Farewell, Jan Morris...and That Soccer Guy

In the early 1990s, I finished my original guidebook to Argentina for a publisher whose name I will decline to mention here. Shortly thereafter, the same publisher offered me a contract to update their existing guidebook to Chile, which I accepted, and my career as a guidebook writer seemed like destiny.

While those two assignments might sound comparable or almost identical, there were significant differences. The same author—whose name I will also decline to mention here--had done the previous editions of both books. In the case of Argentina, though, the author held copyright and, therefore, I had to start the book from scratch. Given that the book was awful—so bad that the publisher decided to do a new version shortly after the initial publication—on one level that was no big deal.

 

Of course, that meant more work for me (and my wife), who also wrote part of the new title. We had to avoid plagiarizing the previous author’s work but, given its shortcomings, that was never an issue. The downside was that the publisher would claim the copyright to our new book, as it was then eliminating author-friendly royalty contracts.

 

In the case of Chile, the publisher already owned the copyright, so plagiarism would not be an issue—or would it? That came to mind last week when I heard that Jan Morris, famed for her journalism, travel writing and personal life, died Friday at the age of 94. I had once unknowingly plagiarized her.

When Jan Morris visited Puerto Montt, in the early 1960s, it looked different than it does today.

In 1961, Morris had described the southern city of Puerto Montt as filled with “structures in the Alpine manner, all high-pitched roofs and quaint balconies.” Thirty years later, the author of the Chile guidebook wrote that “many houses are of northern-European design, faced with unpainted shingles, high-pitched roofs and quaint, ornate balconies,” without attribution.

 

Updating the book, I was unaware of the flagrant plagiarism until several years later, when I expanded the quotation with appropriate credit to Morris herself. Legally, the publisher would probably have been responsible but, when I was fortunate enough to meet her at the annual Book Passage Travel Writers Conference in 1999, Jan simply laughed it off. That’s a great way to remember her.

 

It Goes to 11, or Is It 60?

In other necrology news, soccer icon Diego Maradona has died at the age of 60. Never able to appreciate soccer’s absence of hand-eye coordination, I'm not a fan of the sport, but there’s still no underestimating the impact this addictive personality had on his native country—which was always willing to rationalize his personal shortcomings.

Maradona shares a mural with tango icon Aníbal Troilo.

Argentine President Alberto Fernández declared three days of mourning, with Maradona’s body lying in state in the Casa Rosada presidential palace, but that turned into a truncated free-for-all as many fans tried to force their way in to view the corpse; earlier, morgue employees at the autopsy site apparently took selfies of that event.

 

In a country where embalming is unusual—the most famous case is that of Eva Perón, whose post-mortem odyssey is a true epic—Maradona apparently requested to have himself put on public display in perpetuity, but the family appears to have overruled that. “El Diego” may never enjoy Evita’s privileged position at the elite Cementerio de la Recoleta, but his tomb in suburban Buenos Aires Province seems likely to  become a pilgrimage site in its own right.

 

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano may have summed up his legacy best: “Maradona was condemned to believe himself Maradona and obliged to be the star of every party, the baby at every baptism, and corpse at every wake. Success is even more devastating than cocaine. No analysis of urine or blood can reveal that drug.”

Another Ferry Tale, from Hornopirén

Many times I’ve driven Chile’s Carretera Austral, but it’s been some time since I began at its official starting point in the city of Puerto Montt. On Tuesday, though, I chose to take the shortest leg of roughly 100 kilometers to the port of Hornopirén, where I would catch the Wednesday ferry to Caleta Gonzalo—or so I thought, as I’ll explain below.

The port of Hornopirén

Leaving Puerto Montt, it’s a smoothly paved two-lane road until Caleta La Arena, where the steep headlands still necessitate a ferry crossing to Caleta Puelche, where the road continues to Hornopirén. At the moment, though, this latter segment is one big construction project, with slow single-lane traffic, until within about 20 km of the town.

Once in town, I found a room at a funky hotel which, however, was reasonably comfortable and had better WiFi than I’d had in purportedly posh Puerto Varas the previous couple days. I’d purchased my Caleta Gonzalo ferry tickets online, but had to report to the local Somarco office to get them printed out.

There’s not a lot to do in Hornopirén other than wait for the ferry, but I found the pleasantly surprising Cafetería Rincón Piedra Lobo down the block for an ave palta (chicken breast and avocado sandwich) on homemade bread, plus a calafate sour for a nightcap. Later at night, though, it started pouring rain and, the next morning, I learned our departure was tentatively moved from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Even if that change had happened, it would’ve been inconvenient because the Ruta Bimodal itinerary I’d booked is a ferry shuttle, with two separate crossings linked by ten-km gravel road. This would have meant a very late arrival at my planned destination of Chaitén where, I learned, the storm had left the town without electricity. There were also rumors of trees fallen onto the gravel road from Caleta Gonzalo through Parque Nacional Pumalín Douglas Tompkins.

Hospitable Hotel Hornopirén is about as good as basic gets.

That meant another night in Hornopirén, where I moved to the gracious (and slightly cheaper) Hotel Hornopirén, where my room was smaller but far cozier. During the night, though, heavy rains still pounded the sheet metal roof (typical of this area), and I worried there might be another postponement.

Boarding the Capitán Andrade at Hornopirén

At first light, the clouds still hung low over the mountains, but the movement of ships in the harbor showed that the navy had lifted the port closure. And, as it happened, the Capitán Andrade—a spacious ferry with comfortable seating for passengers and small cafeteria with empanadas, sandwiches and kuchen—sailed on time up the lengthy Fiordo Comau. From the ramp at the hamlet of Leptepu, all the vehicles (and bus passengers) rode the 10 kilometers to Fiordo Largo, where we boarded the Andrade’s twin ferry Hornopirén for a shuttle to Caleta Gonzalo.

A view along the Fiordo Comau

I wasn’t sure what to expect here, especially since I’d received a friend’s alarming Twitter message about floods, the park’s evacuation, and conditions in Chaitén, but those turned out to be mistaken. But for a few potholes, the road was fine and, when I got to Chaitén, all was back to normal (though a crew was restoring some power lines). After a brief stop to purchase a ferry ticket to Chiloé on the 19th, I was on my way to La Junta’s Hotel Espacio y Tiempo for a restful evening.

My modest quarters at Hotel Espacio y Tiempo

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Requiem for a Friend

Steve Anderson and his wife, Loreto Roselló, on the deck of their Panitao home

Last month, I was shocked to hear the news that a longtime friend, Steve Anderson, had died in an automobile accident near his home at Panitao, outside Puerto Montt. I first met Steve when he lived in Santiago, where he founded the online newspaper Santiago Times—still extant under a different publisher—to provide English-language news about Chile. Over the years, I often visited the Times’s offices along the Río Mapocho, and even stayed at his cul-de-sac home on the slopes of Cerro San Cristóbal—sometimes crashing in my sleeping bag on a deck that overlooked downtown.

Steve Anderson shopping for produce at the neighborhood farmers' market

Steve was a southern boy, a native of Arkansas, who had worked in the office the legendary Senator J. William Fulbright(who was indirectly responsible for funding my own graduate research through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant). He had come to Chile to help with the “No” campaign against the Pinochet dictatorship in 1988 and, in his new home, married a Chilean woman and fathered a now 21-year-old son who’s a student leader in Santiago.  In his home at Panitao, he had become a leading advocate—with significant local support—for preservation of strategic wetlands that were threatened by suburban sprawl.

Whenever I visited Steve at Panitao, there were unlimited blueberries on the table.

In fact, I had recently stayed at his home for four days, which let me avoid the Semana Santa (“Holy Week”) period when much of the region is overrun with Chilean tourists on a long weekend. It’s also a time when I tend to get more work done sitting at the computer than I would running around checking practical details in towns like nearby Puerto Varas. At that time, he told me, he was planning to return to the States to work on the midterm congressional elections. He loathed the current occupant of the White House.

Tributes to Steve Anderson appeared in the letters section of the local newspaper.

I don’t know the details of the accident, but Steve’s place lay about a kilometer south of the paved two-lane highway between Puerto Montt and the town of Calbuco via a dirt access road. Entering the highway from his access road involved a slight climb that was partially obscured by trees, so it’s possible he never saw the car that hit him. Whether or not that was the case, I will miss him, and so will his family and neighbors.

Puerto Chacabuco Revisited

In early 1979, when I first headed to Patagonia, I dreamt of the scenic Chilean channels and fjords beyond the city of Puerto Montt, but I had only a limited notion of them. I’d never met anybody who’d sailed the 900 nautical miles to Puerto Natales, the gateway to Torres del Paine.

Part of the Puerto Montt shoreline, with Volcán Calbuco in the background

At that time, the rusty freighter Río Baker carried cargo between Montt and Natales, but without formal passenger service—the captain’s whim determined whether or not you boarded. Instead, I settled for the freight and passenger ferry that then connected Puerto Montt with Puerto Chacabuco, the port for the Aisén regional capital of Coyhaique. That 24-hour voyage was my first Patagonia adventure, a route that I’ve just repeated on Navimag’s ferry Edén.

Waiting to board Navimag's ferry Edén, the night before sailing

The Seno de Reloncaví, as seen from the sea

Puerto Montt’s natural setting on the Seno de Reloncaví always reminds of Puget Sound, where I grew up in Washington State—the Chilean port is no Seattle, but its inland sea has the same densely forested shores and islands, with several snow-topped volcanic summits in the vicinity. To the southwest, the big island of Chiloé compares well with Vancouver Island and, as we sail south, the landscape resembles coastal British Columbia and the Alaska Panhandle.

On the Edén's bridge, a chart of the route through the channels

In fact, nearly the entire route to Chacabuco is an inland sea where the waters are usually calm but, as we pass Chiloé’s southern tip, at the Golfo de Corcovado, there’s a surge of open ocean where the Edén starts rocking slightly—not alarmingly, but noticeably. Soon enough, though, we pass through the gulf and the waters calm down.

Recycling and disposal bins aboard the Edén

Shortly thereafter, I see crew members moving bags of trash and recyclables. In several places around the ship, labeled bins remind me that, on my previous voyage here, that vessel’s crew dumped debris off the stern and into the sea—something that would never happen today. Then, as I visit the bridge, we spot a school of dolphins and the pilot tells me he’s seen orcas in this area. Marine mammals, and the penguins, appreciate the change.

The Fiordo de Asian, approaching Puerto Chacabuco

I can’t recall much about the accommodations back then, but I believe we had narrow reclining “Pullman” seats, rather like those on a Greyhound bus. Nor do I remember anything about the food and, frankly, I didn’t much care—the goal was to see this remote region. Compared with that, the simple though compact cabins on the Edén are almost unimaginably luxurious, and the cafeteria food filling and nutritious enough.

Puerto Chacabuco's ferry ramp awaits the Edén

En route then, I met a pair of young German doctors who had shipped their VW campervan to South America and were headed for Tierra del Fuego—the exact same place I wanted to go. After arriving at Puerto Chacabuco, they drove me and a German backpacker up the narrow verdant valley of the Río Simpson to Coyhaique, across the border to the Argentine town of Río Mayo, and then to the Atlantic coast city of Comodoro Rivadavia. There we all separated, but I soon managed to hitch a lift all the way to Ushuaia with an Argentine trucker.

The Río Simpson valley, between Puerto Chacabuco and Coyhaique

Back then, there wasn’t much opportunity to explore this sector of Chilean Patagonia overland—only parts the now completed Carretera Austral (Southern Highway) even existed. Now I’m fortunate enough to have my own car here, and I’ve since driven the highway many times without ever tiring of its rugged mountains, thundering rivers and pristine lakes, and its scenic coastline and pioneer settlements. I’ll be doing it again for the next couple weeks.

A Park To Oneself? At Laguna San Rafael

When southbound travelers head to Patagonia, a frequent motive is the opportunity to see something “off the beaten path.” One of their bucket-list sights might well be Chile’s glacier-studded Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael, southwest of the regional capital of Coyhaique, which remains one of the region’s least visited parks – technically, at least.

Laguna San Rafael is one of Chile’s largest national parks, where the ice from the Campo de Hielo Norte, the Northern Patagonian Icefield, still reaches the sea. I have viewed the jagged seracs of the park’s namesake glacier (pictured above) - the world’s lowest-latitude tidewater glacier - on three separate trips, but I have never actually entered the park.

In fact, even though thousands of visitors view the glacier up close and personal every year, only a relative handful ever enter the park – as recently as 2009, only 158 persons (82 Chileans and 76 foreigners) actually set foot in it. That’s because the jurisdiction of the Corporación Nacional Forestal (Conaf), which manages the park, ends at water’s edge – where the Chilean navy exercises authority. Thus, almost everybody arrives on catamarans and cruise ships that spend a few hours before heading back to Puerto Chacabuco (pictured below), the port from which they sailed.

On my most recent visit, a few years ago, I took the catamaran Chaitén (pictured above), which sailed from Chacabuco at 8 a.m., arriving at the glacier around 1 p.m. after a couple brief stops to view sea lion colonies en route. Over the next couple hours, the crew shuttled the passengers on rigid inflatables along the glacier’s face - not too close, to avoid the crash of melting towers of ice and the waves they create - on a magnificent day that yielded the best views I’ve ever had of the advancing river of ice and its surrounding peaks.

In the course of my Chilean travels, I have also taken the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales at least half a dozen times, and it still amazes me that, in a world of six billion people, such an enormous area could be almost unpopulated - human settlements, or any sign of population, are virtually absent in an area that resembles the Alaska Panhandle. Verdant forests rise from the sea to mountains bearing the last of the winter snow, among other peaks of perpetual snow and ice, but they remain largely nameless, to me at least.

In reality, except for the handful who earn their livelihood at sea, this is still the nearly trackless wilderness it was when John Byron - grandfather of the famous poet Lord Byron - was shipwrecked here in the 18th century, and when the Beagle, with Darwin and FitzRoy aboard, anchored at Laguna San Rafael in 1835. In one sense, the forested hillsides and islands of archipelagic Chile differ little from the barren wastes of the Atacama desert - there is a verdant monotony to them. Yet in the Atacama the evidence of human habitation and activity is present everywhere, while in the lush south it's simply overgrown, if indeed it ever existed. There is no simple way to orient yourself, other than by the cardinal directions - in general, you’re going north or south.

While seeing Laguna San Rafael other than by sea has been difficult, that’s starting to change. This past year, the total number of visitors rose to 4,728 – still only an average of 13 per day, though that’s misleading because almost everyone goes between mid-October and April. I had hoped to go last January with the operator Río Exploradores, which now takes hikers by road and sea to the park for day trips, and for one- and two-night packages with dome tent camping from the town of Puerto Río Tranquilo, 228 km south of Coyhaique by a mostly paved highway.

It’s not cheap, but prices compare favorably to the catamaran and cruise ship excursions; unfortunately, there was no space available on the one day I had to spend in Tranquilo (which, however, has its own brewpub (pictured above) and several other excursions, like the nearby Capilla de Mármol on Lago General Carrera, pictured below). I’ll give it another shot this upcoming season, though.

Chaitén Reborn

Almost every year, when I head to South America for the summer, I look forward to revisiting the Chilean port of Chaitén – in reality, a modest ferry terminal that connects the major port of Puerto Montt with the Carretera Austral, the southern highway that winds through an area as wild as the Alaska Panhandle.

I first saw Chaitén in 1992, while updating a guidebook, and the view of the Andes rising steeply behind the shoreline was unforgettable. At that time, the town and its surroundings had only about 3,600 inhabitants, but it would soon become one of the access points to Parque Pumalín, the audacious forest conservation project of the late environmental philanthropist Douglas Tompkins. I revisited regularly, but there was a hiatus in 2008, when a surprise eruption of the town’s namesake volcano forced its evacuation.

For a time, Chaitén was a Chilean Pompeii – the volcano did not set the town on fire, but waterlogged ash flowed down the Río Blanco to bury many of its wooden houses under two meters or more of cement-hard debris. The Chilean government tried to move the settlement north, to a more protected area but, while visiting Futaleufú a year later, I drove to Chaitén for the day and found, to my surprise, that a quite a few residents had decided to return. The mountain was still smoking, and many houses and vehicles barely showed beneath the ash, but several residents had cleaned up their properties – including a couple waterfront hotels – and forced the government to provide tanks of potable water.

I’ve had my doubts about Chaitén – and probably wouldn’t invest in local real estate – but seven years later I’m impressed by the effort to rebuild. Last January, I saw a new regional airport, new ferry installations, a new park and playground along the river, and private initiatives including a sparkling new hostel, restaurants, and even an appealing food truck (not so long ago, its espresso would have been unthinkable here). There’s a trail to the top of the volcano now and, while Chaitén is no luxury destination, it’s a rewarding one. I look forward to returning again in November.