ivan the not so terrible

The flight stopped in Bariloche, a magnificent landing, and as we took off again, a pair of eagles followed our path. When we arrived in El Calafate there was no other bus (the first one was full, that was it) and there wouldn’t be a taxi for 40 minutes. As we made our way into the town, we had the impression that it was being constructed in front of us, a frontier town. The steppe continued south to Ushuaia, the southernmost settlement on the planet, and then that´s it. El Calafate and El Chalten 4 hours next door were established in a rush to mark political territory; the land was still disputed between Chile and Argentina in the 60´s, and its township urbanism has an air of a gold rush community, but the commodity here comes wrapped in North Face and Lowe Alpine. Half the tourists on the continent spill in here to get away from the other half, presumably, and the town replies accordingly – there are mountaineering shops everywhere, the hostels are called Last Stop, Adventurer, etc. How this will change as time goes on is hard to guess.

The main reason we came here was to see the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the only advancing ice fields in the world, and the third largest reserve of freshwater on the planet. It is 1.25 times the surface area of Buenos Aires. It is unfathomable; even when a boat sails close to it there is something strange about it, something off, as if it is a unconvincing piece of CGI. It rips the valley asunder, slowly. We took a boat out to get near it, and the colours of the glacier are seen more clearly – these colours are blue-violet, cerulean, and teal, among others. Bits fall off and collapse into the lake; they don’t look like much till they hit the water, and you realise that this one was the size of a truck, this one a house. Later, when we were about to leave, there was one massive collapse, a storm of noise, all around us – terrifying for a second – then we went back.

Ivan in the hostel was great, he told us to get in, see the ice-cube and head off as soon as possible. He proved to be the benchmark for sound hostel workers, and we would later end up meeting his best friend on the other side of the continent. We took a late bus to El Chalten and rolled into the Rancho Grande at 10pm that night.

big

El Chalten, the newest town in Argentina, is serious business. We woke early, the Fitzroy range looming over our heads as we made our way outside. the mountains here are some of the toughest peaks to climb on earth. The park wardens scare the shit out of you, intentionally, and there are black widow spider warnings on the notice boards. Here we climbed, and ate, and slept, and that was about it. We saw so many eagles that they became commonplace. On our first day, St. Patrick´s day, we made it to the base of the cerro grande after 9 hours walking and saw a condor hovering over the glacial lake in the valley, waiting. We were destroyed on our way down, it had been 9 serious hours, and there wasn’t much drinking. Dad’s horse was racing in Cheltenham and he came in fourth place I found out later, a great result, but the internet is a satellite connection, I didn’t find out for days.

The next morning we faced the reality of sorting out a 32 hour bus journey. Up until now we had come across our share of oddbods and lunatics, but the guy at the bus terminal that we bought our tickets from deserves attention, medical and otherwise. The shutter of his little window was half down so we had to stoop to talk to him. He was small and roundy and he had that strange feature where the hair of the moustache doesn’t grow in the middle, right under the nose, but only on the sides, giving him a benign Genghis Khan look. He gave us a price and we went to suss out the competition, but there wasn’t any, so we found ourselves back with him; it was better for me to kneel down to talk to him, which gave the affair a weird confessional feel. He sipped his mate serenely. What was on offer, the only thing on offer, was a semi-cama for 370 pesos. Semi-cama does not translate as half a bed; it is a chair that reclines “nearly” 180 degrees. There is also full cama, which goes “even nearer” 180 degrees, but such luxury wasn’t on the cards for us on this outing. Faced with the prospect of this for a day and a half, we asked him to show us how nearly nearly was. He showed us by leaning back on the chair he was sitting on – semi cama goes back about heeeere...and full cama goes baaack abooout – when he comes crashing off the chair and spills his mate all over his belly. Semi-cama it is so, we decided, having no other option anyway. Having this lack of options, we continued with stupid questions – will we get a good night sleep we asked, all the time still kneeling. He shrugged and said that nobody has been so uncomfortable so as to make the journey back to complain – this I thought was a beautiful answer, with a lovely shape (it reminded me of a great Bob Monkhouse line – my dad laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian – well he´s not laughing now...) and he was delighted with it himself, reclining back into semi-cama position.

For some reason he needed our passports, and when he saw mine he was delighted to see I was Irish. He didn’t seem interested in the usual stuff (drink, banter, etc) but instead he told me about and Irish movie he saw where a man put his brain into a kid´s head to remember what it was like to be a kid. Totally stunned at this turn of events, and unaware of the brain-swapping sub-genre in Irish sci-fi cinema, I rattled off a few US suggestions (Big maybe? The Man with Two Brains? or the recent Zak Efron masterpiece?) but no, he assured me calmly that it was Irish. Maybe, I said...The Quiet Man? And he goes – Yeeah thats it! – I realised then that I had to spend as much time with this guy as possible. What about the kid’s brain, I asked, where did they put that? Yeah, he said, they left that kind of open. And what, I ventured, from an ontological point of view was resolved, I mean, it´s the guy´s brain inside a kids head, did he feel like a kid? Unfortunately this will never be answered as it was one question too much for ewa, whose patience was wearing as thin as the skin on her knees, so we paid for the tickets and said goodbye.

On the second climb we ploughed through a raincloud to see the full range open up to us for the first time. We moved to the hotel next door that evening, a much better place at the same price, though the place was so new that the phones were there for show, and the TV was hung on a wall without a plug socket. We made it to a concert in the town hall but headed off pretty early. The following day was another huge climb, this time up to the base of Fitzroy to the most beautiful setting I have ever seen – the beginning of the snow level, with a huge glacier feeding a lake the colour of which is hard to describe. I washed my feet and had a snowball fight with some Germans. We made our way down with the sun. Later on we had a fine meal in a great restaurant, a huge steak, and then half of ewa´s. The next day was a short walk and the rugby match; we went back to the same place and had the piss taken out of us as Scotland ran in tries against Ireland. Then quickly back to the hotel, collected the bags, and we jumped on the bus. It stopped along the way, notably for 4 hours in Perito Moreno at the exact time of the Boca V River match, which ended up being cancelled 10 minutes into the game because of torrential rain. We continued on through the next night and arrived in Bariloche early the next morning.

a fold in the map 1

Our hotel was a steep climb up a hill along the bank of the lake. We sussed out prices for cars and took it easy after a long bus journey; we ate chocolate and had a bad dinner in a Germanesque restaurant – there is something here that seems Germanic – the sausages, the chocolate, the well constructed timber balconies; the people are a little more reserved too. The next day, after renting a car, we set off on what was supposed to be a day trip into Chile. The plan was to see a new project for a thermal baths built in the mountains over the border, and hopefully return the next day through San Martin. This reality was: 4 days travelling, camping 2 nights, a flight to the border coming back, a rally across the Andes on a dirt track in the pitch dark with one headlight, an overnight stay in no man´s land, a completely destroyed car, and a peculiar suspicion that we had met a devil.

It started smoothly as we made our way to the border, with condors hovering above us the whole way, and alpacas jumping out of the way of the car. The crossing was funny, particularly on the Chilean side; there were three windows we had to present ourselves at, police, customs and vehicle registration I think, all of whom taking a keen interest in where we were from. We were firmly on Chilean soil by 3pm. Across the border you arrive directly into Villarica national park, named after one of the many volcanoes in the area, all calmly exhaling thick black smoke from time to time. The first thing you notice as you cross the border is the richness of green, thick Cavan ditches alongside the roads, cattle feeding in thick deep grass, but the trees tell you you´re not in Ireland anymore – huge trees towering over the road, dripping with long ropes of ivy, branches spilling into the ground and becoming roots again, dead trees half fallen on others. The clouds that form over the pacific come inland but only to a point, and on this side of the mountains it lashes. We wound our way down a ridiculous zigzag until we got to the park warden´s house, where there was a sign saying –back in 5 minutes– which sounded improbable. After a quick snoop around, though, two ranch hand looking characters with John Deere caps and beer breath appeared from the house, saying they were the wardens. This sounded, and smelt, unlikely, but they were good help in any case; we even gave them a lift into town. Two hours driving later and not out of the national park, we realised that this would be a longer trip than planned.

We camped outside Pucon with a Jewish guy who had a meditation centre and that night we headed out to Los Pozones, a thermal bath that was open till 3am. This place was incredible, you arrive at it from a hill and you see a series of pools in the moonlight, all dimly lit, steam rising from each one, up through the valley. We spent 2, maybe 3 hours there, it was impossible to sense the time passing. We were mostly on our own, the odd visitor passed by, appearing briefly and disappearing in the mist. I sat and held my girlfriend and looked at the stars and felt the heat of the earth and it felt good.

Seeing that it would take us much longer than expected to find the project I was looking for, we stopped in Pucón for breakfast and bought tickets for our journey later on through Chile. The dogs are all insane in Pucón, travelling in packs and barking at anything doglike (which includes most things). This is probably a result of the constantly erupting volcano looming over the city of which the people seem to have a resigned acceptance. This is a country that recently suffered the 5^th largest recorded earthquake (8.8, February 2010), and regularly faces tsunami warnings along the coast (which, given the skinniness of Chile, is the entire country). But the dogs live in a constant state of madness, torn between a loyalty to their masters and a desire to flee to the hills. Getting things organised, we headed off to look for the termas geometricas, a renovation of other hot springs in the area, and a project that had won national architectural prizes and international acclaim. After literally lapping the volcano we arrived at a road leading up to the hot baths. 17km up the hill you arrive at a dip in the road from which steam rises, directly from the ground. There are a number of natural baths, but the geometricas is the best, an incredible scheme of timber bridges and walkways, painted a gorgeous red, through a huge cleft in the mountain from which hot water rises. A few minutes here and you allow yourself think that this is really one of the magic places on the earth. We couldn’t resist it. We stayed for hours, and talked about how strange the planet is, opening up to show us how deep it is, and how small we are. The volcano gave out belches of smoke above us, and the water bubbled beneath.

The guys in the baths were great too, giving us a lovely broth when we finished and showing us the best way to get back across the border – our options were to 1. go back around the volcano and across where we made the pass the first time, 2. take a dodgy road over the mountains on the condition that we have a 4x4, or 3. wait for the next day to take a ferry over a lake to the border near San Martin. Faced with the hassle of adding another day onto our trip, we went to a police station in Coñaripe, where we talked with a sergeant who said that if we wanted to cross today we could take the mountain road to Liquiñe, that it is eminently passable – in fact he would even call the border to let us know we were coming. The border closes at 8pm he said, but it was half six and it was a hour´s drive. Super we thought, get to the border at 8, into San Martin at 9 or so, and we´ll have the day trekking. Such was the idea. But as we make our way to Liquiñe, after a benign caution – road works sign, we find ourselves behind trucks and steamrollers that are literally laying the road in front of us. We managed somehow to get around them, onto the dirt track and after a half an hour at 20km/h we made it to the border just past eight. There was a small building, a flag and a barrier blocking the way to a dark path up the mountain. There was no light on in the building; I remember thinking when I went to the door that if they answer, then all will be ok. They answered, but all was not ok. Normal procedure with border crossing is to leave one territory and enter another but, crossing the Andes, normal procedures don’t apply. After 20 minutes of questions, stamping and registering the details of the car, Carabinero Loyola (I’ll never forget his name - the Jesuit, just following orders) told us that the Argentinean border crossing is located 60km over the mountain, and that floods and the earthquake have left the path with some complications, but as we have been stamped out of Chile, we were to leave. There was no recourse to sleep in the car and leave in the morning. We had complained that it was the cops in the first place that told us to take this path, this pissed him off. It was now 9pm and pitch-black outside. Ewa wasn’t looking forward to it, and I didn’t feel positive about the affair, but we had no choice; Loyola´s peon raised the barrier and we made our way into the blackness ahead.

a fold in the map 2

Despair hit quickly – I thought that we would be at least out of the valley before we found trouble, but our first turn up the track was the steepest and the worst. The car got immediately stuck, and I had to get out and push while Ewa floored it. This didn’t work and I started to realise that the car was just ploughing through mud and veering scarily close to the edge of the path (the drop was a sheer one down into thick forest). I found big flat stones with the light from my mobile and laid them out under the front wheels and wedged two huge branches behind the back ones, bb revved it and I gave it one mighty push and we made it out. As I got back in the car I realised a few things: that there is just the two of us in this, no one else can help, that to do this will take hours, many hours, and that it is going to test us. But I saw other things two, that my girlfriend had a level of grit and seriousness that I hadn’t seen until now, and that I would do anything to keep her safe. The road continued as it began but we learnt to read the path and keep the car in the middle. The car was taking such a beating though, from stones and craters that the right headlight packed in which meant I had to get out at most right hand turns to see where we were going. Most dips in the road were completely flooded, which involved me getting out and checking the depth of the water with a stick, and guiding ewa through the shallowest way. We got used to the low thuds under the car, but every so often there would hit a terrible clank, stone on metal, and we would look at each other thinking is that it so? But it wasn’t, each time the car continued and every flooded dip that bb flew through, now confident after 3 hours of beating this fucking path, I would think, Christ, I love this girl!

We were both avoiding the truth though, the awful truth, that we made 15km in 3 hours. Something had to give, the car or our patience. It was here though, where fate entered, and the events that transpired, or the significance of these events, are still floating in my mind, and my heart, looking for anchor. Even if this appears as merely a story I can only say that, interpretations aside, the events that I write about are all true.

At one of the moments I was out of the car, I took my time walking back to it after ewa raced through a sodden pothole. It was a clear and beautiful night, mercifully dry, and I found myself looking to the sky and talking to Paul, and asking for help as I have done a few times before, with the promise that if it arrived it would be recognised as such and acknowledged. We had discussed parking the car and sleeping in it, but till now there was literally nowhere that we had seen to pull over, and in any case, I had noticed that the forest was making strange sounds. So I suppose I was looking for something extraordinary. As got back in the car we set off slowly and made our way around a few bends until, as the road started to flatten out, we saw in front of us a thick low cloud sitting on the road. It was 11 at night, and in the one headlight it looked impossible, but there is was, hanging eerily in front of us until the car drove through it, and it parted. If we hadn’t spent time in Pucón and Coñaripe we wouldn’t have known the truth – that somewhere near here the earth had opened up and there are hot springs around us. At night the water vapour gathers in heavy sods and the cold keeps it low and clotted. We passed through three or so of these, registering their weirdness but perhaps being already too on edge to be scared. And then, 10 minutes further, we see a sign on the road, the first that we had seen. It said LahuenCo Hotel Spa 100 metros. This was 20 km into no-man´s-land in the Chilean Andes, but improbable as it seemed, here was a hotel. We took the turn into a driveway down to a low building, modern, timber framed, and totally empty. We entered into a lobby with leather sofas and a huge mahogany coffee table, but no reception, no desk, nobody. To our left there were rooms, numbered, but nothing else. A huge window behind the couches looked out onto blackness. I checked the doors to two of the rooms; all closed. The corridor faded away in the dim light; I thought of the corridors of The Shining but thought it sensible not to share this with ewa. We thought for a while of just sleeping on the couch and leaving a note beside ourselves, but we decided to explore outside. We lapped around the outside of the building, nothing, and we walked back up to the road to see if we missed a turn. Sure enough, there is a small sign saying reception 200 metres.

LahuenCo, as it turns out, is Quechua for “miraculous water”. The reception, restaurant and health spa is in a totally separate building of the same design further down the road, but is connected to the residential building by a wooden path. We make our way into a huge reception and ring a gong. The manager, young looking but grey haired, grey eyed, greets us. His dark eyebrows pointed in a gothic arches. We told him of our adventure, and he smiled and welcomed us, and told us to relax, that we would spend the night here. His name was Daniel.

He showed us back to the rooms along the path; it wasn’t lit but he had a torch. He checked the first room on the corridor, 14, but I knew we wouldn’t be sleeping there. He came out and told us that it was missing towels, so he showed us into room 13. It couldn´t have been any other room under the circumstances. On his way out, he asked us did we have a torch ourselves; we said no – well now you do – he said, and left us with his light. We showered and lay on crisp linen sheets and laughed. The previous night we slept in a tent. As ewa got ready, I went out to look again at the sky; the same sky as always but now incandescent, the stars cast shadows and the planet Venus (the Morningstar!) shone low and firm. I paid my respects and offered my gratitude. Daniel came up to get us at 11.30, the chef was about to leave so we went back to eat. The one other couple staying in the hotel had left about an hour ago apparently; the restaurant was ours. We had an onion soup and a fine steak and red wine, and then a lemon tart. Daniel took our orders and served us the food, and when we finished he cleared the plates. If the chef left, we didn’t see him go; it seemed that our friend the manager was the only person in the building.

Flushed after red wine, we had tea and felt complete. Red meat in no man´s land – it all fed an atavistic hunger inside us. Our surroundings were the most lavish we had experienced by far and the whole affair was spectacularly expensive, but inventions like money and national boundaries seemed to be all too human this night. We asked Daniel to join us; we were intrigued by him and curious. Where we are at the moment, geographically (he smiled as he explained), comes under the law of Argentina, but we were outside of the two borders. Basically it's complicated, he said. He kind of left it at that, and looked out the window, but in any case it seemed best to leave it nebulous. We asked him about himself, where he lived. He had been living here in the hotel since it opened 3 months previous. Before that there was just the forest. He was born in Buenos Aires but he seemed to hate the place. He had lived in hotels quite a bit, working as a manager in the Sheraton at the Iguassu Falls for 10 years (a hotel that sits directly on another border, between Argentina and Brasil). He was extremely open, telling us about his life, personal things – his split from a band he sang in, the break-up of his relationship with the mother of his kids, how he lives here and they live in Buenos Aires. The more he told us the stranger it felt, pity not being the first sentiment that a hotel manager usually inspires. And there were weird things, inconsistencies – he would say something and then deny it, or contradict it. He became strangely animated when we talked about frontmen in bands and I said that only someone like Jagger can really pull off a song like Sympathy for the Devil. He said he loved football but when I mentioned Henry´s handball against Ireland, he told us he didn’t know much about football. He chose to live away from his children so as they wouldn’t see him unhappy. Nothing freaky, but it was enough for me to think, and say to ewa, there´s something strange about Daniel. We finished up at half one. He told us that the hot baths outside were there to be used if we wanted. I tried to persuade ewa but I was a half-hearted attempt, we were both drained. So with our new light, we wandered slowly to our bedroom.

a fold in the map 3

The next morning we were served breakfast, by Daniel. The place looked different in the day – the wooden beams, which looked splendid with soft lights, had split in places and the windows were dirty, other parts of the building seemed unfinished. From the window of the breakfast room (filthy) you could see down to the hot baths. We walked down to them; they had a strange surface texture and were not clean. They gave off a smell which was hard to place.

We walked up to see the car – it was in bits. Mud was caked thick on the doors, and came off only to reveal brutal scratches underneath. The front bumper was shredded and we had to pull bits off it to make it look ok. The headlight was easy to fix though, and it started fine. We were eager to make it to San Martin, or to at least cross the border at some stage (we had 45km of mountain path left, so we got organised and paid the bill. Daniel was waiting for us; before we left he showed us a bowl and a stick made of quartz. It looked like a mortar and pestle, but it was a musical instrument which produced a perfect C note. He told us that quartz is the element which retains the most amount of information. He tapped the side of the bowl the long bar and slowly ran it around the inside, making the sound resonate and amplify until it felt like it was entering my body. He told us that the road we were going to take was one of the most beautiful on the whole planet, that we would see an ancient lava flow, some of the mightiest trees on earth, a turquoise lake whose banks are of black volcanic rock, along with numerous other wonders.

All these things we saw and more, but it was not until two days later that I began to process an abstract feeling that I had during our stay at LahuenCo, and here I need to be clear – from early on at the hotel I felt there was something slightly diabolical about Daniel. In his look, his strange contradictions, I had a feeling, but it was only later in Bariloche, over a dinner of wild boar, venison and rabbit, that a pattern emerged. We were talking about the mountain road, how incredible it was that we would find a hotel along the way, and I told ewa for the first time that I had a moment where I looked to the stars and I asked for help and that I felt that I had been listened to, particularly after we checked into room 13, a number important to me. But from the moment he introduced himself, a slickly devilish air surrounded the gentleman manager. We started talking about this, his slightly demonic appearance, his omnipresence around the hotel, his weird equivocations, his rejection family life and national boundaries, of the way he balked when I mentioned Jagger´s finest moment (you can call me Lucifer!). I thought about what he said about football (he loves it/he´s not interested in it) and I realised that he said it when I told him that the Henry incident was known as the hand of the devil (as Maradonna´s was that of God). I remembered that feeling I had about the corridors when we arrived in the building, as well as where it was, in no man´s land, a non-place, outside political borders, not located on any map, or as if the map were folded and the hotel sat in the fold (what a place to hide!). We talked about how the hotel seemed much better in the dark, that when the day came it seemed to lose its sheen. His name too – a devil in disguise would surely find it hard to resist teasing us with a name that sounded similar, an Old Testament name. As an angel in the celestial army he was known as Satan Sataniel. And then the baths outside. Daniel had tried to persuade us to take a bath that night at 1am, but we didn’t, and when we saw them the next morning they were gruesome, filthy. And they stank. That smell, I couldn’t place it then, but over dinner two days later, over the boar and the deer it came to us – the smell was of rotten eggs. Deep underground, the stench of sulphur was rising up with the hot water – sulphur, which in ancient times was called brimstone, the base element of hell. What if, when I asked for help, my wish was fulfilled, but not by whom I asked?

We ordered another bottle of wine and entertained this idea. What would it mean that we were helped by the Devil? Of the books I had brought with me on this trip, I had just finished a chapter of The Double Flame by Octavio Paz, a beautiful little book on the subject of love and eroticism. In this chapter he writes about the origins of the name Lucifer, a Latin word meaning bringer of light which was used to describe the planet Venus. It is the herald of the dawn, the brightest thing in the sky and it was called the Morningstar. In the old Hebraic bible, it was used metaphorically to describe an old Babylonian King whose fall from power through excessive hubris was seen as parallel to Satan´s fall. Venus rises at dawn as the brightest of the stars, outshining Jupiter and Saturn, but lasting only until the sun appears. St Jerome translated the Old Testament into the Latin Vulgate and used the term Lucifer for the first time as a metaphor for Satan; later in the Tyndale translation of the bible the Latin term was maintained, as it was in most other language translations. Dante had previously used it to refer directly to Satan, but it was in Milton´s Paradise Lost where Lucifer the rebel angel is reborn, almost becoming heroic. The romantic poets took his rejection of the heavenly hierarchy as a source of inspiration – the Morningstar’s light is dimmed by the sun, and it lasts only a few hours, but how it shines! I had read this book before, but had wanted to read it again here, in the original, and I got as far as the chapter in question on the 32 hour bus journey to Bariloche. Of all the chapters in all the books it was this one that I had just read and it was still fresh in my mind so I blabbed on about it to ewa for as much as I could recall. I found out consequently that in the southern hemisphere the heavens are reversed and Venus mostly appears as a star in the evening sky, outshining the rest. (It was 18 degrees from the western horizon on the 24^th of March. The planet shines so bright, I also found out, due to the fact that it is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds which bounce back 70-percent of the sunlight that hits them. The clouds are formed of sulphuric acid.) I finished the last of the boar. We left and walked back to our hostel under a grey sky – still the question remained – what would it mean if all this was to be entertained? A tentative answer was proposed in the morning.

We woke up the following day heady from the wine, and started to pack our bags. We were crossing the border again, this time by bus, to Osorno in Chile, and then north to Santiago. Our stuff was in a mess from when we left; we had camped the night after, and we hadn’t really sorted our backpacks since then. I asked ewa to take the video camera; she opened her bag to put it in, and she took out the little black torch to make space. This was the light that Daniel gave us. But did he give it to us? His words were strange – Tienes luz? Pues ahora la tienes – it was never clear but ewa took it in any case; it’s usually me who fleeces stuff from hotels so I thought I would tease her for a bit that morning. I said – baby you took the torch that Daniel gave us, yeah? Well what happens when you take light from Lucifer? What happens when you steal from the devil? – She wasn’t having it. With an answer, she closed the book on the affair, slicing through all my talk with a sentence. She stuck her head out of the bathroom and looked at me mischievously, saying – What if I didn’t steal it? What if it was offered to me? I am Eve after all. Beauty is, I think, clarity. There are other strange things about that night, coincidences, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile to labour on them. The question what does this mean has an answer; I’m working on the answer to why.

black ice

Anyway, to go back a bit: we arrived at the Argentinean border the day we left LahuenCo at 2pm. The journey was spectacular. The lava flow ripped through the valley at Escorial like a black glacier, and the lakes we saw shone brighter than any we would see later. When we got to the border the guards came down to take a look at us; they genuinely couldn’t believe that we had crossed the sierra in a Chevrolet and there was some confusion as to why our Chilean exit stamps were from the day previous, but we were through with minimal fuss under the circumstances. The road continued shiteously for about 20km and then we were onto silken asphalt all the way to San Martin de Los Andes. A beautiful town, we walked around and took it easy. The whole place seems to be made of timber and the carpentry is incredible. There is nothing like their tables, signs, doorframes. We ate in a little cafe that was showing the Boca v River match that was cancelled a week ago. We camped in a Mapuche settlement, which sounded groovier than it was, they are quiet but respectful, and out to make a peso like everyone else. We walked down to the lake by the campsite and drank sambuca on a huge treetrunk until the sun dropped and the bats started to drop low. When we got back to the tent we lit a fire and talked about our parents. These chats usually result in the conclusion that we both have great parents. We did all of these kind of things, it was a good day.

The next morning I washed the car and we headed off to do the route of the 7 lakes, and along the way we picked up two nice French people hitching to Bariloche. They were pretty cool but a bit French. They talked to each other a lot, patently about things we were talking about. We stopped in Villa la Angostura to see an old forest of trees that only grow here, but we missed the last entrance so we took a look at the harbour, ate in a pizza place and arrived late that evening in Bariloche.

We checked back into the nice place that we stayed in before, but there was a mouse in our room, the only one available, so we switched. The next day we had to leave the car back; ewa pulled a crafty one and parked the car right up to the rear bumper of another car, we went in, made nice, paid, and got out. The main problem was a totally shredded bumper but there were fresh scratches all over the car, some pretty heavy ones. The right headlight was effectively an indicator now, the amount it went on and off I’m sure bits fell off underneath, but we managed to swindle it. Later we did get to see the Arrayanes Park, where a species of tree survive that elsewhere has perished. (There was a forest of arrayanes in Japan but it burnt down a few years ago; the Perito Moreno glacier destroyed the second last Argentinean example in 2001.) It is a long journey through an island to get it, we rented mountain bikes and ploughed through it, a great idea it was. The forest is beautiful. The trees are thin and tall, extremely tall; their wood is hard as teak and their colour is like a jaguar´s coat.

General Schneider RIP

The next day we took a bus to Osorno in Chile, an awful town whose central cultural focus was a sculpture of a bull in the main square. He just stands there, bored, lacking the menace and the potential of the Wall St. bull. He appears in postcards, equally forlorn. We spent the day online, and I called a Chilean lady we met in Buenos Aires who invited us to her house for dinner. As well as that I finally got to talk to Fabian whose tent we still had; we were leaving it with his in-laws in Santiago and I needed the address, which turned out to be the same area as Carmen our hostess. The bus journey up to the capital was spectacular – there were 9 seats altogether in the lower section where we were, they showed Avatar on a widescreen TV and served us snacks and breakfast in the morning. We arrived in Santiago as well rested as you can be on a bus, albeit 3 hours late (the motorways are still badly damaged from the earthquake), and left our bags in the locker for the day; we were going to Valparaiso, allegedly, that night. As soon as we walk out onto the street I asked a man for directions – with all the pointing and what not I walked into a tree, which resulted in a cut head. We arrived at Carmen´s with flowers and wine and me looking ridiculous.

We met Carmen Lemaitre in Che Lulu, a hotel in Buenos Aires. Her daughter was starting a course in hairdressing in the city and she was there to help her find an apartment. We met over a series of breakfasts, and we got on immediately. She was full of compliments about how handsome I was, and how beautiful ewa was. Her daughter cringed appropriately; they seemed a good family. She left us her number in Santiago and told us that if we arrive we must call her. Her apartment was in a good area of the city, you could tell by the bins, and we were greeted by a friendly doorman who called up to Carmen and spoke in English – Mrs Carmen! Hello! Is here Mr David Smith to know you! – he gives me a wink. She meets us at the door on the sixth floor and is again the essence of charm, showing us round the house, thanking us for the flowers, letting us see the damage from the earthquake (some cracks, a broken shelf, a cut knee). She invites us into the sitting room whereupon Sergio, their servant, comes in to see what we want to drink. I thought he was a brother that was just wearing an apron for a laugh and got up and shook his hand, but Carmen told us that Sergio works here, 7 days a week, and has done for the past 14 years. Sergio brings us pisco sours and some cheese. We talked for a while, mostly about my head, until Jaime comes in, the father. Jaime is also incredibly charismatic, with the most believable eyes I have ever seen; I thought right away, what a politician he would make. His suit hung loose and his collar and tie were impeccably tailored. He was immediately worried about my head. Jaime had lived in Belfast in 1968. He was an economist and was wise.

After a few drinks we had lunch in the dining room, served to us by Sergio. Carmen showed us a photo of their family – they had 7 children, one religious, a historian, 2 lawyers, an economist and some other ones too. We began to talk about politics; he said he was very happy with the recent change of government to centre right. He made the usual platitudes about all sides being more or less the same these days, and he sounded a typical conservative until he let us know, in one sweeping breath, that frankly he didn’t believe in democracy, that himself and his wife had been strong Pinochet supporters since his rise to power, that they lament the fall of the dictatorship and they still consider themselves his staunchest supporters.

Our slight pause was maybe a little too long, I could see that he noticed our displeasure, but he had obviously dealt with this before, having lived in Europe for a time; over the next hour, he and his wife went into a spirited justification of their political stance. It felt like we were in the presence of a strange and rare species that only survived under certain conditions. As it turned out, Carmen was the more vitriolic of the two about Allende, and the more idealistic about Pinochet, but both of them had some staggering things to say. They were quick to say that they were aware of his crimes and those of the regime, but they believed it necessary, and in any case the numbers were ridiculously exaggerated by the left. I tried to imagine what the prospect of socialism must have been like for a wealthy family like theirs. Carmen´s family had a silver mine northern Chile which was taken by the government during the land reform years and as a result she feels, and sounds, personally slighted by the socialists. How her family got the mine in the first place wasn’t explained – the sharp edge of revenge softens like memory over time. Jaime told us that at the end of his period in office, Allende was a drunk, that he was incapable of maintaining a conversation let alone control. – And he was a Marxist! He welcomed Castro here! I don’t think you in Europe realise how bad things were! – He told us that when the coup happened, that everyone was out on the streets “celebrating and drinking champagne” I thought that anyone with Champagne in their fridge would rejoice the end of socialism, whatever the change. I thought a lot at that table, but I didn’t say much, nor did ewa, we just listened. I imagined that kind of sclerotic Victorian who would have stood up, thrown down his napkin, and said “I’m sorry but I am afraid that my political convictions do not permit me to share a table with you, Goodbye!” but I was my diplomatic best, even ewa said it after the meal when we left.

They were a family who wanted to protect what they had, and were afraid. Fear seems to have been their greatest motivator and you felt it had done its job; the opinions were embedded and had become fact. There was no point in arguing. Some of the things they were saying were awful though. Carmen told us that when a patient has gangrene in a limb, the doctor must remove that limb and that was what Pinochet did – he made hard decisions for the greater good. They explained that only 3000 people were killed during the regime, and over 2000 of those were “radical militants.” And the students, I asked, the tortures? All necessary evils, sad but essential. And Victor Jara? They looked at each other. And the American involvement? The General Schneider murder? Schneider was the weak link for the military at the time leading up to the coup, the only general openly opposed to the idea of a military takeover. He was shot dead on the street in daylight during a failed kidnapping attempt. Four men were arrested in the aftermath. Two were CIA operatives, immediately released when the coup was instigated and brought back to the US. The other two were Jaime´s two best friends, whom he had known since he was a child. They were people he knew, he told us, his whole life – “people who wouldn’t do harm to anybody.” They wanted to “convince” him, this is the word he used, of the benefits of the impending coup.

I looked at the two of them. It left an oblique feeling with me, that they were good people who knew love and could say such terrible things. Thinking about it later though, there was no contradiction. It is a hard reality to face – that the most natural of attributes for the human being (itself a contradiction in terms) is to maintain a paradox, acknowledge it, even to nurture it over an entire lifetime while it neither causes confusion nor has any adverse affects. Life is filled with small pockets of time where we reach peace with contradictions; this is maybe what it is to be happy.

Ritoque

The bus journey from Santiago to Ritoque was three times longer than stipulated. Along the way we passed by a gas refinery, which looked like something from a bad post apocalyptic movie – huge black steel towers, scaleless steel cylinders, and there was an excess gas burner, where random bursts of flame spewed out every few seconds. I didn’t think these things existed, they had always seemed too improbable. We arrived in the town and a taxi driver took us out to the beach where we were staying. As we pulled up to the gates an old Saudi-looking merc pulled up beside us and a flaky couple get out – Angie and her boyfriend who, as it turned out, were our hosts and were waiting for us at the bus station, but didn’t see us. They had a car that was so much full of random shit – there were baby rattles, egg cartons, a small buoy, and a pack of gravel that was permanently weighing the car to the left, appropriately. They took us up the hill to the house which was entirely for us – an incredible A-frame building, a living room and kitchen downstairs and a bedroom up on the mezzanine. There was a full height window looking out onto the Pacific Ocean roaring dimly beyond the sand. We met Will the night porter, an American guy from Seattle who visited the place 4 months ago travelling through the continent and hadn’t left yet – he was given a kind of job by Angie looking after the place at night; he was playing beer pong with Canadian guy staying in another house. Beer pong is a game of skill and beer. Two people stand either side of a table, each with ten small cups of beer in front of them in a triangle. The idea is to throw a table tennis ball into the other person’s beer cups, and then you drink the beer. The person who drinks the most amount of beer wins. Either that or he loses, I can’t remember but they were playing this outside our place when we got in.

There was a little restaurant beneath us by the beach, owned by a really cute couple, she was an actress and he was a surfer and they lived in their restaurant. His father had been one of the first surfers in Chile, but he moved out during the dictatorship. When he found himself back again, he started a surf school and restaurant with his son, and the son has been running it since his father died last year. They told us what they had left in the kitchen (fish), so we said we would have that. She made the dinner while he stayed out with us and talked and talked. I hadn’t realised the word huevon was used so much in Chile (typical example: uuuiii huevon, estos huevones son unos putos huevones, huevon). Maybe he was just making up for lack of usage, either way it was funny. The food arrived about an hour later and it was spectacular, a real surprise and maybe the best fish we would have over there, in a soy sauce, uber-stylishly presented on the plate and tasting incredible. By then it was nearly 12; we had always been the only ones in the restaurant but when dinner was over he and she both sat with us and we talked and drank Bolivian beer. He told me how sad he was with the right wing switch in the government, that they were doing things wrong, that people are slow to see the truth, that there is a better way to live he wished other people would see. I liked these people, I liked the way they lived. I certainly felt more on their side than on the Lemaitre`s but something bothered me that I couldn’t articulate until I heard what Zizek said – that ecology is the new opium of the masses (as Marx called religion); its next (logical) step is to tend towards fascism. I wonder if there will ever be a point at which the two couples we met on this strangest of days would appear to be the same. We left full and laughing and went back to our new and great house.

We had breakfast on the terrace the next morning; our house, it seemed, was the centre of ceremonies for the surfers in the area, they would meet up with Maurice and get what they needed from the garage below us. The food was good and nobody seemed bothered about the large wasps that chaved over the honey. After breakfast we all (8 of us) piled into the merc and Angie brought us into town but we only made it as far as the main road where the police were parked; ewa and I bailed out of the car and walked the road till she left the others in and came back for us. A strange thing happened as we made our way – a condor exploded out from the field beside us, enormous and gnarled, like a huge black sheet flung towards us. It was too big; the signifier “bird” didn’t seem to apply. I followed it as it became real in the sky, like the condors I had seen previously. It came into focus as it became a shape hovering a million miles above the huge pacific.

We found ourselves in a dull town, thinking about the compromises made in living here, like they do. There was a wonderful market though with food and a spectacularly random second-hand stuff section, anything that you could never need. We got food for dinner and a useless adaptor. We hitched back to the beach and will the Seattler was there on his own, kind of just standing there. We talked about making decisions and committing to things, I told him about myself and my iniquities. Ewa and I went inside to make dinner; a bit later on he came in and said that he had been thinking about what we had talked about and that he felt ready to start making choices about what he wanted to do. I looked at ewa – we were waiting for a huge revelation, some grand statement, but that was it. He spoke softly – his name was will. Around this time the surfers came back – Maurice and Sasha and Angie and some kids looking for body boards. There was a full moon that night and the plan was to go horseback riding over dunes. Angie organised it – it was cheap and she even said that she would throw in a 3 litre of wine and some spliff – it ended up as being one of the great moments of the trip. We got picked up by the same taxi driver that left us to the hostel the day before, with the same Elvis record playing, and he took us to the stables. We were given our horses and we headed off in tandem, ewa`s horse taking her time, mine a little too eager, Will`s too small, Angie`s crazy and Maurice`s an aristocrat. The moon was low and buttery that night. Even now as I write this I can feel the horse between my legs, its roundness. Surely the horse is the greatest of animals. We rode in tandem through fields and the moon followed slowly, and when we arrived at the beginning of the dunes we stopped for wine and drugs. They joked about poor Will`s non-spanish, and I did some impressions of the guy from the restaurant the night before. The wine was heady and gloopy but we managed to finish the whole bottle; a joint was handed round, and we got back on our horses to make our way over the sand dunes.

Things I will remember from that night: the colour of the sand in full moonlight that put the sky blue-green, the low quake of the ocean in the background, ewa`s laugh, a child`s laugh, which fixes a spring stream in my mind. Angie at the back complaining that her horse has “gone mad”, the sight of the girls behind us, arriving over the peak of a dune, and holding it, silhouettes now, watching us watching them, basking in the moon. A horse will go slowly down a dune, but to climb one the horse will charge, and the feeling is glorious. I have felt nothing in my life like this, a childish rapture that made me roar and cry laughing. We would drop down into huge craters from which you could see nothing but the rim of the dune and the sky, and the moon. We would make our way up the far side, surrendering to the horses, who would show us the power of their hind legs. All this for hours. It was easy, with the full moon, the movement of the horses, the wine, and the weed, to entertain the notion that this was the lunar surface and the milky light in the sky was a ruse. Eventually we made it to the beach, and another moon appeared far out on the surface of the black ocean, the reflection of reflected light. We charged the beach, its full length, the sand firm and giving. I could feel that the horse wanted to run as much as me; I don’t know who enjoyed it more. A glorious memory, one of the finest moments of the trip.

We had arrived back to the beach beside the hostel. It was maybe 1 in the morning and we were heading to Valparaiso the following day so we said our goodbyes to the guys and headed to bed. We had organised a taxi from the night before, and he came at 7 am (same guy, same music).