Chile Chico

We made a concerted effort to get up early on Monday and left the campground at Perito Moreno in Argentina by 8:30. The staff in the office were as surly as ever when Layne went in to pay our seven dollars for our fourth night in town. I was looking forward to crossing the border thirty miles to the west. Southern Argentina has been a disappointment with not terribly friendly people and astronomically high prices and the sense of a country stalled out economically. Sant Cruz province is one of the poorest in the country and it shows. 

Despite the drawbacks we liked Perito Moreno and were glad we had stayed a bit and explored what it had to offer. I have high hopes that were one to return in a year Argentina might be getting properly back on its feet to offer some optimism to people who have been suffering a lot of cuts. 

The US is entering a period of uncertainty that looks bizarre to me as the economy at home seemed to be doing well and if a period of austerity is to be inaugurated to give the US the same treatment as Argentina is getting I’ll be glad to not be there. I don’t think Americans are in the mood to be cut back economically but we shall see. I hope things will get better for everyone in the years ahead but I will miss the peace and quiet of the Biden years. 

I was glad to be leaving behind the vast desert steppes, the sweeping winds and the communities in decrepitude. The hope is Chile’s Southern Highway will be as scenic as promised as it winds through the fjords and mountains ahead. 

By ten o’clock we had joined the line at the back of the informal parking lot to exit Argentina. We parked, gathered our documents for us, GANNET2 and Rusty walked to the border post. The officials were cheerful and exchanged banter about working on a Monday morning and I made a play of being retired.  I guess if you still have a job in Argentina you can still flash the lighthearted humor they are famous for and the exit was a pleasure. 

A mile up the road we came to the change of asphalt, in this case on the Chilean side the surface wasn’t nearly as smooth as the Argentine… but it was even offer to me as the border wasn’t actually the nearby river Rio Chico, but simply a line in the dirt. 

We crossed the bridge and there ahead we found the Chilean border post beyond the river. 

You park somewhere in the line and walk to the building with your documents. You bring a passport each, the registration for the vehicle, driver license for the driver and Rusty’s 60 day permit from Chile’s agricultural authorities. And then you get in line. 

The lines can be long but they seem to evaporate fast enough and in the end we didn’t about an hour leaving Argentina and entering Chile. The Chileans have an electronic customs declaration form where you use a QR code to download a declaration form. Yes we have bananas and a dog. No hiding Rusty, who does not leave the van while we do this stuff. 

We chat and joke our way through and we saw the payoff outside. This Dutch couple radiated irritation with us and the officials and the process. They ended up snorting their Gouota for inspection. Layne handed over our fruits and vegetables, showed them our fridge and our dog food ( why? No idea) and we left all smiles and waves. 

The town of Child Chico was just ahead and now we had to get some fresh food. 

The museum we planned to visit is closed Sunday and Monday so you are spared another history tour. 

The town is pretty enough but not special. 

We found  fruit stand and it was fun to be back in Chile. The clerk was a bright spark and engaged us in conversation. It was noticed after Argentina and we enjoyed telling our story. 

Layne cruised two local supermarkets but she didn’t enjoy it too much. She sort of got what she was looking for but we aren’t going to see any big towns for a while. 



Lunch wasn’t great and we had no lake view as we had hoped but I stepped out into the ferry dock to get a picture. We had thought about crossing the lake but there is one ferry a day at some ridiculously early hour. It wasn’t worth waiting around for the next two and a half hour ride on Tuesday. 

Check that splendid van out. 

I had a local beer…

…and pork loin. It did the job but it wasn’t delicious. Layne’s cod was okay but not very flavorful. 

We drove on. It was going to be a hell of a drive, 70 gravel miles west to the famed Carretera Austral -the southern highway. But getting to the gravel highway was pretty spectacular.

The Cave Of Hands

One of Perito Morelos claims to fame, indeed a top tourist attraction of Santa Cruz province they say, is the Cave of Hands. They make mural representations of the cave in town; 

It’s a provincial park in the desert down thirty miles of bad washboard so we bagged it. The production three hours driving at six o’clock at night put us off and Layne knew there was a museum dedicated to the cave in town. 

The museum is dedicated to the memory of Carlos Gradín, 1918-2002, who carried out the scientific investigation of the cave paintings. Local farmers and farm workers had known about several such caves in the area but it was only in 1941 when a local priest first photographed them. 

Gradín came across them when he was working in the area as a land surveyor in the 1960s and as he realized he was onto something he went back to Buenos Aires and convinced the academics he wasn’t too old to become a late blooming archeologist. Eight years later…he came back in his new career and devoted his life to the paintings. Nowadays they are a tourist attraction next to the Patagonia National Park (no dogs allowed). 

Gradín had a camera and a mobile dark room which boggled my mind a bit. 

His wife, Gradin and a pupil: 

It was a different world back then as they excavated and kept notes with pen and paper. The caves were painted over millennia which is a bit hard to comprehend, between 7,000 and 700 BC. 

The artists belonged to the earliest inhabitants of Patagonia about whom not much is known, not even what they called themselves. But they left behind bits and pieces of their daily lives and the tools they used to paint so scientists gathered dates from those artifacts. 

Our guide showed off another weird Patagonian animal, some sort of cross between a very large hare and a beaver. This creature lives in the cliffs which it climbs apparently like a goat. These creatures along with armadillos and guanacos formed the local human diet. 

A guanaco leather shoe found in the cave. I was fascinated by the fact it was easily identifiable plus they found a soft insert made from grasses. They liked their comfort. 

Fortunately for the cave dwellers they seemed to like guanaco meat because they hunted them and butchered them all over the place. 

They were  people who hadn’t yet encountered the bow but they used some  pretty sophisticated weapons to hunt. 

They had a spear made of bamboo cane with a removable tip so the haft would fall away had the guanaco would be stuck only by the tip.  To increase the force they used a launcher held in the hand to propel the spear further and harder. 

And in their spare time they made cave paintings possibly to tell stories or to teach youngsters how to identify their prey and hunting tactics. 

They had a kids room as part of the museum.  

The painters used brushes and bones to paint. They filled hollow bones and blew the pigment onto the walls. They’ve noticed most painters were right handed as they painted their left hands and they even found one six fingered hand. 

One other thing archeologists found was that some pigments aren’t found in nature but must have been created by heating up the yellows and reds that do exist naturally. Geologically South America has changed, ice in the Andes have shrunk and the coasts too, shown below by the white edges that used to be above water and no longer are. 

And back then prehistoric wild animals developed in their own way. 

They out grew humans by a long way too. Check out the human below to give the animals scale: 

Gradín’s family…

…and himself, all on the job. 

It would have been a long hard slog to drive out there. Maybe we should have arrived earlier in the day. Maybe we could have left Rusty aboard GANNET2 while we took the cave tour. 

Now we’ll never know.