After I said goodbye to my family when they went home after
Christmas, I had a month and a half to kill before I needed to be back in
Ushuaia for…something really awesome (more about that in a future episode).
What to do?
As nice a home base as Bariloche had been, I was anxious to move
on, and besides, there were no affordable beds left anywhere in the city beyond
the few days I had booked back at the Green House Hostel. So where to go? The
two remaining things on my South America bucket list were 1. Go to the Atacama
Desert, see the endoliths and 2. Work for a while at some sort of sustainable/natural
farm or tourist outfit.
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| Spotted on my bus ride out of Bariloche. WHAT IS THAT?? Borg cube crashed into an otherwise nice-looking volcano? Cerro Pantoja at the Argentinian/Chilean border. |
#1 – The Atacama – was to satisfy Science Carie, the Atacama
(driest hot desert on Earth—some weather stations have never recorded rain—ever!) has been the top of her World bucket
list (and #3 on the Universe bucket list after Mars and the moon) ever since I
read about the photosynthetic microorganisms that live inside rocks there—some
seriously badass bugs.
#2 – Spend time working at a Green Nature Organic Hippie
Rainbow Farm Lodge – was to satisfy Treehugger Carie who had dreamed of
building an Eco Camp somewhere lovely and mountainous and running a sort of
sustainable building and alternative energy demonstration center and laboratory
/ natural science and green engineering camp for kids. More on that in the
post that follows this.
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| Stuff like this was pulling me back to Chile |
Being indecisive by nature, I sent out emails to people
involved in Atacama research asking when they were going and if there was any
chance of me tagging along. At the same time, I researched Green Nature Organic
Hippie Rainbow Farm Lodges in Chile and Argentina advertising a need for help,
bookmarked a few that looked interesting (i.e., in a pretty location with
people who worked at something more interesting than smoking pot all day and
who would feed me), and sent out a few emails, including one to
one particular Ecocamp in a spot in Chile I had wanted to visit at some point anyway.
I didn’t hear from anyone for a few days, so I tried to book
a hostel room in nearby, but less citified, El Bolson. Still no beds available.
Fine, screw you Argentina, so I found a place on the other side of the border in
Puerto Varas.
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| Church in Puerto Varas |
And then I got sick. Deathly, wheezy, coughing in a scary
rattly way, fever and chills, shit-I-think-I’m-dying-of-pneumonia sick. It had
started with a phlegmy cough on New Year’s Eve and wasn’t helped by
hiking up a mountain for hours through the rain and freezing cold, then partying until the wee hours of morning, then hiking for hours through the rain and freezing cold back down a mountain. I woke up in the hostel on January 2
nd unable to
talk and with a horrible-sounding cough, quickly developed a fever, and it was
all downhill from there. But that didn’t change the no-beds-in-Argentina
situation so I loaded my deathy, wheezy, coughing in a scary rattly way, fever
and chills, shit-I-think-I’m-dying-of-pneumonia self onto a bus and wheezed and
coughed (trying to be as good as possible about coughing into tissues and
wiping my hands down with sanitizer ever few minutes to protect my innocent
fellow passengers) my way into Chile. It was another 6 hour trip, which would
once have seemed long, but after my
36-hour bus ride to Ushuaia seemed short
and I entertained myself by, wheezing and coughing, staring out the window at
the stunning views of volcanoes, and wheezing and coughing some more.
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| Mountains from the bus. That beige triangle is a giant mound of ash on the side of the road from a recent volcanic eruption. |
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| More ash. |
I probably should have flagged down a taxi, but being now
thoroughly used to being a cheap-ass backpacker the thought never crossed my
mind after I arrived in Puerto Varas and then had a few miles to hike with all
of my stuff to my hostel. Lots of wheezing, coughing, breath-catching stops,
and I arrived dripping sweat and completely exhausted. The upside was that I
looked so miserable (and potentially dangerous to others) that a single room
was found for me in the hostel attic. It was the cutest room ever, and I
quickly set to work napping.
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| Inside the Cutest Room Ever at the Hostel Margouya in Puerto Varas |
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| Cutest Room Ever would not have been complete without a wood etching of Che Guevara |
It was another miserable, feverish night, but I was waiting
for a response from my travel insurance company about coverage before I checked
myself into the hospital (which would have meant the emergency room, it being a
Sunday, and I’m always reluctant to call anything short of profuse blood
gushing an emergency), and never got that response so never went and checked
myself in. Instead I laid in bed and watched movies that my friends had
generously sent to me when I went begging for brainless entertainment on
Facebook (I don’t know about you, but when I’m sick I feel like my skull is
full of mucus, and my brain stops working) and ate from-scratch chicken soup I
made from some chicken parts and veggies I bought at a market a block from the
hostel.
That did the trick, and after a few days of that (including
another hostel move when I got booted out of the original one), I was feeling
better enough to move on.
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| Bacon Avocado? |
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| Inside my second quarantine room at another hostel in Puerto Varas |
And right about then, I got a response from Amory, the female
half of the team at the Chilean Ecocamp I had hoped to work at saying that I
could come and see the place and talk about what I might be able to do there.
And two days later, I was back on a bus, this time to the legendary Island of
Chiloé.
It was a miserable bus ride, and I was two kinds of sick,
still plugged up from my dying-of-pneumonia-turned-bad-cold, and also brutally
hungover. Yeah, I’m an idiot. It started when I decided to celebrate my last night
in Puerto Varas and my feeling significantly better by, rather than eating
chicken soup for the 5
th night in a row (my
kidneys were starting to complain about the
sodium strain), going out to the restaurant next door and treating myself to
some of the area’s legendary seafood. On my way out, one of the other hostel
dwellers told me that I could get $1000 peso beer or wine there with a special
hostel card, and although I was at first hesitant to drink anything while still
somewhat under the weather, I figured a beer would be good. So I sat down, at
the bar because there was no table room (my first mistake), ordered my beer and
a ceviche, and started chatting up the locals around me.
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| Puerto Varas has a large lake and a huge volcano. Making it officially awesome. |
There were some great stories and conversations and when one
guy insisted that he buy me a wine I didn’t refuse and then another insisted
that I try the bar’s pisco sour because they are reallyreallygood, and then the
bartender got involved and started having me try things, and…next thing I knew
I was god-knows-how-many wines and piscos and whiskeys and and and down and in
another bar scrawling my name in magic marker on the arm of a stupidly cute guy
from Texas while being gently pushed out by the bar owner because it was 3:30
am and he wanted to go home.
Despite my questionable mental state, I made it back to the
hostel without incident (which was conveniently right across the street from
the bar, so literally within rolling distance), but was in pretty bad shape the
next morning. And I showed up at my stunningly beautiful, peaceful, healthy site
of potential temporarily employment—on one of the three buses per week that
head out the long dirt road to Chepu from the town of Ancud on Chiloé
Island—exhausted, grumpy, still somewhat inebriated, head throbbing, stomach
uneasy, having horrible menstrual cramps, wheezy, sniffly, disheveled, and
reeking of alcohol. Classy.
And when Fernando, the male half of the Ecolodge team, came
out to meet me as I walked down his driveway and said, “Sorry, you can’t stay
here, we have no water,” I momentarily considered puking right there to express how I felt about that
news. I didn’t, instead managing to get out a semi-coherent explanation out
about how his wife had said I could come, etc. Given the shape I was in, I’m
surprised he didn’t throw me out. But he let me stay—for two nights until I
could catch the next bus back from whence I came.
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| Home sweet home in the Ecolodge Dormi |
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| Laundryline in the Dormi |
So I checked into the little
“dormi” (essentially a non-mountain refugio room) which consisted of a bare
room with two sets of bunk beds with naked mattresses), pulled out my sleeping
bag, crawled inside it, and slept for a few hours. I woke up feeling
significantly, if not quite 100%, better. Then, after dinner with two lovely
couples from England and Germany, I went back to sleep. In the morning I was
still sick with a cold and still suffering from cramps, but otherwise better. I
went for a walk to the dunes at the beach a few miles away, enjoying the quiet,
pastoral landscape, the river views, and the birds, and when I came back
decided to talk to the owners again about working with them for a while. It was
a nice, quiet place, and I needed a nice, quiet place to relax and finally get
some writing work done.
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| View of Chepu Adventures ecolodge from the Río Punta |
And guess what? They let me
stay!
Two weeks later, I’ve done a little
bit of everything:
- Woken up at 4am to prepare the
lodge and get guests suited up and sent off on kayaks for the Ecolodge’s Kayak
at Dawn activity, then pulled them back out when they were done
- Manned the safety radio from
4:45 – 8:30 am
- Made breakfasts
- Washed dishes
- Cleaned bathrooms
- Ripped the floor out of a
rotting bathroom, re-framed it, and rebuilt it
- Redid their website
- Made dinner
- Stripped beds
- Entertained guests from Germany,
Holland, Switzerland, Norway, England, Canada, and the U.S.
- Folded laundry
- Done translations
- Given kayak safety orientations
- Served coffee
- Making a promotional video
featuring their sustainability efforts
- Programming their beer fridge to
keep track of guests’ beverage consumption
- Installing solar panels on the
lodge roof
I’ve also had a lot of fun and
some pretty incredible experiences
It’s been great, a lot of fun,
interesting, and peaceful. It’s lovely here.
So glad it worked out.
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