Chaitén

It was hot yesterday, really hot and I got sunburned.  At last summer has arrived though for how long who knows. This is Patagonia and this below is where we ended the day, under the sun: 

The day started a few miles outside the village of Chaitén and it promised sunshine when I took Rusty out for his walk.

It was a spectacular campsite but unfortunately Layne found the shower to be too funky. 

We set off to see town and find a free campsite, not that we’ve had much luck for lo these many miles. 

Chaiténis a town of 1400 people nowadays with a pretty messed up history. Right now it’s a ferry port with ships going left and right up and down the fjords and we’re riding one on Sunday. 

This is also a junction where tourists gather not only because of the various ferries but also because of the national parks around. 

Whitewater rafting, hiking, and camping are big around here. 

Doug Tompkins, the founder of Elite clothing spent his fortune here preserving wilderness by buying up land and donating it to the people of Chile. 

It was a plan viewed with a great deal of suspicion and resistance from business interests but he managed to make it work and after he died he was buried in the Pumalin-Doug Tompkins National Park. Not that a tourist with a dog could go check it out in a national park. 

We listened to the audio edition of this book. It’s a good story well told and even if Tompkins was an obsessive asshole he comes out of the story like a charming hero and you want to shed a tear when he dies. That he didn’t like dogs is definitely a character flaw but he’d have loved Rusty. Actually not. 

Meanwhile we checked out the museum dedicated to the destruction of the town of Chaitén. Destruction? Just wait and see because this is a bizarre story. 

The second of May 2008 a volcano previously considered dormant spewed a tower of ash twelve miles into the air. It started after prolonged seismic activity, at one o’clock in the morning just to add to the drama. No one felt compelled to evacuate and the government had no plan. 

In the photo above of a model on display in the museum you can see the Chaitén volcano crater, the white circle and the town far below off to the right at the end of the white valley. Below you can see the column of ash from a video we watched. 

Luckily the ash column didn’t collapse or the city would have vanished like Pompeii but the town was covered a several inches of fine gray talcum powder. No one evacuated. The government prepared no plans. 

The volcano was so dormant ranchers used the crater as a summer pasture as it was circular and closed and secure for their cattle. That’s how dormant it was. See what a strange shape it was with a cond inside the crater? That’s because it was filled with an unusually liquid magma which was going to pour out and cause chaos. 

But first it started to rain and it rained so hard and so long the ash turned to cement. And then the magma started to flow and the water poured down the mountain in a huge flood of liquid lava water rocks tree trunks and that swept into town. The city of Chaitén got flooded, this wasn’t the classic lava flow from a volcano but it was a winter storm mixed with everything else that killed the town. The government suddenly struggled to get people, but not their animals, out. 

The black rock, obsidian, the brown rock and the white rock are all products of the eruption but they were produced by different cooling rates. 

Below you can see why the flow went straight down the valley into Chaitén. The mess flowed out to sea a quarter of a mile and created a whole new coastline away from the city. 

Below you see aerial photos, on the left before and on the right after. 

A flooded house never repaired. It reminded me of hurricane damaged homes. 

Down that valley came the flood. 

That’s the path: 

The wisps of steam are at the summit of the Chaitén volcano. You can hike up there nowadays if you want. 

4,000 people from the city were displaced for two years and their pets were rescued I was pleased to see. The government set aside millions to relocate the town up the coast away from the valley that leads up to the volcano. And then as if on a schedule the city of Concepcion got flattened by an earthquake in 2010. 

All the money and plans went to Concepcion where two million people were displaced and the two thousand former residents had to fend for themselves. So they did and the town that was declared dead is back. And that to the south is the Corcovado Volcano: 

Six years after the last refugees returned the town looks pretty decent. 

Check out the new housing: 

“Here Chile recovers.”

They are building a new hospital. One has to hope the volcano won’t blow up again before it again is expected to be dangerous in two hundred years. 

Then we had to get ferry tickets to cross the water to Chiloé Island. We were there for three days in December but we want to fiend more time exploring. 

We are scheduled to cross to the city of Castro, the capital of Chiloé at 9 am Sunday in a seven hour crossing. 

It means an early start so we can get Rusty walked and comfortable to ride the van with us. With all these ferries he’s an old sea dog by now. Later this year I want to be riding a barge down the Amazon and I am confident now he can handle it if we do it. 

Even though the water is now four hundred yards away…they have a nice waterfront boardwalk now. 

We drive north to look for a wild camp listed on iOverlander and naturally at one point the damned Carretera Austral turned to gravel again. 

At least this time we only had one and a half miles of pavement and then we turned up a creek to camp. That’s the Pumalin National Park whose ranger station and trail head is a short walk up the road from here. 

It’s a popular spot to park for the day or to camp alongside the creek. 

It’s a pretty spot with no facilities but we go have the sounds of rushing water which is nice, when it’s not the sound of rain. 

It rained our first night here after a lovely sunny day. 

It’s just summer in Patagonia. A bit wet, sorry about that. 

Pinochet, Honey And Weirdos

Rusty was moaning to be let out and I couldn’t blame him as it was 8:30, so I tumbled out of bed and went out with him into a damp misty world filled with the promise of sunshine. Layne didn’t move from under her blankets. 

The only annoyance in this campground outside the town of La Junta was sheep. Rusty is not fond of sheep and he starts pointing like a gun dog when he sees them so I was forced to trail around behind him through damp bushes as he pursued his morning smells. I like the campground but this doesn’t do. The joy of Latin American campgrounds is an absence of leash rules unless, as in this case, there is a good reason for them.  

The sun took over by ten in the morning and I was deep into Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” 93 chapters of small vignettes of life in 1970s Argentina, a Patagonia full of eccentrics and pre-internet isolation, a world that has I think vanished along with the troubled young man who wrote so beautifully. 

Well, Layne finished her shower. I filled the water tank with the campground potable hose and off we went to find our very expensive laundry. 

$30 to wash this and it was beautifully done, all 13 pounds of it (6 kilos). The most expensive laundry of the trip though Costa Rica came a close second. 

La Junta showing off in the sunshine.  1400 residents, a hub for cattle drives to Argentina three days across the Andes in the last century and one more oddity I finally discovered. 

We needed Dea from Kansas City to shout “Tope!” as I had to swerve wildly to avoid this one that I hadn’t noticed. Luckily the bump was across only half the street. Those little rubber things are lethal at speed. 

We bought a jar of honey from the owner of the campground. La Junta is famous for cheese and honey so we had to add the honey to the cheese we had already bought. Obviously. 

Check out this oddity, below, it’s a monument to the Dictator Augusto Pinochet who ruled from 1973 when he had his predecessor Salvador Allende murdered to 1990 when democracy was slowly but peacefully restored. From that miserable period of torture and murder there is only one monument left in Chile and you’re looking at it. 

Pinochet got 10,000 soldiers to work on this highway connecting isolated communities like La Junta and it was only completed in 2003 shortly before his death. La Junta had been so isolated prior to the Carretera Austral they were more connected to Argentina than Chile. So this monument thanking the dictator is the last such public act of recognition for the man who killed and tortured thousands of his opponents. 

The government announced in 2023, the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup that the monument was going to be transformed into a public recognition of the soldiers who labored to build the highway. But lucky me, I got to see it still in its original form. Now history can be rewritten and the dictator who tortured his own people properly forgotten but I’ve seen this weird monument with my own eyes. 

Happily this was a day of pavement, in upgrade from Pinochet’s original dirt single track road, and the weather was glorious making Chile look splendid. 

A high of 73 under blazing sunshine. 

I feel rather shallow sometimes thanks to my need of sunshine, where cold and gray and wet gets to me. 

High summer and the peaks are still showing ice. 

This was a long drive through a national park, shown by the rather eccentric wood covering the usual metal guardrails and even though this was Corcovado National Park the highway was lined with fencing making pulling off the highway to camp challenging. 

It was not planned to be a rush to drive 89 miles to Chaitén the next decent sized town and after an hour we stopped for an early lunch at noon, for which we had planned by skipping breakfast. Just as well, as this was my portion of roast lamb: 

The lady who owns the restaurant laughed at me struggling with my knife and fork and encouraged me to dig in with my bare hands. It was a savage lunch and good value at $15 a plate. Left overs went to the fridge onboard.  

The rest of the day went weird as though the gods had decided to mess with us. First we planned to stop for the day early in keeping with our general inability to make progress…Rusty keeps us out of the parks but this strange isolated valley bordered by massive mountain peaks looks really cool under bright sunny skies and given that we probably won’t be back in Patagonia any time soon we wanted to pause and enjoy the glorious day. Especially after so many cold windy days. So we tried to find a spot to lounge which turned out to be impossible. Exhibit 1:

The lady offered to let us camp at her restaurant but a combination of her own barking dog Andes field full of sheep made us think that was not going to be a peaceful option. So fifteen minutes up the road we pulled over above. Not level full of rocks and not able to pull off the road any distance. Usually we don’t hear traffic but even Layne the noise tolerant said there was too much truck noise down the hill. We moved on. 

Next Layne texted a campground on WhatsApp which on iOverlander was rated as pretty expensive by previous visitors. We got a message back saying $55 a night. That wasn’t on the cards. Bugger. 

We drive on enjoying the panorama along this famous highway which I have taken to thinking of as the Blue Ridge Parkway for its high proportion of tourist traffic. 

Lots of bicycles of course all going south and tons of single lane bridges just to keep you alert. 

This spot looked good on iOverlander, an open space next to the bridge. It was packed with a few vans and tons of pickups and roof top tents. No room for us at this inn. 

We pressed on enjoying the views. 

And then, for the first time on this trip we got creeped out. There was a camp site listed at the end of a disused runway right off the highway. We didn’t expect much but the afternoon was slipping away so we thought to give it a try. No sooner had we parked at the very end and thrown open our doors to the fresh air than a big white older Mitsubishi raved down the dirt and sloped to a halt behind our van. Right behind. 

I went out to say hello and give him a chance to say we were trespassing or something but the man at the wheel, a little younger than me gave me a limp hand through the window and made small talk: stopped to rest have you? On vacation? And I went back to the van. He stayed parked right behind us with barely enough room to open our back doors, this on a huge empty gravel air strip. The woman sitting next to him said nothing to me but we could hear the low mutter of voices. After ten or 15 minutes he started the engine and pulled alongside letting his diesel engine idle. Then he drove off. We packed up and left before he could get back with reinforcements. 

That clearly wasn’t going to work for us. We speculated about his weirdness for a while but whatever he was up to he didn’t want us around. 

We didn’t know whether to be pissed off or laugh. This one day we wanted to find a nice spot to just sit out and enjoy the sun it was not going to happen for us.  

There are not a lot of camping spots shown along this valley and the ones listed seem most frequently to be listed for bicycles, small out of sight pieces of flat land for a tent, not free camping in a van. 

Then we came to another formal campground. We drove in, found a spot in this big green field, empty except for the camp host a greasy man in a wife beater who came up as I was ordaining our spot and wanted $15 for a night. Then he started making a fuss about Rusty, possibly shitting in the grass, monotone i said I’m used to picking up after him, or annoying the other campers…screw this I said and then he started backing down like he wanted a bribe to accept us with a dog. Just say yes or no to dogs but don’t screw around. That was that and off we went. 

By now we were just laughing as clearly this was not our day. More scenery. 

Three and a half miles from Chaitén we saw another sign. We had planned at this point, five o’clock, to just go into the port and look up a campground in the town itself. We pulled off not sure what to expect. 

No problem she said when we asked about Rusty. $20 a night hot showers no WiFi or electricity and a river nearby which locals swim in but not us. 

It turned out to be a nice spot except of course for one fly in the ointment, a tent camper nearby screeching like a banshee playing cards with his family. But considering the rest of the day’s struggles he seems like he is more of a problem for himself than us. I’d like to think he’s developmentally disabled as he yells incoherently and unexpectedly and  feel grateful his family is standing by his bad mannered antics showing him a good time. 

All day to drive 85 miles in a perfectly decent highway. That’s the joy of being retired.