November 7
We really wanted to get back on the motos after our four day ferry ride, but we couldn’t help but take a day to see Torres del Paine National Park. “Torres del paine” means “towers of the deep blue”, and indeed they were. I was not expecting it to be so, but it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. We are deep into Ernesto’s karma and had yet another unseasonable and uncanny warm and sunny day from beginning to end. We decided not to ride our motos to and through the park because it is 400+ km round trip and the roads are mostly gravel, which means watching the road and not the wildlife and scenery (in fact, it is a rule of the park that they are not allowed to pave the roads). As much as we hate canned tours, we are so happy with our decision. The van had huge windows that we looked out of all day. There were a lot more stops than we expected which was nice; we had three long stops where we did small hikes and and about ten short stops that were pretty much just for a photo. We saw stromatolites, Darwin’s rheas, condors (albeit too far away to appreciate their size), guanacos (boy do I like guanacos), black buzzard eagles, and Ernesto got to see a Patagonian mara hopping around! I am very jealous. The caracaras in and around the park are so tame and plentiful they reminded me of campus squirrels. We could have whacked them on the head with a switch and brought some home like Darwin did. And the plants on the Patagonian steppe… wow. I was blown away by how detailed such small flowers could be, like the Guernica that is just a few millimeters in diameter. My two favorites were the yellow lady’s slipper (or capachito) and the guanaco bush. If tubeworms were a plant, they would be a guanaco bush (maybe my new favorite example of convergent evolution). Unfortunately there were some areas that were in serious recovery/restoration efforts; stupid tourists lit illegal camping fires that damaged different parts of the park in both 2005 and 2011. Dumb asses. There is lots of wind here and nothing here has fire as a natural part of its life history, so it really hurt the landscape.
In terms of scenery… it was stupid. Over-the-top-beautiful-couldn’t-believe-it-was-real panoramic views. Much of what we saw today couldn’t even fit in my camera lens. The waterfall had a rainbow over it. The wind was so calm you could see the reflection of the towers in the lakes below. The glacier that cut the towers had an avalanche. We were driving and our guide said nothing and we didn’t stop. Ernesto calmly said “It is going all the way down! We are missing it!”. Another glacier that is melting from global warming had pieces break off two weeks ago and they floated to the shore where we could see them. The rocks had two layers of patterns, one pattern formed over millions of years and one formed over hundreds of years; it takes millions of years to form the colors and angles and mangling of the strata, but the “bricks”, formed by freeze-thaw water cycles, only take dozens of years. Torres del Paine has strata that are a few millimeters thick as well as a few meters thick, so to SEE all that time in the Earth on so many different scales was pretty astonishing.
The day ended with a tour of Cueva del Milodon, or the mylodon cave. The mylodon is an extinct sloth (that Darwin found bones of, hence its latin name Mylodon darwinii), and when the European that thought he “discovered” the cave in the 1890’s he found a hide of a mylodon. They went extinct about 10-12K years ago, so sloth leather was some seriously durable stuff. The cave has quite a geological story as well; after the rock itself was formed by the collection of pebbles in a giant lake, the lake dried up, then glaciers formed, then those glaciers melted and currents from the way the water went to sea cut a cave in the rock.
November 8
We did it. We successfully made all the final arrangements with Pricer Shipping and Ignacio Morales and our motos are officially being trucked and shipped to us from Ushuaia, Argentina. Wow. Everyone, please thank Super Hero Tonya Butts for this success. She is single handedly the reason we were able to make everything happen. THANK YOU TONYA :)
With a huge weight lifted off our shoulders, we took our first big ride in a week and rode ~250 km to Punta Arenas, one of two free port towns in Chile (the other is Valparaiso). As such the town is full of tax-free shopping (and we did a little). It certainly isn’t as picturesque as the other towns in Southern Chile, but the plaza and gaggles of imperial cormorants that occupy the run down docks are very charming. Our ride here was full of critters. Thousands of tailed lambs (as it's spring here!), dozens upon dozens of Southern crested caracaras, too many Magellan geese pairs to count, alpacas, guanacos, rheas, and two flamingos. It was windy but not too windy. Bueno.
We tried pizza again for the first time since Peru. It had hot dogs on it. Sigh. After it got served to us and we both sat and stared and wondered if and how to proceed, Ernesto said “at least it is the last time we will ever have hot dogs on our pizza”. We may or may not have had a big box of pizza para llevar (take away/take home) and given much of said pizza to a street perro on our way back to the hotel.
We just saw a clip on Chilean news about the birthday of Celino Villanueva, the world's oldest man. He is Chileno and is 121 years old, born in 1896. He doesn’t have any teeth but he still walks with the help of a cane. He is adorable.
November 9
Pablo, El Senor of our hotel last night, was very chatty and helpful this morning. He is Chilean, and asked us about a lot of the places in Chile he is proud of. It was endearing how he got really excited when we said we had been to a place and how disappointed he was when we said we had not visited. At one point we asked him about the two routes to get from here to our next stop, and he told us the roads are better on the eastern route but a small chance to see penguins if we the western route. West it is.
After a late start, it was a windy ride. The temperatures were mostly in the 50’s, with only a little bit of the day in the 40’s. I am wearing all my clothes, rain gear included, to stay warm. With the wind we had to pay more attention to riding, so we didn’t see as much wildlife today as we did yesterday. Unfortunately we saw lots of roadkill today… guanacos, rheas, foxes, and an armadillo. Sigh.
Right where the highway meets the Magellan Strait (which yeah, we’re on the Strait of Magellan!) there is an abandoned estacion (station) called San Gregorio. Behind the deserted buildings there are two shipwrecks. One is the Vapor (steamship) Armadeo and the other is Barca (boat) Ambassador. If we read the signs correctly, the Ambassador beached there in 1896 and the Armadeo beached there in 1932. We don’t know why and we couldn’t find out on the interwebs. The Armadeo is still miraculously chained to shore, and the Ambassador is seemingly so settled into the silty substrate it will collapse before it will move. It was intense to think about the men that embarked on those ships and traveled who knows where in what were no doubt treacherous conditions...
Around 2 pm we arrived to the end of the America’s along Ruta 255. After a quick ferry ride, we are officially in the island of Tierra del Fuego. Wow! We’ve gotten some really good shout outs, and it's exciting and is giving me some extra energy boost for our final stretch. There are lots of adventure riders around here, especially now as we all funnel down to the big rally in Ushuaia. But we still have yet to see another couple, a woman on her own bike, or anyone from a country other than Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.
We have been reading a bit more about the Selk’nam people, which is the indigenous tribe to Southern Patagonia. What eventually pushed me to read more about it was the portrayal of the people; the gift shops and tourist stops have people adorning striped outfits in fun and joyful poses. Their playful bodies appear as earrings, necklaces, kitchen towels, figurines, etc. Who are these clown people and why are they marketed in Chile? Sigh. Not surprisingly, their body paintings and “outfits” were highly spiritual; they used them as means to act out spiritual communications with each other and their version of “the gods”. Also not surprisingly, the story of these people is a sad one. When Europeans came here in the 1890’s to raise sheep, the Selk’nam killed said sheep for food. They existed solely on hunting, as the Selk’nam cultivated neither vegetables not animals for long term sustenance. Both Ernie and I wonder whether they were ignorant to the concept or just preferred not to deal with it… Either way, it is easy to see how settlers wanted to remove such a people and kill those who were killing their sheep, so they killed as many Selk’nam as possible, taking their population from the thousands to the hundreds in just 20 years. It is now called the Selk’nam Genocide. And now Southern Patagonia celebrates that with Selk’nam earrings? I suppose it is the same story as what happened to the USAmerican natives, the Australian natives, the African natives… Europeans that traveled the world, built a fence or posted a flag and said “this is mine now” and destroyed whatever culture was already in place. I guess it was just a bit more tacky and offensive to me to put the actual human forms on the propaganda. In the SW USA or African tourist towns we buy jewelry made of turquoise or tanzanite, but at least it doesn’t come in the shape of the suffered bodies.
(Pause).
This hotel can go fuck itself. It is the only gig in town, meaning it is the only hotel in between Punta Arenas and Rio Grande, which is about a 500 km stretch of potentially hazardous conditions and includes a border crossing. So if you want to play it safe and/or want to don’t want to have time to enjoy something about this part of the world, this is the only place to stay. It costs $125 a night, which is our most expensive hotel of the trip (even the Sheraton in Puerto Vallarta wasn’t this much). It is clean and all, but the wifi is terrible and I took a cold shower. There are no other restaurants besides the one at the hotel, and it serves traditional Chilean fare (i.e., pick your meat and pick a side). We both ordered a pepper steak (instead of farmed salmon, chicken, pork chops, lamb, plain steak, or steak with eggs) and it came with a layer of melted cheese. Wha? Why? I was going to send it back but I knew they would only throw it away. I scraped and wiped and ate it. Sigh. So two mains, two sides, and we each ordered a glass of their house red wine. The bill was $58. To the owners of Hostel Tunkelen, your Karma must be even lower than the gas station attendant in Baja, Mexico, so good luck with that.
We really wanted to get back on the motos after our four day ferry ride, but we couldn’t help but take a day to see Torres del Paine National Park. “Torres del paine” means “towers of the deep blue”, and indeed they were. I was not expecting it to be so, but it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. We are deep into Ernesto’s karma and had yet another unseasonable and uncanny warm and sunny day from beginning to end. We decided not to ride our motos to and through the park because it is 400+ km round trip and the roads are mostly gravel, which means watching the road and not the wildlife and scenery (in fact, it is a rule of the park that they are not allowed to pave the roads). As much as we hate canned tours, we are so happy with our decision. The van had huge windows that we looked out of all day. There were a lot more stops than we expected which was nice; we had three long stops where we did small hikes and and about ten short stops that were pretty much just for a photo. We saw stromatolites, Darwin’s rheas, condors (albeit too far away to appreciate their size), guanacos (boy do I like guanacos), black buzzard eagles, and Ernesto got to see a Patagonian mara hopping around! I am very jealous. The caracaras in and around the park are so tame and plentiful they reminded me of campus squirrels. We could have whacked them on the head with a switch and brought some home like Darwin did. And the plants on the Patagonian steppe… wow. I was blown away by how detailed such small flowers could be, like the Guernica that is just a few millimeters in diameter. My two favorites were the yellow lady’s slipper (or capachito) and the guanaco bush. If tubeworms were a plant, they would be a guanaco bush (maybe my new favorite example of convergent evolution). Unfortunately there were some areas that were in serious recovery/restoration efforts; stupid tourists lit illegal camping fires that damaged different parts of the park in both 2005 and 2011. Dumb asses. There is lots of wind here and nothing here has fire as a natural part of its life history, so it really hurt the landscape.
In terms of scenery… it was stupid. Over-the-top-beautiful-couldn’t-believe-it-was-real panoramic views. Much of what we saw today couldn’t even fit in my camera lens. The waterfall had a rainbow over it. The wind was so calm you could see the reflection of the towers in the lakes below. The glacier that cut the towers had an avalanche. We were driving and our guide said nothing and we didn’t stop. Ernesto calmly said “It is going all the way down! We are missing it!”. Another glacier that is melting from global warming had pieces break off two weeks ago and they floated to the shore where we could see them. The rocks had two layers of patterns, one pattern formed over millions of years and one formed over hundreds of years; it takes millions of years to form the colors and angles and mangling of the strata, but the “bricks”, formed by freeze-thaw water cycles, only take dozens of years. Torres del Paine has strata that are a few millimeters thick as well as a few meters thick, so to SEE all that time in the Earth on so many different scales was pretty astonishing.
The day ended with a tour of Cueva del Milodon, or the mylodon cave. The mylodon is an extinct sloth (that Darwin found bones of, hence its latin name Mylodon darwinii), and when the European that thought he “discovered” the cave in the 1890’s he found a hide of a mylodon. They went extinct about 10-12K years ago, so sloth leather was some seriously durable stuff. The cave has quite a geological story as well; after the rock itself was formed by the collection of pebbles in a giant lake, the lake dried up, then glaciers formed, then those glaciers melted and currents from the way the water went to sea cut a cave in the rock.
November 8
We did it. We successfully made all the final arrangements with Pricer Shipping and Ignacio Morales and our motos are officially being trucked and shipped to us from Ushuaia, Argentina. Wow. Everyone, please thank Super Hero Tonya Butts for this success. She is single handedly the reason we were able to make everything happen. THANK YOU TONYA :)
With a huge weight lifted off our shoulders, we took our first big ride in a week and rode ~250 km to Punta Arenas, one of two free port towns in Chile (the other is Valparaiso). As such the town is full of tax-free shopping (and we did a little). It certainly isn’t as picturesque as the other towns in Southern Chile, but the plaza and gaggles of imperial cormorants that occupy the run down docks are very charming. Our ride here was full of critters. Thousands of tailed lambs (as it's spring here!), dozens upon dozens of Southern crested caracaras, too many Magellan geese pairs to count, alpacas, guanacos, rheas, and two flamingos. It was windy but not too windy. Bueno.
We tried pizza again for the first time since Peru. It had hot dogs on it. Sigh. After it got served to us and we both sat and stared and wondered if and how to proceed, Ernesto said “at least it is the last time we will ever have hot dogs on our pizza”. We may or may not have had a big box of pizza para llevar (take away/take home) and given much of said pizza to a street perro on our way back to the hotel.
We just saw a clip on Chilean news about the birthday of Celino Villanueva, the world's oldest man. He is Chileno and is 121 years old, born in 1896. He doesn’t have any teeth but he still walks with the help of a cane. He is adorable.
November 9
Pablo, El Senor of our hotel last night, was very chatty and helpful this morning. He is Chilean, and asked us about a lot of the places in Chile he is proud of. It was endearing how he got really excited when we said we had been to a place and how disappointed he was when we said we had not visited. At one point we asked him about the two routes to get from here to our next stop, and he told us the roads are better on the eastern route but a small chance to see penguins if we the western route. West it is.
After a late start, it was a windy ride. The temperatures were mostly in the 50’s, with only a little bit of the day in the 40’s. I am wearing all my clothes, rain gear included, to stay warm. With the wind we had to pay more attention to riding, so we didn’t see as much wildlife today as we did yesterday. Unfortunately we saw lots of roadkill today… guanacos, rheas, foxes, and an armadillo. Sigh.
Right where the highway meets the Magellan Strait (which yeah, we’re on the Strait of Magellan!) there is an abandoned estacion (station) called San Gregorio. Behind the deserted buildings there are two shipwrecks. One is the Vapor (steamship) Armadeo and the other is Barca (boat) Ambassador. If we read the signs correctly, the Ambassador beached there in 1896 and the Armadeo beached there in 1932. We don’t know why and we couldn’t find out on the interwebs. The Armadeo is still miraculously chained to shore, and the Ambassador is seemingly so settled into the silty substrate it will collapse before it will move. It was intense to think about the men that embarked on those ships and traveled who knows where in what were no doubt treacherous conditions...
Around 2 pm we arrived to the end of the America’s along Ruta 255. After a quick ferry ride, we are officially in the island of Tierra del Fuego. Wow! We’ve gotten some really good shout outs, and it's exciting and is giving me some extra energy boost for our final stretch. There are lots of adventure riders around here, especially now as we all funnel down to the big rally in Ushuaia. But we still have yet to see another couple, a woman on her own bike, or anyone from a country other than Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.
We have been reading a bit more about the Selk’nam people, which is the indigenous tribe to Southern Patagonia. What eventually pushed me to read more about it was the portrayal of the people; the gift shops and tourist stops have people adorning striped outfits in fun and joyful poses. Their playful bodies appear as earrings, necklaces, kitchen towels, figurines, etc. Who are these clown people and why are they marketed in Chile? Sigh. Not surprisingly, their body paintings and “outfits” were highly spiritual; they used them as means to act out spiritual communications with each other and their version of “the gods”. Also not surprisingly, the story of these people is a sad one. When Europeans came here in the 1890’s to raise sheep, the Selk’nam killed said sheep for food. They existed solely on hunting, as the Selk’nam cultivated neither vegetables not animals for long term sustenance. Both Ernie and I wonder whether they were ignorant to the concept or just preferred not to deal with it… Either way, it is easy to see how settlers wanted to remove such a people and kill those who were killing their sheep, so they killed as many Selk’nam as possible, taking their population from the thousands to the hundreds in just 20 years. It is now called the Selk’nam Genocide. And now Southern Patagonia celebrates that with Selk’nam earrings? I suppose it is the same story as what happened to the USAmerican natives, the Australian natives, the African natives… Europeans that traveled the world, built a fence or posted a flag and said “this is mine now” and destroyed whatever culture was already in place. I guess it was just a bit more tacky and offensive to me to put the actual human forms on the propaganda. In the SW USA or African tourist towns we buy jewelry made of turquoise or tanzanite, but at least it doesn’t come in the shape of the suffered bodies.
(Pause).
This hotel can go fuck itself. It is the only gig in town, meaning it is the only hotel in between Punta Arenas and Rio Grande, which is about a 500 km stretch of potentially hazardous conditions and includes a border crossing. So if you want to play it safe and/or want to don’t want to have time to enjoy something about this part of the world, this is the only place to stay. It costs $125 a night, which is our most expensive hotel of the trip (even the Sheraton in Puerto Vallarta wasn’t this much). It is clean and all, but the wifi is terrible and I took a cold shower. There are no other restaurants besides the one at the hotel, and it serves traditional Chilean fare (i.e., pick your meat and pick a side). We both ordered a pepper steak (instead of farmed salmon, chicken, pork chops, lamb, plain steak, or steak with eggs) and it came with a layer of melted cheese. Wha? Why? I was going to send it back but I knew they would only throw it away. I scraped and wiped and ate it. Sigh. So two mains, two sides, and we each ordered a glass of their house red wine. The bill was $58. To the owners of Hostel Tunkelen, your Karma must be even lower than the gas station attendant in Baja, Mexico, so good luck with that.