists decided to leave it rather than risk damage taking it down!

After Tongariki, we headed over to the quarry where all the statues were born. This is probably the most spectacular place on the island, and more than that, it’s probably one of the most spectacular places in the world. Everywhere you look, you see statues in various stages of completion. Some are buried in the ground up to their necks for the final details, some are just rough shapes in the rock, and there is even one that is nearly finished but still attached to the bedrock where it was born. I could spend hours wandering around here just looking at all the different statues, checking out all the fine details and just imagining what this was like during the height of production.

Finally we ended our day over at the main beach. There are a few more statues that have been restored, with the most notable being one standing by itself that Thor Heyerdahl raised with the help of a few islanders using no technology in the 1970s.< The next few days were spent doing a combination of diving and relaxing in the sun. The diving wasn’t the best I’d ever done, but it was great to be back in the water. There were lots of turtles, pufferfish and parrotfish, and a few corrals, but for the most part the waters were a bit too chilly for the kind of spectacular reefs that I’ve seen in other places. One of the fun things that we saw on the first dive was a miniature statue that someone had built out of fiberglass and placed on the ocean floor. The divemaster didn’t tell us about it before the dive, and it was pretty surprising to come around a corral head and suddenly see it. Apparently there is a real moai somewhere on the ocean floor, but no one knows exactly where it is. The story goes that the Chilean navy was going to transport the statue to a museum on the mainland, but the ropes broke and it fell into the ocean. There have been a few half-hearted attempts to locate it, but I get the feeling that the navy really has other priorities to look into.

The last day two days on the island were actually some of my favorites. James and I took off one morning for some serious hiking around the island. We had a couple of destinations in mind, but nothing too specific. I’d heard about some lava tubes that were supposed to have spectacular views, and we decided to go look for those. When we finally found them I was blown away! There was one tube called “dos ventanas” (Spanish for two windows) that started out as a barely noticeable hole in the ground. We followed it down this tiny cave until it suddenly turned into a pretty good sized underground room with two passages leading out. There was light coming from the two passages, and when we followed them to the end, it turned out that they both ended up as lookouts on the cliff face, with an amazing view of the infinite ocean as far as we could see. After enjoying that for a while, we kept hiking around finding more and more caves, and finally ended up at Ahu Riki, which are the only inland moai that actually face the ocean.

The strangest thing that I think I experienced there was actually on the plane ride back to Santiago. I was sitting in the row ahead of this really large and loud woman who was actually complaining about how she’d wasted three whole days on the island. She kept complaining that one day was enough to see a bunch of stupid statues, and she couldn’t believe that she’d paid the money to come out here. I was stunned to hear this, but it’s just another example of the “ugly American” stereotype of travelers that I try really hard to disprove. I’ve heard that only 15% of Americans actually have passports, and people like this really make me wish it was fewer!