We elected to stay in a hospedajae (hotel)
in the event that it might rain and to dry things out. We are at about the
cheapest room in town which is about thirty dollars. When we went around town looking
for a room they ask if we need a matrimonio room which to them is one and the
same meaning something larger than single beds.
The proprietor of the inn also has a supermarket up front that has good
produce. You walk through her kitchen to
get to the rooms. Yesterday at one point there were six people in the
supermarket and there was a serious
traffic jam.
One interesting custom at the restaurants
is that you can’t split a meal. The waitress will just look at you in a
befuddled way. This is not just because Laurie can’t speak the language well
enough either. A couple next to us from Santiago said that it is not the custom
and you are just trying to buck the system by asking. In our case we just
wanted to split the large portion of meat we were seeing on other people’s
plates. We get the impression that foreigners often get charged different rates
than the locals. The place we stopped at outside of Bahia Murta the waitress if
you could call her that charged the Kansas couple for every cup of tea they had
and they had several. But today in Bertrand Laurie ordered one tea and we both
had hot water and they charged us for only one. They never expect a tip even in
restaurants and it is a good thing as they serve you and forget you pretty
much. I am not sure which I like more, that or in the US where they come to
your table constantly to serve you water trying too hard for a tip. Speaking of water even though most of the
towns have great water coming from some mountain fed stream when you buy a meal
they don’t serve it - ever. If you ask for it they try to sell you bottled
water either with or without gas or hot water.
Laurie has learned how to ask for a glass of water which doesn’t seem to
be problem.
On the way out of Tranquilo we stopped for
a very good bowl of soup which was basically vegetable beef but homemade. It is
called carbonada locally which in this case was served with extra special deep
fried pan (white rolls). That cost us about eight dollars apiece which is a
common price that seems to get charged for meals for foreigners. They don’t call it high season for nothing. Also
it dawned on me the other day that you almost never see any sort of ethnic
choice when it comes to restaurants like Mexican or Chinese. In some of the bigger towns you may see a
Chinese restaurant but they are very very rare even in Santiago.
You can cook up your own meals for much
cheaper and produce is very reasonably priced. Often the produce looks bad
compared to what you see in US supermarkets because typically it is not
refrigerated or sprayed with water but surprisingly to us and other cyclists it
often tastes better than the US produce.
That may have something to do with our rather constant hungry state from
the amount of calories we are burning.
The afternoon touring of fifty k south from
Tranquilo around the lake was one of the best we have had. There were beautiful
mountains all around the lake with the mountains to the west nearest us having
huge glaciers often from the edge of the ice field. The lake, like a lot of
glacier fed lakes looks like some fake green blue color like a cheap touristy
post card. Luckily it was a clear day and the dirt roads were good. We had
heard that the riding from Tranquilo to Cochrane was difficult but that must be
from the other direction with head winds.
Also we will be following the Rio Baker which is the outlet of the huge
lake to Cochrane today so we are hoping the warning pertain to travel from the
other direction. The Rio Baker region is
supposed to rival Torres del Paine. We ran into some kayak guide from Futtalafu
who talked about the Rio Baker for whitewater.
We spent the night in an abandoned gravel
pit with little or no garbage just outside of a very high end lodge complete
with an activity director. The rooms there started at a hundred and sixty US
but from the looks of it the cabins went for a lot more than that. There was a hotel at a hot springs back in
Puyuhuapi that went for four hundred a night. The hot springs on the other side
of the lake near route 7 was twenty eight a person! Some of the attractions
down here seem like they are priced for status appeal for wealthy South Americansso
they can clarify their status when mentioning where they stayed and what
activities they did. We have a better view here from the gravel pit than they
do down at the Hacienda Tres Lagos although they have landscaping done by a
professional landscape architect unlike our gravel pit. They however do not get
to walk around naked around the grounds. We pulled in a bit late and have been
seeing some of the best scenery of our lives so mostly we were just looking for
some place that was conducive to snoring.The gravel pit appears to be sediment
from a glacial moraine and is of wildly unsorted sizes with a large variety of
rocks. I wish I knew more about geology as there are a lot of different types
of rocks like granite of all colors some fine grained and some course, there is
a fair amount of what looks like metamorphic rock and the tourist feature in
the lake was marble.
For some reason there are more upscale
places on this end of the lake in fact they are some of the most upscale ones
we have seen but for some reason the next valley to the north that we thought
was more stunning had just cheap sheep herders shacks. It is all about the
marketing and development I guess like Pronghorn or Sunriver in Central Oregon. It turns out if we would have grunted up one
last hill and made it back down to Lago Bertrand in a couple of kilometres we
could have had our choice of great camps with mountain views right on the lake.
The only reason we did not do that is because the map showed three towns within
a couple of kilometres so we thought it might be pay camping only if any. The three towns amounted to three houses and
they were just low budget herder houses.
Those people could care less really if you want to sleep out in a
pasture.
When we made it to Bertrand on the Rio
Baker where it exits the big lakes it was raining and the wind was howling from
every direction. A Canadian river guide there said it had been that way for at
least a couple days. We thought that was odd because we had had some real nice
weather just relatively a short ways away the day before. The weather was so
bad we thought it was a front or something and considered getting a room. After a hot cup of tea we decided to push on
and not far out of Bertrand the weather got quickly better including the wind. As near as I can figure the weather in
Bertrand was created because the winds were coming out of the northwest for a
couple of days so they would have been blowing across the huge ice cap. Bertrand
is at the south eastern end of the ice cap so it had its own weather system
created from the cold most air off the glaciers as it collided with air that
wasn’t. When we looked back in that
direction the weather still looked nasty.
The Rio Baker was big and that beautiful
blue green color but the white water did not look all that great. They were
taking people down it in sea kayaks. It kind of reminded me of the Hells Canyon
of the Snake River or the Grand Canyon with mostly flat water punctuated with
some big fast moving rapids with typically some easy route through them. There
is a big controversy about an effort by the Hydro Asyencompany who wants to put
a dam in on the Rio Baker. You see
bumper stickers and graffiti all over against the dam. The company has a couple of billboards in the
area explaining that the anti dam folks all come from Santiago and they do not understand the
locals with a picture of a grandma looking woman or some very wholesome looking person. Ironically the people they chose do not look
like they are from here but rather from Santiago. Also the dam will not likely
benefit many of the locals most of whom live out in the country where there is
no way it would be cost effective to run power out to them. The most likely customer if not some
industrial concern would be to ship it across the pampas to the bigger cities
in Argentina or similar. Only a small
percentage of the population lives in Patagonia Laurie says she read fiver per
cent. Carl Rove or the republican play
makers must have been hired by Hydro Asyen to come up with that campaign. The dam actually would seem to me to be in a
good location about like damning the Missouri between Helena and Great
Falls. Running power lines to the
population centers to the north in Chile would cost a fortune through all the
mountains. By the way billboards and signs in general are very rare thankfully.
About ten k below Bertrand we got a taste
of what we had heard was some difficult ridding. There was one big hill that
was so steep it was difficult to push the bikes up even. It was steep on both sides and big. At one
point I got on the bike and put on the brakes without peddling as a test and
the bike was sliding backwards down the gravel road.
One thing that is
different here is that this sort of country in the US or Canada would be
crawling with motor homes and campers.
Those are very rare here and the ones you do see look homemade or some
sort of safari set up owned by eccentric Europeans. A camper would actually be a nice way to see
the area and would probably hold up to the roads ok. Getting one down here would probably cost a
fortune though. As usual there are mostly full buses still going back and forth
from somewhere all day long. We will probably take buses to Punta Arenas or
Ushuaia from Puerto Natales (Torres del Paine) to see the penguins we have been
hearing people rave about. It won’t be too many days and we will come to the
end of the Carratera Austral which is the end of the road in Chile but you can
continue by ferry on a bike or on foot. We have been told that is a hundred
dollars a person for the short ferry ride from O’Higgins across the lake.
The connection here in Cochrane is very
slow so no way am I going to get any pictures off. Cochrane is a nice little
town of maybe a thousand or two. The weather has cleared and the day is a
beautiful summer day.
I can afford to be chatty because i can write to something for the blog on the laptop in camp which I am enjoying. So far the laptop has been holding up to the brutal shaking it is getting. I pack it with great care.
Chau
