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.
