Here not so much for the beauty of the sculpture, which is a religious figure grasping an indigenous figure, but for the setting along the shores of the fjord.
As we walked up the street into Puerto Natales at about nine in the morning after our extra night on the ferry, I had the odd feeling that we had come ashore in a ghost town. Even the dogs were mostly missing. As we climbed the slope toward our accommodations, we started to wonder – is there something we should know?
What we saw of Puerto Natales as the windy day closed. The ferry stayed further out in the fjord (named Ultima Esperanza, Last Hope by its earliest explorer) until the winds abated, and docked as we slept, so we didn’t get ashore until,early-ish the next morning.
What we saw walking up the hill I didn’t reach into my camera pocket for, tho I should have! Rows of little wooden houses, or tin, picket fences, decorated for Christmas. The town plaza featured wind-proof trash cans, a small locomotive left behind from a defunct meat-packing plant, and incredibly densely branched trees. But there was hardly a soul in sight.
Eventually we reached our hostel, dumped our stuff and went to look for a way to visit Torres del Paine. Ever so slowly the town came to life, and revealed itself to be a pleasant enough gridded pueblo of small houses, pensiones and hostels, plus some larger hotels, and an interesting cemetery. There were a surprising number of outdoor outfitters and camping suppliers. Even the locals wore North Face and Marmot, while I was wishing for the same!
Turns out there was little need to be a morning person. With the December solstice bringing nearly 18 hours of daylight, people were sleeping in. Lots of stuff was just getting started in the slanting light of 9 pm and the supermarket didn’t close until 11.
18th and 19th century settlers found the grasslands of southern Chile and Argentina well-suited for raising sheep and did so on vast estancias, exporting the wool. As technological advances permitted, meat was also exported. At Puerto Natales, there had been a slaughterhouse and meat-packing facilities but that declined after World War II. Part of the plant has now been incorporated into a classy-looking hotel, a bit out of town – maybe next time?
Nowadays Natales is mainly the terminus to the ferry and the gateway to the Torres del Paine National Park. That’s pronounces Pi-nay, an indigenous word for, I think, blue. It’s got a glacier, blue- and green- colored lakes, silty melt rivers, a famous massif, climbing and hiking trails that can occupy visitors for a day, or a fortnight.
Torres del Paine was in the travel plans of just about everyone on the Navimag ferry, and of course we wanted to go too. Could we rent a car to go look around? Nope, all booked. Could we rent camping gear and do one of the multi-day treks thru the park’s spectacular scenery? We vetoed that idea ourselves as we became aware of just how many other people there were competing for limited space, and just how variable the ‘summer’ weather could be. And, how complicated and expensive it would be to outfit ourselves from scratch for a week of camping.
So we settled for a mini-bus tour, which ended up being a maxi-bus tour, shuffling off and on at each of the miradors, except the one at the waterfall which was deemed too windy to be safe.
Cerro Castillo seems to be the only settlement on the two-hour ride between Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine National Park.
The park is a two-hour drive away from Pto Natales through miles of estancia country, huge pieces of flat scrub? grass? land rising gradually into much taller peaks. Surely TdP is the largest money-earner of all the Chilean national parks, since to drive through on our bus cost US$30 admission each, not including the bus. Foreigners pay a premium and they are 60% of the 150,000 annual visitors (Wikipedia).
But, our destination having been named by National Geographic in the top five of the most beautiful places in the world, we couldn’t complain. And we’re not. Especially since, at the end of the day we came across some folks, Australians we had met aboard the ferry. They did get a car, and we got to ride back to TdP again with them the next day at a much more leisurely pace. Plus, we got to travel with them for another couple weeks. It was grand; so much easier to share the planning and expenses, especially with compatible seasoned travellers!
Here are a few shots from Torres del Paine.
I like this in particilar because of the lake and island and that’s a hostel on the island although we didn’t get to check it out. Colors as the camera and I saw them. What a place to wake up!Flowers and snow together. i like the idea.We were lucky, I gather, to have had such fine weather this day, but many folks just took pictures of themselves. What is with this selfie business anyhow?My first glacier, zoomed.Maybe not large enough to be icebergs, but nice and blue.Guanaco are doing well in the national park where they don’t have to compete with sheep and cattle for food.
Something still not right with the Gallery, so I’ll just leave it small.
Although we had happily been riding the excellent buses everywhere we went in Chile, we came to a place where going further south meant either flying or diverting into Argentina, there being nothing for the most part but rough tracks south along the glacier-strewn Chilean Andes.
Mirabile dictu! There is a passenger- and freight-carrying ferry weekly from Puerto Montt all the way to Puerto Natales. That’s the one, at the top of the page.
I imagined Patagonia’s weather to be like this much of the time, so I was secretly thrilled to see my prejudices justified on our first evening, looking out from my cozy cabin. But, also thrilled to see the sun breaking through the next morning.I found the kaleidoscopic clouds and mountains fascinating.
One of the reasons we came to Chile was because of Patagonia. It has mystical status in my mind, like Timbuktu, or Kuala Lumpur. It turns out there is way more to the place, at least area-wise, than I knew. Patagonia is basically all the southern tip of South America, generally considered to include Tierra del Fuego. In Argentina, Patagonia is dry and flat, diametrically opposed to the steep, jagged, and damp Chilean coastline I had in mind from years of reading sailing yarns and history of the early explorers.*
However this isn’t a post about Patagonia per se, but about how we moved ourselves southward down the coast of Chile through the portion of the territory that falls under the Patagonia umbrella, on the Navimag ferry Evangelistas.
From my reading I carried an impression of Patagonia, Chile Deep South Section, as a fine-cut maze of rocky fjords and uncharted reefs islands and under a perpetual low pressure system that made the weather blustery, erratic and generally foul, in the 40-knot-with-gusts-higher-and-cold-rain kind of foul. In short, a miserable place to try to sail. The map below, from the iPhone app Tracks, that shows our track, gives just a tiny hint of the myriad compound indentions, and no hint at all of the weather.
I’m not sure we covered as many miles as the counter says, but the internet guesses of how long the trip is are all over the place too, but always shorter.
Hence the trip down the coast on the ferry, the Navimag Evangelistas in this case, sounded wonderful. Four days, three nights, somebody else’s boat, someone else’s responsibility. I could sleep through the night if I wanted, didn’t have to go out in the cold or rain if I didn’t want to. No reefing of sails or radar tweaking for me! No night watches, and all the cooking was outsourced. Yes, please!
We were brought by bus from downtown Pto. Montt to the dock a bit out of town and boarded by walking down the truck ramp. Nice young men offered to lug our luggage upstairs but not many of us accepted. We’re intrepidistas, remember?
Evangelistas carries trailers and other cargo (including at times live cattle in pens on the open deck) between Puerto Montt and Puerto Natales. And it takes passengers, maybe 250 max, if every single bunk including all those indented the thwartships passageways, were filled. On our trip Constanza, the lovely young guide in training, thought we had about 160, which seemed close to capacity for dining room seating. A layout of the ship is shown in the Photo Gallery at the end of the post.
The open ocean part of the trip took place at night, with the wind mainly behind us, which made for such a comfortable ride that I slept through it all in my cozy top bunk. But Doug said, there and in the narrower channels, that he sure was glad he wasn’t trying to go the other way under sail.
This I think was the pass where we timed our arrival for slack water, as it was a narrow dog-leg. I was impressed that a vessel like this approached the area so conservatively, and wondered if there was a back story.
The passengers were a mix of backpackers and silverbacks, which is to say, young and old. The mid-range strongbacks, in their 30s and 40s and not with us, were, I guess, still at work.
Several groups were heading towards Torres del Paine, a Chilean national park with a well-known super-scenic 5- to 10- day hiking trail. Some would turn east and then north towards the glaciers on the Chilean-Argentine border. And some, including us, wanted to see Ushuaia, the self-styled ‘Fin del Mundo’ end of the world city, (although not too much further south in Puerto Williams they disagree, in a thinner, piping voice!)
We did have this one little French girl, and her friend, for sheer cuteness.
The uniform was common to all – hiking clothes, clumpy boots, puffy jackets, hi tech windbreakers. There was a scattering of North Americans, but there were many more Germans, and French, and Swiss (or as we came to call them, the sharp-elbowed Swiss). And there were a dozen Chileans, who were either tourists like the rest of us, or truckdrivers.
How was the food, you ask? It was pretty good! There was only one option per meal, but the ingredients were straight, unprocessed, and well-prepared, and the portions were ample.Real potatoes, real fish, real mushrooms, and a salad for our first meal, plus a good soup.
We didn’t have a cruise director exactly, since it’s a ferry, not a cruise ship. We did have a naturalist. Percy made presentations every day on matters of geology, vegetation, sea life and birds. He was a hard-working man who had to do everything in Spanish, then again in English, and he had a lot to say. He also relayed messages from the captain about expected sea conditions and how these would affect the route. So maybe he was a cruise director!
Percy, the on-board naturalist, spoke about what we might see en route and when we got ashore.
Things We Saw Underway
For us, at the summer solstice towards the end of December, there were some Minke whales pretty far away, some penguins, condors, maybe some birds that didn’t get announced, and at least 17 hours of daylight to see them in. Here is what I took notice of.
Apparently there is a pinnacle rock (named Cotopaxi after a volcano in Ecuador) right under this wreck. And apparently the captain hit it on purpose in an attempt to scuttle the boat and claim insurance. He was found out and sent to prison. The wreck has stood like this through all weather since 1963. A French yacht passing in fine weather went aboard and found a hull like lace and lush green grass on deck. A bit more info at wrecksite.com
Fish farming, a rant.
Fish farms. I was on the lookout for them on our route because of seeing tenders and supply boats in the harbor, as well as protest graffiti ashore. Puerto Montt is the epicenter of salmon boom, but also of bust, following disease among the fish, time and time again. The activity is concentrated in the bays around Puerto Montt, but I am sure that global agricultural industrialists are looking for places further afield and still ‘pristine’ where they can invisibly wreak havoc by raising an inappropriate animal in an inappropriate location in an inappropriate manner. I guess you know how I feel about profit-motivated, large-scale, confined-animal farming! There’s more to say, but we’re passing by on a ferry boat here!
We started seeing more bare rock mountains, and then, in the distance, glaciers, and even dusting of fresh snow. Exciting, at least to me, nature doing her thing. And just in time for me to see it.
Puerto Edén
Puerto Eden is on an island, and well west of several glaciers. The Navimag boats bring in diesel for generators, and propane, but the dock is not up to receiving Evangelistas, so everything is ferried to and fro in small boats.
Christmas Day was sunny and bright, at least for a while, coinciding with our stop at the little settlement of Puerto Eden. Googling around to find out what the place was even there for, I learned how lucky we were with the weather: “Villa Puerto Edén has an extremely wet subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc) and is widely reputed to be the place in the world with the highest frequency of rainfall,[2] though according to Guinness World Records the highest frequency of rain in a year occurred at Bahia Felix, a little further south, with only eighteen rainless days in the whole of 1916”. (1916??)
Furthermore, this Wikipedia article went on to say that there were no roads in Puerto Eden, only raised boardwalks, and that it was the home of the last Kawéshkar people, one of several indigenous groups no longer extant in Patagonia. In 2002 there were 175 people, but Percy told us it was less than a hundred now.
You can see what a beautiful Christmas Day it was in one of the rainiest places in the world.
As we were anchoring off Puerto Eden, I saw someone checking his cell phone. It was interesting to watch how news of a nearby tower spread through the passengers. People who had been looking around were now looking down.
There was news from the world: a 7.7 earthquake that morning on the coast of Chile, south of Puerto Montt in an area we had traversed less than two days before. With my own phone out, I heard about it by email from a friend, and got details on the Guardian newspaper’s website, then on usgs.gov, a wonderful site for the geologically inclined.
Up in the dining room, it turned out we really did have satellite TV, which had heretofore been silly white noise off in the corner, but now was showing a crack in the asphalt of a bridge on Chiloe Island.
TV news of an earthquake off Chiloe Island on Christmas Day reached us at Puerto Eden, but the main footage of damage was this highway crack.
Then they had a home video of someone’s lamp shaking. Those two items played for the rest of the day, and that was it as far as the big earthquake went.
One man down the hatch, and one on deck, up comes the anchor in Puerto Edén.
A Windy Weather Event
As we made a few last turns towards Puerto Natales on a hard blue day, the wind began to pick up until it did become a little challenging to hold on to one’s hat, and the sharp-elbowed Swiss could be found already hunkered down in the cozy lee corners.
Seas were calm, but wind gusts sent passengers lurching unsteadily down the deck.
When we arrived at Pto Natales, the wind was reported at 60 knots, which was odd because the seas were so flat, although the boat did have a modest heel.
The ferry could not dock in these winds, said to be 60 knots, so we went back out and anchored overnight. The wind blew but the sea state in these sheltered waters was negligible to a ship like this.
Percy made an announcement: the port had been closed and the ferry was going back out to a better anchorage. There would be no docking this afternoon, and probably not this night. So the kitchen made another good meal and we all went to bed.
This 2-berth B class cabin looks small, and it is. We took turns during wardrobe adjustments. The only thing you are not seeing is the closet behind me. But the beds were comfy and cozy, the reading lights illuminating, and that radiator under the window could fry the proverbial egg, or at least steam it, and dry your jacket too.
When I woke up at seven the next morning, we were tied to the dock and the trucks had already left. It was grand! After breakfast, the intrepidistas shouldered their bags and strode off toward Puerto Natales.
*one of the books I have really enjoyed about this area is by Dallas Murphy, called Rounding the Horn. It blends history with modernity, perspective with adventure, in a conversational way. It’s as if we were meeting over a beer, not over a thesis interview.
Trouble editing the photo gallery – sorry, but moving on….
After the first day’s rain there were dozens of waterfalls.
We passengers weren’t looking at a chart, but apparently there is a pinnacle rock right under this wreck. And apparently the captain hit it on purpose in an attempt to scuttle the boat and claim insurance. He was found out and sent to prison. The wreck has stood like this through all weather since 1963. A French yacht passing in fine weather went aboard and found a hull like lace and lush green grass on deck. A bit more info at wrecksite.com
Testing whether the captioning feature works
Fish farms. I was on the lookout for them on our route since, I saw signs both in the harbor (tenders and supply ships, on land in the form of protest signs – no more Salmoneras, and I’ve read about environmental disasters as a result of converting areas into closed pollluting monocultures. Puerto Montt area has become an epicenter for disaster, had a big crash. I don’t like to bury info like this in a photo caption, because it is worth way more attention, but we’re passing by on a ferry boat here!
As close as we got to the wheelhouse.
I was hoping to see an albatross, but this one in Percy’s slide show was the closest I got.
The route to my comfy little bed.
We started seeing more bare rock mountains, and then, in the distance, glaciers, and even dusting of fresh snow. Exciting, at least to me, nature doing her thing!
Excited to get under way,
TV news of an earthquake off Chiloe Island on Christmas Day reached us at Puerto Eden, but the main footage of damage was this highway crack.
Seas were calm, but wind gusts sent passengers lurching unsteadily down the deck.
Beneath my tree-hugging, nature-gal exterior, there must be an urbanite yearning to break free. That could explain the excited buzz I felt in Valparaiso, Chile, one of the South Pacific’s most important ports. I liked everything about the place: the setting, the walkability, the new discoveries around every corner, the street scenes, most of the people I saw. What made it so?
Color! It’s everywhere: walls, doors, telephone poles and trash cans, stair risers and retaining walls, not to mention the big sky and sea so often visible.
This is a hotel being build out of shipping containers. I’m looking forward to seeing how they do the rooms and other details.
Color!
Much of it is in the form of graffiti: writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place, says an online dictionary.
It is easy to think of graffiti as a kind of vandalism. There’s a lot of graffiti I just hate to see. That bubble script and things that look like letters but can’t be read (failed fonts, I call them) signal a potentially fatal failure to connect the rising generation to their history, or maybe their culture’s failure to engage all its members. So, it’s not necessarily a good thing.
But in Valparaiso, they are learning to adapt. Perhaps the citizens and city government were bowing to the inevitable, or maybe they just learned how to channel ordinary graffiti into Street Art. Valparaiso has taken what might be considered a flaw, and made it into a feature. More than a feature even: an attraction.
I don’t know how it has been arranged between the owners of the walls, the aspiring artists, and the sensibilities of the public – wouldn’t it make an interesting study? However they’re doing it, I would say that a good number of the images that are painted on the structures of Valparaiso are attractive and intriguing, or at least more amusing than the blank/neutral canvases they replaced. The open-air art museum that is Valparaiso is a good part of what make the city so appealing to me.
Mind you, Valparaiso* is not Disneyland. It does feel like there’s hard living a few streets further back (or up), poverty and politicization for sure, and some of the hard and ramshackle that comes with port cities.
The nice thing about my pocket camera is that it lives in my pocket and slides out easily, and gets used alot. Here are a few favorites. In the gallery at the bottom of the post are dozens more snapshots.
We could see this tribute to Vincent van Gogh from our window. Remember, this is painted on a concrete wall, two stories high. When I went to look up a possible title, I realized just what a referential mish-mash of van Gogh-isms it is, but Wow!
Viewed from a terrace several hundred feet away. The striped legs I recognize as a form of decoration once used by a no-longer extant indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego.
I just like the sense of wonder and trepidation that this ship in ice evokes.
But first, about the city
With about 275,000 residents (and in the associated suburbs, a total of close to a million), the Valparaiso conurbation forms Chile’s second largest city and its main seaport, at about 33 degrees South, 71 degrees and a half West. (You can tell I’ve been reading Wikipedia again, and Britannica too). UNESCO has named it a World Heritage Site for its history, setting, and architecture.
I heard people calling this building ugly, and maybe it is. But I appreciate how they worked with what was there to get something more functionally modern. And I’m glad they took the blue glass down onto the original windows.In addition to being orange, there’s a two-story van-Gogh on the side wall. Correction: van Gogh is on the yellow hostel to the right of this one.
First of all, the setting is grand, a big amphitheater of a bay whose hills are sprinkled with bright-colored houses, or weathered and peeling ones, wood, metal, concrete, brick, in a cacophony of 19th century housing styles and textures; 20th and 21st centuries too, of course.
Container port, old town, new town, maybe Viña del Mar and points beyond.
There is an potent aura of history too. In the 1800s especially, when sailing vessels and steamships could get around Cape Horn, but needed a port to stop at afterward, Valparaiso was that place.
Valpo was perhaps at the peak of its strength in 1863, about to start building up the hill and out to sea.
English, Germans, Italians, French, seamen, sheep herders, whalers, California-bound gold miners, they came from all over, and often they stayed and built, multiplied, and sometimes prospered.
Home of the world’s oldest Spanish-speaking newspaper, this building used to be on the waterfront but there’s been significant landfilling and now it’s several blocks inland.
At first the town was built along the small coastal shelf, but as it grew it expanded, with landfill to seaward, and up the hill, aided by fifteen or twenty ascensors, a kind of elevator to make it easier to reach the ‘mezzanine’. These were each privately built and charged a toll. Some no longer operate, but most have now been taken over by the municipality, with an operative toll taker.
I think this one was under repair, but you get the idea. UNESCO likes the ascensors too.Concepcion and Alegre are two of the most-visited, and painted, of Valparaiso’s districts.
We were there in December, the southern hemisphere summer in fact and demeanor. (It’s easy to fall in love in the summer.) At latitude 33 South, and strongly affected by the ocean and the Humboldt current, it’s generally sunny and pleasant (not hot). Winters are said to be mild, maybe rainy, maybe foggy.
So many dogs roam the streets. Compared to tropical street dogs, these dogs seem less-diseased, better fed, and of a more noble lineage. We see people putting out kibbles and tubs of water, and stepping patiently over the dog-mat into the store. But they aren’t curb-trained, so watch your step.
Natural Disasters
I need to mention other natural disasters as well. Chile is a very seismically active place; earthquakes and tsunamis have both affected Valparaiso. In fact there was a major quake in 1906, just like in San Francisco, California, to which the geography and climate, and maybe even the general vibe of Valpo, is has been compared.
Forest fires have also caused problems (are causing them right now in other parts of the country) which are exacerbated by the hilly terrain, the steep and convoluted cobblestone roads, and wind flow in the bowl. A big fire this year after Christmas, south of the port, destroyed hundreds of homes.
Panama Canal Takes A Toll
Valparaiso’s boom times were dealt a strong blow when the Panama canal opened in 1914. But they kept improving the port and today it exports growing quantities of wine, copper, and fresh fruit. It’s also a (relatively) popular cruise ship stop, and may also host beyond Panamax-sized ships.
It’s always a challenge to figure out the logistics of this operation, but entertaining.
With four universities (my dentist in Guaymas is a graduate of one) and offices of the Chilean Congress and several other government agencies, there is plenty of new blood coming into town. That would account for the clubs and bars and galleries and the general sense of life on the streets, even in my limited up-at-dawn, down-at-dusk time frame. The southern hemisphere summer allows plenty of dusk.
Photo Gallery of Street Art and Interesting Buildings
That’s more than enough of the dry bones of history. Here is a gallery of photos taken on various walks around town.
I’ve skipped a lot of captions and titles – sometimes it’s hard to chose a mere handful of descriptive words for some pretty fantastical paintings. Probably some duplicates too.
This puppeteer had half a dozen puppet characters, and knew how to make them work.
Channeling Little Richard.
I like the idea of using what you have plenty of.
Corrugated roofing seems a good siding, and re-siding, material in a climate like this.
In our travelling rigs, we wait patiently (good internet available) for our flight to Mexico City..
Doug and I are sitting in Cuidad Obregon’s very civilized (small, modern) airport waiting for Interjet to whish us away to the Big City of Mexico, aka Mexico, or the DF, Distrito Federal. We decided to do a little land travel this year while we still have the oomph to lift our backpacks.
We are aiming for Patagonia Chile and maybe Argentina too. I’d also like to see the geysers in the Atacama desert which is all the way at the other end of a really long -2670 miles- country. So we’re starting in the middle, Santiago, where all the planes fly.
We’ll stay in hostels, which we find good for meeting other travellers and getting useful information. We usually ride the buses (South American long-distance buses can make Greyhound look very long in the tooth) but as I said, here we are in an airport having balked at the prospect of a 25-hour ride through Mexico.
Given that the trip plan is to have no plan beyond movement and serendipity, the most befuddling part so far has been the packing. We started with carry-on sized convertible backpacks with a capacity of ~42 liters and put our hiking shoes (they are not even boots, but they weigh five pounds each pair). The bag is full.
Well, actually not. I got 20 more pounds of stuff in mine, and Doug in his, but it was packed, unpacked, repacked, reconfigured, substituted, sat upon and reshuffled so many times that I’m not sure what actually made the team. Less is better, it is said, but how many summer clothes make a layer of glacier-proof winter wear?
The entire pre-travel process actually makes me a little anxious. Nobody like to pay too much or make the wrong decisions, but I eventually reach a stage where I’ll push the next button that appears rather than parse the possibilities any longer. Then for weeks I worry that I’ve made a mistake on the booking, or have the connection on a different day than the origination, or mis-marked my calendar, forgot to set the alarm clock or the day of the week. But none that happened this time despite the energy I wasted wondering if I had gone wrong.
So here we are, waiting to board. If you get this you’ll know none of what I feared came to pass (as usual). The trip is underway, and taking on a life of its own.
