The Southern Highway

CHAPTER 38

We relaxed for a few days in Villa la Angustura, partly because it is a quaint little mountain town, with a charming main street crowded with shops and boutiques, not unlike Estes Park back home; and partly because we needed to recover from the St. Patrick’s Day festivities.  We went for a long hike one day, and planned to rent bikes and go for a ride around the nearby national park the next, but a storm blew in that night.  Looking out our hostel window the following morning at the bleak overcast sky, the idea of slodging for hours down a maze of muddy paths, through the cold blowing rain, and not being able to even see what we were riding past, seemed a little bit the fool’s errand.  No, this day would be a perfect day to drive.  We packed up our moving home, and started south.

By some lucky coincidence, our friends Amy and Hannah, who we had spent so much time with in Buenos Aires only a few weeks before, were traveling north along the same route that we were taking south.  The fact that they were traveling up the famed Ruta 40 was not the coincidence.  The highway stretches from the southern end of mainland Patagonia, skirting the foothills along the country’s western border, for more than 3000 miles north to the deserts of Bolivia, connecting some of Argentina’s most spectacular natural wonders- the Perito Moreno Glacier, Mt. Fitzroy, Bariloche and the lake district- into a variable string of pearls laid out upon the backbone of the Andes.  In Argentina, Ruta 40 is considered a part of the national identity, on par with Route 66 in America, and if you mention to an Argentine that you are headed to Patagonia, they will insist that you spend some time on the unbroken highway.  The world’s fraternity of young vagabonds has caught on to this, and now it is almost considered a sin for a backpacker to go to Argentina without taking a stab at Ruta 40.  Amy and Hannah were doing their part as such, and like two ships crossing the wide expanses of the open ocean, we had the rare fortune to somehow meet in the middle of the wide expanses of Patagonia.

The small town where our paths crossed, El Bolson, is known for their thriving crafts market; and also for their just as thriving hippie drug culture.  Where their twice weekly market was a cornucopia of high quality, handmade jewelry and art, spread out in an arcing bazaar around the town’s main park, you could be sure that a good majority of the stalls were manned by a slightly smelly, slightly dazed looking pile of dreadlocks, though as a rule extremely gregarious and happy.  I couldn’t tell you why such a large number of hipsters would all gravitate to this unremarkable town in the BFE of Argentina, for there is not much to recommend the place to the mind (or lungs) of a pot head except for the inordinate concentration of their fellow kind, but it’s as if they all start along the pilgrimage that is Ruta 40 and unexpectedly come upon their mary jane mecca only half way through.  Over all, they seemed pretty content with their circumstances, but even so, this must only be a staging area for the Iron Lion Zion rank and file- strangely enough, the one or two traveling hippies that you are sure to encounter in every craft market from Cabo san Lucas to Cabo de Hornos, with their display of feather earrings, and braided bracelets, pinned to a taut piece of felt stretched between a frame of PVC pipes, are 9 times out of 10 from Argentina.  I say: if they are happy, and the locals don’t mind, then more power too ‘em- the crafts they were selling really were first class, and we were glad to take a few select pieces off their hands.

El Bolson didn’t have that much to offer besides the craft market, but we did have a fresh hike to a peculiar stone outcropping called La Cabeza del Indio, which really did look like the head of an Indian- amazingly without any man-made meddling- and later a rather disappointing visit to the local brewery.  They seemed rather put off that we only wanted to sample their beer, even though the town tourist brochure touted the free tasting as a major reason to come and visit, and subsequently only gave us each one small Dixie cup of, I hate to say it, pretty lackluster cerveza.  To be fair, we come from the land of Micro Breweries, where the malt flows like water, and the air is scented with the sweet smell of barley and hops.  Making a circuit of the 4 or 5 local tasting rooms every weekend is almost a way of life.  It’s not hard to fall short of a bar set so high.

With promises to meet back up when we returned to Buenos Aires, Hannah and Amy boarded their bus north, and we steered the Golden Gringo onto the highway, headed for all points south.  About an hour down the road though, I started to notice a peculiar whining/grinding sound coming from the engine.  When I got out to take a look under the hood, the engine noise was too loud and masked the sound that I could only hear very faintly in the cab.  Until something actually broke, there wasn’t much I could do to diagnose the problem, and we were about to head into the least populated regions of Patagonia, where there are literally hundreds of miles between settlements in some locations- therefore, we decided it would be prudent to stop and have a mechanic take a look under the hood.  It turned out that the nearest town was actually the same town we stopped in on our way north 10 days earlier when the check engine light reared its menacing head.  I felt like the guy had over charged us a little the first time, but he was nice enough and he seemed like he knew what he was doing, so we drove back to the same mechanic shop that we had gone to the first time we were in Esquel.

“What’s the verdict?” I said with a slight hint of apprehension.

“Well, one of your transmission bearings is going out.”

“Oh, really. Well that shouldn’t be so bad to fix- just pop her on the lift and we’ll be back in a few hours to pick her up.”  I tried to sound optimistic and confident, knowing full well that I was about to be sorely disappointed.

“So it’s like this” he went on, “there are five bearings in the transmission, and I don’t know which one is going out until I take it apart.  It might last another 5000 miles or it might only last 5 miles, but if it goes out while you are driving, it will blow up and send dozens of ball bearings flying through the spinning gears and teeth- and will destroy the whole transmission.  As long as I have it all taken apart, you might as well replace all the bearings, because if one is going out, you can be sure the rest are soon to follow.  Oh, and we don’t have them in stock- we’ll have to ship them from BA which should take a week or two, and its going to cost you an arm and a leg, and blah blah blah, you might as well just cancel your trip and fly home.”  At least that is what it sounded to me like he said.

But what could we do?  We handed over the keys and found a rather quaint hostel to whole up in for the foreseeable future.  About the only thing Esquel has going for it is that it is right outside a fairly impressive National Park, but considering we had already been to the park two weeks earlier, and since we couldn’t get there without the truck anyways, we had little ambition to leave the hostel except for food and drink.  We decided to spend the time of our forced sedentariness doing an avoided, but rewarding task- catching up on our blog posts.  We spent days and days sitting at the small table in our room, typing away on both laptops, editing pictures, eating cheese and crackers, drinking warm beer, and laughing together at the occasional episode of The Office when we got tired of writing.

Ten long days went by, and when we finally climbed back into the cab of the truck, it felt like a dream, it was impossible that we were on the road again.  But we were ready- we were headed south and nothing could stop us now.

Realizing that it might be a long while before we came across another gas station, we filled up the tank and our spare gas can before leaving town.  Little did we know that not 20 minutes down the road we would come to the Chilean boarder post, where, because of the ridiculous disparity in fuel prices between the two countries, they had a strict policy of “no imported gas”.  I topped off our tank from the gas can as much as I could, and watched in despair as the guard poured the other four and a half gallons of gas out on the road.  You would think they would have some sort of holding tank for confiscated gasoline, if only to use in their own vehicles, but I guess that would bring up all sorts of issues with bribery and corruption.  No, better to let all those hydrocarbons seep into the ground, and evaporate into the air- one more nail in the coffin for this slowly dying wilderness to bare.  And besides, that was my $20 collecting in a puddle around my shoes.  I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

At this point on the continent, the distance from the arid pampas of Western Argentina, to the verdant sub-alpine coastal forests choking the shores of the Chilean coast, is only a mere 75 miles as the condor flies, but the one lane dirt track that winds its way over the Andes was considerably longer.  It was incredible though to behold the steel grey waters of the freezing Chilean fjords only a few hours after seeing a desiccated guanaco carcass dissolving into the desert, who’s existence could probably be characterized as a, and ultimately unsuccessfully attained, search for water.

We were now on Chile’s version of Route 66, the Carretera Austral, or Southern Highway.  Again every Chilean will tell you that the Carretera Austral is the absolute pinnacle of Chile’s natural wonders strung out along an improbable, yet navigable highway.  Though the original design has been forgotten, or rather, unconsciously accepted by most Chileans, the Carretera was envisioned and implemented by the Dictator Agusto Pinochet in the late 1970’s as a pretense for a nationalistic enterprise to unite the far flung corners of the country, while the unspoken genuine intent was to distract the nation, and the world, from the ongoing civil unrest, political oppression, and the thousands of unaccounted-for missing dissidents who’s views happened to be overheard by a government official or informer.  Luckily, the age of Pinochet has passed, and the consequences of his dictates have come to bare, for better or for worse- and in the case of the Carretera Austral and the 100,000 people who live along it, for the better.  They now have access to power, water, communication, and commerce with the outside world; and for us, we had a direct, if sometimes less than smooth, but to a fault magnificent in its natural beauty, route south for a good 400 miles.

The highlight of the Southern Highway was our evening spent in the Queulet National Park, with its glorious hanging glacier- a mangled thrust of compressed azure ice spilling, in extreme slow motion, over the edge of a self-made cliff, hundreds of feet above the avocado-green melt water lake that receives the effluent of its 500 foot waterfall.  What an awe inspiring site!

Notwithstanding the fact that we had driven all the way there from Colorado, a large proportion of attractions we had the chance to visit on our trip were just that, tourist attractions- places that pretty much anyone with a week off of work and a enough money for the plane ticket could visit.  But this was something different, this was something special, if only for the fact that it was staggeringly hard to get to- besides the obvious natural enchantment of the place.  Even in the relentless drizzle, we were upbeat and excited for our three hour hike to the lookout platform.  The foliage and fauna were something out of Jurassic Park: huge five foot wide Gunnera leaves encroached upon the trail, and strange unknown creatures slithered underfoot- including a seven inch long black snail that slimmed along down the middle of the path as if he owned the place.

Just as we reached the observation platform, the rain let up, and we were afforded an unobstructed view of the teetering dark blue glacier.  The incessant noise of falling glacial melt water was occasionally overpowered by a loud cracking sound, followed a few seconds later by the reverberating echo of a house sized chunk of ice falling from the glacier and smashing into the rocky canyon floor hundreds of feet below.  It reminded me of those quarter games at Chuck-e-cheese, you know the ones that have a large pile of tokens precariously perched on an edge with an oscillating metal wall moving in and out threatening to knock them all off.  All you have to do is send your coin down a metal ramp just at the right time to land in the gap between the wall and the pile of tokens, and bingo! You win!  Well, here the glacier was the coins, and every time a piece fell off, it brought about the same anxiously anticipated satisfaction, though on a much grander scale, as the quarter game.

Unfortunately, we were again hostage to the unpleasant demands of a time schedule due to our unexpected delay in Esquel.  Before we left Buenos Aires, we had booked a spot on a ferry through the Chilean fjords as the means for our return trip north from Ushuaia, and though that date was still three weeks off, we still had a lot to do and see in Patagonia.  We finished driving the Carretera Austral without further interruption, and crossing back over to Argentina at the highway’s southern extreme, we traversed the continent horizontally for a third time and reaching the Atlantic coast, turned to the right, on to Argentina’s Highway 3 and drove south all the way to Tierra del Fuego.