Travels in a Thin Country (24 page)

After an hour a Conaf ranger walked past, and he laughed
at me, dripping under a monkey puzzle.

‘Come and wait at the information centre,’ he said. ‘We’ll radio to see if there are any vehicles about. You’ll catch pneumonia here.’

I stood letting my clothes steam next to a log fire under a copper chimney hood as half-a-dozen campers without waterproof tents crept miserably in to dry their clothes. It became increasingly clear that there was no hope of getting out of the park that day. The ranger spoke on the radio. An unoccupied room was located at the back of the information centre, and a down sleeping bag materialized. At least I wasn’t going to die. More people arrived next to the fire, mainly desperate mothers with wet little children. There was a kind of Hispanic Dunkirk spirit about that day. Later another ranger gave a slide show on the fauna and flora of the park. It turned out there were pumas lurking near the lakes. The Conaf men were always helpful, and loved answering questions and solving problems. They all wore brown trousers, part of a uniform obviously designed to make them look like trees. Seeing how desperately underfunded the organization is I was surprised at how much its motivated staff achieved. Wherever I was in Chile, I was always pleased to see them, and they seemed to be the same everywhere, whether in the desert, the forest, or on a glacier. They helped keep it all joined together, in their own way.

Long before Conaf men the park was the home of the Pehuenche, the People of the Araucaria Pine. For centuries the monkey puzzle constituted their livelihood – it provided food, wine, weapons and fuel – as well as operating as a cultural and spiritual symbol. The remaining Pehuenche were fighting for the right to stay on their lands; those who lived at Quinquen were demonstrating in front of the Moneda palace in Santiago that very month to protest about their proposed expulsion by a timber company. Their land had been sold to
a private concern in 1918, but their grandparents had refused to leave. Massive-scale logging followed regardless, and despite recent state prohibitions and other governmental intervention the future of the Quinquen region Pehuenche and their traditional way of life is still insecure. I could go into these disputes in great detail, but you know the story, and its themes of moral turpitude, greed and a dominant culture. You have heard it told about many countries, in both hemispheres, probably so often that the words no longer register.

The roof in my room leaked during the night, and there was fresh snow on the Sierra in the morning. The sky was the colour of sulphur. The families left. Most of them were wealthy professionals from Santiago whose well-scrubbed children already knew a few words of English. Their cars were full, so I waited around in my damp clothes. I realized that from now on I wasn’t going to be able to do whatever I wanted, whenever I chose. I had to take the climate into account. And it was going to get much worse.

At Temuco I reclaimed my gear in the nasty little hotel where I had left it, had a regrettably cold shower and washed my clothes. As I carried them back along the institutional corridor which smelt of rotting melons and looked like it belonged in a gulag I heard a phrase from a Beethoven piano sonata. It had escaped from a room off the corridor; the door was ajar, and someone inside was playing a record. Despite the poor quality of the sound the intense languor of Claudio Arrau was unmistakeable. It was the first time I had heard him in his own country (they had declared a national day of mourning when he died, a few months before my arrival), and I rested my head on the peeling wall of the corridor, embracing my wet clothes and listening to this stranger playing a Beethoven sonata on a record player in a crummy Temuco hotel room.

My clothes were still wet early the next morning when I
travelled south east to the heart of the Lake District. I felt tired and shivery, and had caught fleas from a child I had taken on my lap in a bus.

The Lake District is the most popular holiday destination in the country, and Chileans speak of it as their most beautiful asset. It was certainly beautiful, replete with volcanoes, green fields and the amaranthine loveliness of the evergreen forest. There were some resorts, but I was sufficiently high-minded to think that they wouldn’t tell me much about Chile, so I stayed on the bus till Panguipulli, a village at the northern end of a lake of the same name. Six men were shifting watermelons from a heap on the ground to a heap in a truck, throwing them to each other. I began sneezing, my legs ached and I could feel my morale draining away; determined, therefore, to keep still for a few days, I went on to the smaller and, by Lake District standards, remote village of Choshuenco. The bus that conveyed me there, along the eastern shore of the long lake, was like a mobile tin furnace, and besides that after two hours a sack of flour fell off the luggage rack and split on a passenger’s head, releasing clouds of white powder which made everyone cough.

Choshuenco consisted of two long dirt streets lined with wooden houses and gardens growing runner beans and blue hydrangeas. The three guesthouses were full. There were no more buses. There was allegedly another hotel just outside the village, on the black sand beach, so I carried the carpetbags to it, certain that I would be obliged to carry them away again.

They had a room. It was a large house on its own beach, with a wide balcony overlooking two wooded hills which formed a V as they came down to the water. The eight guestrooms and two shared bathrooms were simply furnished, and someone had put twists of polished wood on the tables and windowledges. The large windows faced the lake and the Choshuenco volcano at the end of it, and the sun contrived to
shine through mine all day long. The family who owned the hotel were quiet and friendly; it was their home, too, and they kept a fire going in the enormous fireplace in the dining room and a jug of cold pisco sour on the bar.

I had to call London one day. I reversed the charges at a hut in the main street which called itself the telephone office. The person I had to speak to needed to telephone me back later, so I asked the woman in charge of the hut if I could receive a call there in the afternoon. She said that would be fine. I asked what the number was.

‘One,’ she told me.

‘One?’

‘Yes, one.’

‘Is there a code?’

‘No, just ask the operator for Choshuenco One.’

A group of kayakers were staying in the hotel and one of them, who was Swiss but lived in Dallas, had broken a rib, so he was hanging around looking dejected while his friends kayaked. I went for a day-long walk with him to a waterfall. He said it was just like Switzerland – the cows, the flocculent clouds in a blue sky, the green fields broken by trees and hedgerows, and the streaked mountains behind.

I had dinner with the kayakers next to the fire one night, and stayed up late, and then I had to let myself out at six-thirty the next morning to catch the daily bus out of the village. My flulike symptoms had been getting worse despite rest and comfort, and I had a persistent pain behind my eyes and a permanently blocked nose. When the bus arrived shortly after seven it was already full, and I stood for three hours, slowly squashed against the back wall as even more people got on, and there I snivelled and succumbed to the lethal combination of self-indulgence and guilt.

I had to reach Puerto Montt that night, ready to meet my friends from London at the airport early the next morning. It meant a long day’s travelling, with several changes. On the last bus a woman crane-operator from Seattle carrying a bag of pastries sat next to me. She wanted to offload her tent, so she gave it to me, with a pastry.

‘Look,’ she said later with her mouth full of apple turnover and her finger pointing at a sign. ‘We’re there.’

Puerto Montt was a landmark in my journey. It was where the name ‘Panamerican’ ceased to apply to the highway; Pinochet’s dream road, the little-travelled Carretera Austral, took up the baton at Puerto Montt and went south. The roads were symbols of a more general transformation. From the northern borders of Chile almost two thousand miles away you can travel easily right down to Puerto Montt, as long as you don’t go off at a tangent into the mountains. You could drive the whole way at once if you wanted, in a straight line. Provided you stay on the coastal plain you have a sense of being plugged into a national network, but at Puerto Montt the plug comes out, and to the south the country hardens into a continental icecap and crumbles into an archipelago. Few people live down there, and fewer visit.

I went first to a pharmacy near the port, and described my symptoms to the saturnine pharmacist. He said he thought I had flu, and I asked if he could take my temperature. He rolled up his sleeve and said, ‘We take temperatures rectally here,’ removing a thermometer from its sleeve as if he intended to do it straightaway, next to the toothbrush display.

The next morning I picked up Rocky V from Hertz and my friends from the airport. The friends had flown from Santiago and had already been in Chile for a fortnight. We had known one another for twelve years, and I felt as if I had arrived at some small oasis of the spirit, a psychological service-station before the next long leg of the journey. We travelled north
around the shores of Lake Llanquihue, through Germanic streets of wooden turreted houses. In Frutillar, the Teutonic heartlands, I saw a group of old men in a bar hunched over copies of the
Condor
, a German-language newspaper printed in Puerto Montt. Germans colonized southern Chile extensively in the 1850s and over the following decades. Perhaps partly as a result of that earlier connection, during the Second World War Chile was the only South American country not to declare war on the Axis. The development of modern Chile owes a good deal to the Europeans who arrived during the nineteenth century, notably the British, Germans and Slavs. In the case of the British, the majority of immigrants belonged to the middle and upper classes, and their surnames still feature prominently among influential and aristocratic types in Santiago.

We asked a farmer’s wife if we could pitch our tents on her piece of the Lake Rupanco shoreline, and she agreed with a majesterial smile. Someone occasionally passed on the track above us – a man walking next to a pair of oxen pulling a cart, another riding a white horse, another urging three cows to the milking shed. Four pigs came down to grub around among the remains of our tortillas, followed by a goat and a flock of geese. My friends had brought mail from home, and it included a batch of Christmas cards. It was mid-February, but I put them up around the tent for the night anyway, and the goat ate them.

We struck camp the next day and drove to Petrohué National Park, where we walked up the Casablanca volcano. It wasn’t very high, and at the top we had a picnic, above the treeline in the centre of a 360-degree horizon of mountains. There were over thirty lakes and lagoons in the park, and the slopes around them were coloured with fuchsias, the clear dark pink of stained glass. The day after that we travelled down to the eastern shore of Lake Llanquihue, the third largest
lake in South America (286 square miles), and had another picnic in a field with sheepskins drying over the fence. Llanquihue was more like a sea than a lake. It was overlooked by the perfect cone of Osorno volcano, which Darwin watched erupting. Osorno is 8730 feet high and it is to volcano, what Krug is to champagne; it is the Taj Mahal of the natural world.

The
conquistadores
didn’t make much headway down there in the southern lakes. When they weren’t fighting them, the locals told them about a fabulous city made of pure gold in the far south, populated by white men. The Spaniards wasted years in pursuit of this city of their dreams. They knew roughly what the lakeland consisted of – Pedro de Valdivia wrote to Emperor Charles V on 26 October 1552 and told him he had been present at the discovery of Lake Llanquihue, and Juan Fernández reconnoitred the zone for the Governor in 1620. The natives east of Llanquihue were Huilliche and Puelche; some of them were farmers and fishermen, and others transhumant shepherds. For years they kept the pass over the Andes a secret from the Spaniards, who were particularly anxious to know of its whereabouts as it constituted the only land route open to them between their colonies in the north and south. A priest discovered it for them in 1708.

At Petrohué,a settlement on the banks of Todos los Santos lake, the road stopped. The water was brilliant aquamarine, and the forest fell to the edge of more than twenty miles of shoreline. We got on a boat leaving for the small island in the middle, sunk within a giant rim of volcanoes. They made the whole lot a national park in the 1920s – the first in Chile. There were more alerce trees then. The alerce is a slow-growing conifer (
Fitzroya cupressoides
exclusive to Chile, much overlogged for its excellent wood and now a protected species. The alerce at Petrohué still shelter the little Chilean shrew opossum, one of only two marsupials found outside
Australia and the rarest mammal in the country.

Indigenous people called the western tip of the lake Place of the Small Black Flies (Petrohué). This displayed a fine sense of understatement. We stayed in the only hotel, and for several hours concentrated on the destruction of these tabanid horse-flies, coining several more expressive names for their home.

It rained all night, and a thick mist descended over everything except a greyish-blue block of matt water. We had been planning to take a boat across to Peulla with the tents and hike around the country between the lake and Argentina, but the weather conditions meant that this was out of the question. Being in Petrohué in those circumstances was like spending two days as a hostage in a wet NCP carpark. We decided to return to Puerto Montt. I was beginning to realize that the effects of bad or freak weather in Chile increase exponentially, like circular ripples emanating from a pebble tossed into water. The road out of Petrohué (the flies had evacuated) was closed. A busdriver who arrived at midday reported that it had reopened, but one of the newly formed rivers across the road was ‘tricky’. We set out. The volume of water rushing down from the hills was overwhelming. It was an opaque mid-brown, like chocolate milk, and spilled over itself as it hurtled across the rocks and vegetation to join the rising river. At one point a small queue of cars stood pathetically on either side of forty-foot wide rapids gushing over the road (and boldly described as ‘tricky’ by the busdriver). The owners of the cars were in conference. A grader had just created a new road upstream, and collective confidence was being worked up to tackle it. We watched them cross one by one, some taking a run-up and careering through the waves, others moving so slowly that submerged exhaust pipes almost caused fatal stalls. We felt our stomachs tighten at each crossing, and then it was our turn, but with double traction Rocky cut straight through, and we continued
in the pounding rain, past lone churches built of alerce shingle tiles and painted bright colours. They all had tall pointed roofs and looked as if they might have been designed to feature on an Austrian chocolate box. At Puerto Varas the front was deserted, and looking at the railings in front of the expressionless water through gaps cleared by windscreen wipers reminded me of the south-west of England when I was a child, when we drove to Clevedon or Portishead on another rainy summer Sunday and ate an ice-cream in dad’s first car, which had one long bank seat in the front, occasionally spotting holidaymakers trying to redeem the irredeemable with binliners, and we always argued on the way home.