Getting to Ushuaia...Again

Palafitos in Castro, Chile

Getting to Ushuaia: The Plan

My trip to Ushuaia started out as a bit of a bummer. I had left Chiloé and Chepu Adventures excited to explore some of the southern coast of Chile along the Carretera Austral.

The Carretera Austral is Chile's answer to Argentina's Ruta 40. While the Ruta 40--large stretches of which I had already traveled--is largely through barren Patagonian steppe and has in recent years largely been paved, the Carretera is a bumpy dirt road through the verdant and mountainous wilderness of Chilean Patagonia. It links settlements previously only accessable by boat, plane, long horseback trips, or in some cases via road over the Andes from the more developed Argentinian side of the mountains. Remote. Mountainous. Sounded magical. Of course I wanted to go there.

The unrealistic romantic in me was hoping I'd manage to magically luck into another yacht hitchhiking stint and would sail along the coast of Chile, stopping along the way to go hiking in some of the legendarily remote mountain ranges (Darwin Range, anyone?). Given that, even if I had the luck, I lacked the time required for such a voyage if I was going to make it to Ushuaia in time to catch my ship to Antarctica (Antarctica!!!), I spent my month in Chepu chewing on alternate ideas for how to get there.

One obvious option was to hop on the Navimag Ferry from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas, which goes through the Chilean Fjordlands and would at least let me see the coast, if not hike in it. But it was expensive ($500/person, last-minute discounts were possible but unlikely) and it was booked for weeks.

Another trip I wanted to do was the combination bus/hike/horseback/ferry journey through the Andes from Villa O'Higgens at the end of the Carretera Austral to my favorite mountain town of El Chaltén in Argentina. But how to get to O'Higgens?

Someone at the lodge suggested what seemed like the perfect solution: an inexpensive ferry from the southern tip of Chiloé Island south through some Chilean Fjordlands to Puerto Chacabuco near Coyhaique, from which I could take a series of bus and ferry connections to O'Higgens, and then do the bus/hike/horseback/ferry trip across the border, then maybe spend a day or two rock climbing in El Chaltén before catching a bus to Ushuaia via El Calafate or Puerto Natales. Time-wise it was cutting things close, but it sounded too perfect to pass up. My heart was set on it.

So I went to book my passage and...everything was sold out. My ChepuAdventures host Fernando even called to double-check, but nope, booked for another week. Damn.

Misty sunrise in Chepu. Chepu was beautiful, but I missed mountains.

Plan C: Ferry to the volcano-devestated Carretera town of Chaitén. Also booked.

Plan D: Bus to Puerto Montt, bus to Chaitén, possible bus to Coyhaique or at least some backpacking in the Parque Nacional Pumalín, then a bus back to Puerto Montt, then Punta Arenas, then Ushuaia. I couldn't book it online, but it seemed like it should work out with some wiggle room for missed connections and such.

So I arranged to Couchsurf for a night in Puerto Montt to catch an early bus to Chaitén after a day exploring Castro and seeing some of the rest of what Chiloé had to offer.

It was kind of a giant flop.

Getting to Ushuaia Part 1: Castro, Chile

First, I arrived in Castro and, when I went to find a tour to see some of the churches and other sights, was told that they started at ~$100 USD and the bus schedules to do it independently were not in my favor. That was okay, I'm sure the churches are lovely but I'm more of a nature person than a culture browser. I set about my first errand of doing my laundry, which ended up taking most of the day because all of the laundromats in town asked if I had a reservation and explained they were full for the next four days. It took a while, but I was able to beg the owner of the hostel to let me do some bathtub hand-washing and hang clothes up to dry behind the hostel in an epic laundry line. 

My hostel laundry line in Castro

Then I went for a walk. If nothing else, at least I would see the Palafitos of Castro and the fish market I had heard so much about. Castro ended up being a lot more interesting than I had expected; guidebooks and people who had come through ChepuAdventures had painted it as kind of a dump, but I found it to be a very charming little port town. I even found some Microcoleus mats in the mud flats in front of some of the Palafitos.

Microcoleus mat in Castro

Castro Palafitos

Castro fish market

Wow. Those are...some colors.

I went to the Artisanal market and had some really soggy empanadas; they weren't the best, but I love empanadas and eating with my elbows in crab juice while watching a guy hack up chunks of miscellaneous seafood right in front of me was pretty novel. I also bought a sweater and some shoes that I fell in love with and that were priced well within my budget, the first real souvenirs I think I've bought on this whole trip. I walked to the food market where I tracked down some of the incredible smoked salmon that Amory at ChepuAdventures had been spoiling us with. I had dinner--ceviche and pisco--and then worked on a draft of a paper I wanted to get submitted before taking off to Antarctica. And that was it. The next morning I caught my bus to Puerto Montt.

Getting to Ushuaia Part 2: Puerto Montt, Chile

My first order of business in Puerto Montt was to buy bus tickets to Chaitén and back, then to Punta Arenas and Ushuaia, and hoped to have time to have lunch with my friend Max as well. But my Couchsurfing host, Ana, was there when I arrived, and swept me up to her place where she and two other couchsurfers--young French guys traveling south via motorbike--were just sitting down to an amazing seafood stew lunch. With Ana, my dutiful dieting to shed the Argentinian weight I had put on over the past few months went right out the window. The guys had a great idea of recording clips of people from their travels singing and dancing clips of a song and then wanted to stitch it into a video at the end of their trip, so presumably I will end up on the internets in a few months singing "me gusta la manaña, me gustas tu".

Me with hostess Ana

Ana was a saint and took me around town to help me get my bus tickets booked and help me run some of the crazy errands I had. First was a fiasco at the bus station when Plan D totally failed: the buses were booked! So I had to resort to Plan E which I made up on the spot: bus to Bariloche and a repeat of my early November trip to Ushauaia. But it wasn't possible to book that trip in the bus station (of course), but with some determination and forging of Argentinian documents (not even kidding here--sure, what I did was probably highly illegal, but I was desperate) I was able to book tickets online. 

She also helped me and the guys get and exchange a suitcase full of dollars to take into Argentina in order to engage in more illegal activity--this time some blue market money trading. In Argentina, the official exchange rate for US dollars to Argentine pesos went from 5.5 pesos/dollar to over 8 pesos/dollar just in the time I've been traveling. That horrifying rate of inflation has led a lot of Argentines to try to save money in dollars, except that the government has officially restricted the supply of dollars to prevent Argentines from getting them. So there's a thriving black ("blue") market for dollars, which means that you can get a much better dollar-to-peso exchange rate by trading dollars on the street than you can get from your bank, credit card, or ATM. The blue market rate varies, but is typically several more pesos per dollar than the official rate, and can be as much as twice as much. So you can save a boatload of money in Argentina by arriving with dollars. I didn't know any of when I started this trip, but was determined to take advantage of this this time, so I withdrew as many Chilean pesos as I could get in the time I was in Puerto Montt, and then felt extremely uncomfortable when I exchanged it all with a nice older lady at the bus station for dollars, and walked away holding more money divided in various pockets of my clothing and backpack than I had ever seen in one place in my life before. (Spoiler: I did not get mugged)

Puerto Montt

The next day, Ana took us to visit her family in the countryside, including a bus ride along the coast of Puerto Montt, which again is way more charming than the guidebooks would lead one to believe (which call the place "Muerto Montt" and fall just short of calling the city Sketchballs). Sure, it apparently has a thriving narcotics trade with associated gang violence, but that just sort of added to its charm. Puerto Montt was like a cross between Seattle's beauty--with a glittering island-pocked sound surrounded by snow-capped mountains, built on a steep hill spilling into a port--and good ol' L.A. grit complete with the pops of gunshots and graffiti and syringes on the sidewalks. Except instead of the grey uniform of Seattle, the buildings in Puerto Montt are decked out in full Chilean rainbow colors, and the city is surrounded by rural farms and fisheries.

Puerto Montt

Getting to Ushuaia Part 3: Bariloche & the Ruta 40 Trip

Finally it was time to take off and start the journey to Ushuaia. First, over the mountains to Bariloche, where I spent two nights with Anneke while running a pile of more errands buying camera repair equipment and stocking up on dark chocolate (important). I didn't have the time to play that I had hoped I'd have, but it was good to see Anneke.

And then the repeat 36 hour bus ride in the flying fish bowl that I had done in November. It was identical to the last time, except the food menu was slightly different and this time it wasn't me but someone else responsible for the periodic characteristic beeping of GoPro video recordings, and instead of spending it glued to the window I slept a lot. Except for the first hour and the last hour, it's a pretty boring trip.

Although the video I made the first time I did it might make one think otherwise...

But the last hour! Looking out the window as all of the sudden BIG EFFING MOUNTAINS (still with snow on them) appeared on the horizon made my heart leap. The bus pulled into Ushuaia to a sky in flames. The air was chilly. It felt like coming home.

Sunset in Ushuaia

The best part: I had time to hike.

I ran away to Chile and got a temp job at an Ecolodge

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mountains from the bus. That beige triangle is a giant mound of ash on the side of the road from a recent volcanic eruption.

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.

Inside the Cutest Room Ever at the Hostel Margouya in Puerto Varas

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.

Bacon Avocado? 

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.

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.

I’m starting to develop a habit of going out for an innocent beer only to stay up all night drinking with gregarious locals. I also only seem to do this when already sick (although, admittedly, my sample size is n=2 at this point). The gregarious locals part is a blast, but the drinking while sick part needs to stop.

My downfall: I took this sign too seriously.

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.

Home sweet home in the Ecolodge Dormi

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.

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

Guests enjoying the sunrise during Kayak at Dawn

Arranging fruit plates for guests' breakfast

Re-building a rotten bathroom floor. Step 1: Rip up cracked tiles. Step 2: rip up moldy, rotten pressboard floor; Step 3: build a new frame to support a stronger floor. Step 3: install new frame. Step 4: put down new floor on top and secure to new frame. Step 5: clean. Step 6: prettify (in progress).

Current and upcoming projects include

• 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

• Watching the sun rise over the Río Punta and the Sunken Forest
• Saw a pudu (world’s smallest deer) drinking from the river while kayaking
• Watched a Kingfisher fish while out on a run
• Swam with a river otter, the huilin (an endangered species), when it came up to me while I was swimming and chatted with me for 10 minutes

Sunrise over the Río Punta

Kayaks at Chepu Adventures

Bird! Diana? Helpwhatisit!

Sand dunes at the Chepu beach

It’s been great, a lot of fun, interesting, and peaceful. It’s lovely here.

So glad it worked out.

Feliz año nuevo chicos!

Happy New Year everybody!

I rang it in on the flanks of Cerro Tronador (Spanish for "Thunderer", and it looks as badass as its name...sadly the clouds didn't part for me to take photos of it this time) in a hike-in mountain hut full of fun people where the booze flowed and the music played until the wee hours of morning.

Rather than describe in words, here is the story in photos. And some words, but mostly photos. We like photos, right?

Part I: The miserable, miserable (but beautiful) hike

Anneke and I hiked four hours in the driving rain up the side of Cerro Tronador, climbing up through dripping forest with occasional cloud breaks that afforded us some jaw-drapping views. Within the first half hour, we were soaked to the bone, our water-resistant ski gear not up to the deluge. 

It got colder and colder as we hiked, but we were determined. We had a party to go to. Photo: Anneke on the trail as water pours down the volcanic rock.

We did have some pretty sweet views through occasional breaks in the sky (the breaks were never above us, sadly).

Castaño Overa Glacier on Tronador as viewed from the trail.

Anneke slogging though slush as we approached (finally!!) the refugio, rainbow in the background signalling better times ahead.

The refugio! Wait, no, false alarm. A building, but not the refugio.

The refugio! We decided midway up to stay inside, not in tents, because we were so cold and it was raining so hard and staying inside a warm, dry refugio after all that seemed (and was) infinitely nicer.
(Photo taken the next morning as the drunken revelers departed)

Part II: Safe and warm inside Refugio Otto Meiling

Due to our late start, we were the last ones to arrive at the refugio. We were greeted by a hut full of friendly folks who gave us a warm round of applause when we walked in, dripping and shivering. Drinks were quickly poured.

First order of business (after changing into dry clothes): open the wine Anneke hauled up.

Next order of business: cook dinner.

Table neighbor enjoying a book and some mate (in case you doubted we were in Argentina)

One of many cool mosaic lamps decorating the refugio

Part III: We came to party

We killed the five hours between our arrival and midnight by...drinking. Everything. It was new year's eve, after all...

Anneke gleefully pops the cork off of the semi-expensive (expensive is always a relative term when it comes to grape-derived beverages in this part of the world, God Bless the South!) champagne I hauled up the mountain.

¡Diez! Nueve! Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno!  ¡¡Feliz año!!

And then the party started for real. First song of the night: Final Countdown. Then: Carrie. Why? Because the refugieros love me (nobody forgot my name that night).

We danced in our flip flops until 4am. You'd think we hadn't just hiked up a volcano. It was an awesome night. (some of the dancing shots by Anneke)

Part IV: January 1, 2014!

Revelers sleeping off the hangovers the next morning. Incredibly, I did not have one. I may have drank like a fish, but I also drank a lot of water and danced all of it off. My sleeping bag is the red one at the bottom, next to the snugglers. Anneke managed to get a photo of me sleep-drooling in my sleeping bag, but I'm saving myself the embarassment here.

Breakfast in the refugio, watching the snow fall and working up the courage to leave.

Anneke was the first brave soul to leave the refugio in the morning.

But it was fine,and fun. The snow was dry and perfect. Me, backpack on, making a total fail of a snowangel. Photo by Anneke.

The snow was, in fact, so perfect that we had to stop and make a little snowman (Australian Anneke's first!!). Harder than we thought it would be, the snow was too dry to use my normal roll-the-ball expert snowman-building technique. Photo by Anneke.

We hiked down as a big group, I used all my Spanish words. Photo by Anneke.

In good spirits despite the rain and hangovers.

Happy new year!!

Epilogue: Some reflections

This new year marked quite a milestone in the life of this chica: the first new year in quite some time where instead of thinking, "good riddance old year, pleasegod let this new one be better," I rang in 2014 in the coolest possible way, all while thinking, "hotdamn, 2013 rocked!! here's to another one like it!"

2010 was the year I struggled mightily with a hopeless experiment, came down with a bad case of pneumonia, and ended a six-year relationship after years of friendship and fighting.

2011 started off hopefully with an exciting new romance and a new direction in my work, but crashed and burned hard with three consecutive cancer scares, surgeries, and the beginning of my battle with major depression.

2012 was an exhausting roller coaster in which I got engaged, got more bad cancer news, got left by my fiancé and, my heart badly and bitterly broken, I sank into the deepest emotional hole I've ever visited, ending up in a hospital after depression had led me to so give up on life that I stopped eating and drinking; it slowly got better from there as my PhD thesis project started to come together and I deepened relationships with family and old and new friends, but it continued to be an emotional battle.

2013 got off to a rough start with another broken heart, but quickly got AWESOME as I fought off the remnants of the mental and physical health problems I had suffered under the previous year, spent a lot of time working on my favorite desert island in the Pacific, wrapped up my PhD research and wrote my thesis, and then, in an incredible burst of everything going right, got a call from my doctor saying "all clear!" from the latest round of biopsies the night before I successfully defended my PhD dissertation in front of a room stuffed with dear friends and my family. August 16th, 2013, the day I became Dr. Frantz, was the best day of my life. And it kept getting better from there as I drove up the Pacific Coast from L.A. to my parents' house in Oregon, put the finishing touches on my dissertation, then flew to Santiago on a $5 air miles ticket to begin this life-changing and grand adventure.

So, to any of my friends out there who suffered through a rough 2013, I lift my glass to you and hope that 2014 is the year that Everything Gets Better. I know that can ring empty when you are sitting in an emotional well in the emotional dark. To you, amigos, I hope you reach out, I'm only an email away and you have my empathy and love. As Allie over at Hyperbole and a Half so beautifully put it, them's some dead fish, and it sucks. Hang in there.

Proof that life gets better!

And to those of you who had a baller 2013, WOOO!! Keep on rocking, rockstars!

To everyone: wishing you joy, random acts of kindness that make you smile, rain in the desert (but get the hell out before the flash flood, k?), and sunny powder days.

With love,

Carie