Songea, Tanzania

I went south from Dar to Songea to meet my friend (and former volleyball teammate) Alena. (Her blog is alena-tanzania.blogspot.com) The bus ride tested my patience much more than the rides I took in South America. I rode a taxi to the bus station at 5.10am to get there by 5.30. I shook off all the guys coming up to meet who thought I should get on their bus, to whatever city it was going to. I loaded up my pack and climbed aboard after the driver scratched out my seat number on my ticket and wrote me a new one. Tanzania is like that. I moved seats twice before the bus left, thankfully sitting down in one by a window. I wrenched it open and went to sleep as the pink on the horizon turned to bright white. I had packed important things like snacks for the day in my bag, so I busted out the first of two peanut butter and banana sandwiches for breakfast (thanks to Tamara for a western luxury product like peanut butter). I was prepared with my pack-lunch but the Tanzanians all bought snacks en route. Young guys hoisted tubs of nuts or corn or soda above their heads and ran alongside the bus whenever we slowed down on the road, their muscles bulging as they tried to keep the tubs balanced. They were aggressive, banging on the windows to get the attention of the passengers. I preferred watching the women dressed in kangas balancing baskets of bananas on their heads. Bathroom stops meant pulling the bus over to the ride of the road and the passengers filing out. Men unzipped right by the road while women ventured a few meters further into the bush. I woke up later and we were entering Mikumi National Park—another thought provoking session on the boundaries of wilderness… doesn’t it break up the protected nature of a national park to have the main highway (ok, road) pass right through the middle? The giraffes and elephants didn’t seem to mind too much. I woke up later and tried to read, but Isabel Allende’s words blurred with the jolts from potholes. I put the book away. A muggy heat surrounded my face and I stretched to open the window again (the guy in front of me had closed it). I didn’t notice when, but he closed it again soon after that. I guess my heat threshold is a bit lower than Tanzanians’. It grew dark and the bus started spewing out passengers at the smaller towns leading up to Songea. We arrived just past 8pm, and I pushed my way off just like a local, refusing to give up my space or let anyone go in front of me. Alena had given me her address in case she wasn’t there, but as I contemplated the challenge of negotiating a taxi ride to Songea Girls Secondary School House #16 for the appropriate 3,000 Tsh, Alena came through the crowd and I knew I was home. I got my backpack (inexplicably soaked on the bottom) from under the bus and walked down the street (mostly paved) back to Alena’s place. The air was pleasantly cool.

Alena lives right on the campus of the school she works at. Her house is one in a block of teacher housing. She has a kitchen, a living area, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. That seems pretty nice to me considering the mud hut image the Peace Corps usually projects. She had cooked rice and peas (Tanzanian style, on her charcoal stove, just like she learned from the neighbors) and had kept it warm while coming to meet me. We ate dinner and stayed up late catching up on almost two years of activity. This naturally led to a discussion of UPS volleyball. The start of the season, without us there… well, it’s still tough. I went to bed in my own room, a blue mosquito net strung over the bed frame to complement the bright blue walls. (And no, not deep sky blue.)

I slept in (what a surprise) and then we went onto campus so I could look around a bit and meet the headmistress. Alena was modest about her Kiswahili skills, but I was suitably impressed with the conversations she had, especially considering my repertoire doesn’t go past Asante sana and poa. The dormitories for the girls who go to school here left the biggest impression. We complained about our Trimble rooms but these girls lived in a long hall of rooms that size, with 2 bunk beds to each room and absolutely no personal space. Trimble doesn’t seem like such a burden after all. I looked at the extensive book collection at Alena’s house (she is the Peace Corps library for the region, really) then we headed into town, just down the street, to explore. I liked the market, the rice and flour and vegetables piled high with everyone aiming to get our attention. Alena did the talking and I just smiled. We bought important supplies like okra and coconut then ducked into a vendor’s shop to escape from the periodic torrential downpours. The sky cleared as fast as it had clouded over and we dried off walking to the post office, the bookshop, and to another vendor to buy more spoons. Two other PCVs (peace corps volunteers—you get the lingo down pretty quickly listening to them talk shop) were staying the night before heading further south so it was a veritable party. I sat on Alena’s coconut chair, two slabs of wood making a little stool with a scalloped blade on the end specifically for shredded coconuts. (This was only Alena consulted with the neighbors on the best way to open the coconut while conserving the water inside; no one had a machete handy to hack it open so a neighbor came by and slammed it down on an edge a few times.) My hands got tired by the time I scraped out almost all the meat and then squeezed it by hand with hot water to make coconut milk. We added that to the okra curry that was bubbling away on the hot charcoal. Dinner was delicious and I knew part of that feeling was knowing how I had contributed (although not with heating up the actual cooking device—playing with fire still scares me). Jenna had just picked up a package from a friend from home that contained double stuffed Oreos, so we gorged on cookies while watching Sigourney Weaver fight Aliens. Movie-watching (and Oreo-eating) is not usually a possibility for the non-urban PCVs, so this was a treat for them. Alena is lucky to have running water and electricity most of the time. I meant to go to bed after that, but read a book until 2am instead. My goals for the short time I have in Songea include making pancakes with Alena and getting my hair braided. Soon we will head up north to Arusha town and climb Mt. Meru. This takes a bit of planning, only because we want to keep the cost down but make sure we have the right kind of ranger to protect us from aggressive wildlife in the park. Alena has PC training starting March 8, so we will have a good 2 weeks together. The bus ride itself will take two days, because the roads aren’t direct or in the best condition. So far I have talked to a few people who have climbed Kili and all have had different stories. The ones I talked to all made it, though some had it tougher than others. The altitude will be a challenge, I know, but mostly, what I hear from them just makes me excited about my time here in Tanzania. I want to fit it all in!


Well, since I finished writing that, I have seen a lot more but I have not visited an internet café. Later today, perhaps. We accomplished the short list of goals I made for my time in Songea. We made both corn cakes and pancakes, as well as bananas soupu, pumpkins leaves in spicy peanut sauce (I ground the peanuts by hand), fresh coconut pineapple juice (again by hand), and the Tanzanian classic uggi (porridge). I consider it a success that Alena has started to refer to the food we make as slop—it’s not an insult to the food, just my funny way of talking. I got my hair braided as well, an uncomfortable four hours sitting on concrete while my head ached from the pinching and pulling. I look suitably wild now, though.

We have had rain every day, so the red clay path outside is always muddy. I bring tracks in the house all the time since I don’t have indoor and outdoor shoes like Alena does. I even wore my Chaco sandals on the hike we took Saturday. For once I woke up really early. I made peanut butter and banana or honey sandwiches for the walk. Our hiking friends slowly started trickling into town according to the schedule of the daladalas (little bus—vans that you take for short distances). One PCV, Dawn, had to leave her place at 4.30am and walk two hours to catch her daladala in order to get here in the morning. The other people who came on the hike were a PCV from a nearby village, five volunteers from a church (2 Italians, 1 American, 1 German, and 1 Austrian), and Alena’s friend named George, a Tanzanian teenager who was going to be our guide for the day. We crammed into a daladala, as always more people fitting inside than you ever thought possible. At the end of the dirt road we all shuffled out and made our way to the base of the mountain through pounding rain. The rain lasted only a few minutes, enough time to get all the plants wet on the mountain side but not long enough to ruin our moods. George picked his way up to an unmarked path in the tall grass. We had to almost crawl up the slippery mud to keep from sliding back down. Mostly I could tell where the path was from where the plants were squashed down to the ground. I accepted the squishy mud in my shoes and the way my pant legs stuck to my skin and climbed on. The mountain wasn’t so tall, in the end. We shared sandwiches and beef jerky from home and other snacks on the top while looking out over Songea town and the houses dotting the green countryside beyond the city. This is the rainy season, so the landscape really was all green. Dawn, who has been here for a few years, assured us that it all turns brown during the dry season. On the way down, through rows of trees not unlike Van Gogh’s spindly cypress of Provence, I was distracted and fell behind the group. After 30 seconds, my friends in front of me disappeared in the tall reeds, and only the bent plants on the ground downhill showed me the way. The trail ended on a road where sticky sweet squashed mangos rotted by thatched-roof huts. We squeezed once more into a daladala and came back into town for a celebratory ice cream.

While my list for Songea is mostly accomplished, Alena’s is a much greater task. Do laundry, clean house, burn trash. We will have to do that together before we leave.

2nd Quarterly Report

In the last 2.5 months, I hiked in the following areas: La Quebrada de San Lorenzo, Lauca National Park, El Morado NP in Cajon del Maipu, Torres del Paine NP, Chiloé NP, Villarica NP, Huerquehue NP, Puyehue NP, and Nahuel Haupi NP.  I am proud of this list, despite its sometimes convoluted trajectory, because it shows the way I took advantage of the freedom of movement that Chile had to offer. I got to visit a variety of parks and protected areas from the far northern desert to windy Patagonia not only because my Watson-style sense of adventure was finely honed but also because Chile was easier to navigate than the last country I hiked in. I could hitch rides with trucks and walk barely marked trails without sacrificing my safety or breaking any rule. And as is appropriate for a Watson project, my visits to huts in Chile complicated my vision of wilderness in surprising ways. 

I divide the huts I visited into three categories: 1. The organized, reservable huts that I expected to encounter when I proposed Chile as a country to visit for my project. Most, but not all of these, were veritable systems, with connecting trails that could take 8 days to traverse, like in Torres del Paine and Nahuel Haupi.  2. The second category is shelters and family farms that offer little or no services. These shelters, like the ones in Puyehue and La Quebrada, are usually not reservable. The huts in both categories 1 and 2 are owned and run by private organizations or individuals. 3. The third, surprising category is the CONAF (Chilean park service)-run huts that were all rendered inaccessible, such as in Lauca, Chiloé, and Huerquehue. 

Category 1.

The huts of Torres del Paine, large cabins offering welcome relief from the sideways rain and strong winds, are run by a private concessionaire although CONAF does have a cabin or two along the trek for rangers. It is possible--and indeed necessary-- to make reservations in advance through websites or tourist agencies. The refugios are on par with Swiss huts in terms of comfort level, with bunks and sleeping pads, hearty meals, flush toilets, and high prices. The two refugios at the trailheads, one on the shores of a milky-green glacier lake, are kept well-stocked by bus and boat. Horses supply the other huts daily. Because the park is filled to over-capacity for the entire summer season, the huts are almost always full. While the lucky ones (or the planners) sleep inside, the majority of park visitors camp in approved pay-campgrounds near the huts. The places I stayed there had from 40 to well over 100 tents in the forest clearing. The camping crowd was younger, made up of those who didn't want to pay so much to visit the park and those who didn't make reservations. While theoretically these scrubbier campers were allowed in the refugios, in practice the groups remained separate. Campers and day hikers could technically purchase food at the refugios, but at least when I was there, the refugios ran out of food at meal-time and had nothing to sell to people dropping by. Campers had their own bathrooms, their own kiosk to purchase food, and were mostly glad to stay outside and brave the elements. It was a case of elitism on both sides--the warm, well-fed hut sleepers reveled in their comfort while the campers boasted of their purer, more complete understanding of the park after sleeping only inches from the freezing rain. 

The Nahuel Haupi huts were more similar to the Swiss huts I've visited because they were run by a local mountain climbing organization. There were even traces of a European connection dating back a century, with huts and natural features bearing Slovakian or German names. The rock. concrete, and wooden refugios of Nahuel Haupi were all supplied by horses. The park was busy, especially on summer weekends, but nowhere near as busy as Torres del Paine, so hikers could find a space in a hut without planning ahead or come up for a meal and expect to find food available. The park was more accessible from nearby cities than Paine, and much less expensive, with neither entrance fees nor camping fees. The difference in clientele, including some rock climbers camping near refugios for weeks at a time, meant the energy surrounding the huts was less competitive and more inclusive. Like Switzerland, there were day trippers just visiting for lunch, but in the evening when just the overnighters were left, the guest kitchens buzzed with the conversation of rock climbers and scouts and hikers cooking all together. The inclusive, informal attitude extended so far that I actually heard a refugiero (hut guardian) voice a kind of mountain ethos that would be impossible in the overcrowded Torres del Paine: A girl my age asked in there was space for the night --"There is always space," the refugiero said, "If there isn't space we make space." That reminded me of my first night in Switzerland, when I showed up at Berghaus Aescher with no reservation on a Friday night that happened to be the national holiday as well. There wasn't space, but they made space for me. 

I spent a week tramping around in each of those parks. Some of the huts were more exclusive or expensive than others, but all offered a warm sleeping space and hearty mountain fare (even a bife de chorizo). 

Category 2-Stand-alone huts with minimal services

When I planned to stay at a farm in La Quebrada de San Lorenzo, I excepted something similar to a Swiss experience, where I got to try the food they produced right there. But the campesinos were offered a bed (with puma skins for warmth) and nothing more--no smelly cheeses or cured meat. The family hospedaje in the village of Parinacota in Lauca NP likewise lacked an enthusiastic presentation of local products. The family served meals of quinoa soup and alpaca meat if you asked for it, but they seemed surprised to get such a request and did not readily advertise it on arrival. The refugio el Caulle in Puyehue was another shelter with little to offer--some rough slabs of wood nailed together made crude bunks and there was a slow combustion stove for warmth. There wasn't any sign-in book or extra fee for that hut; it was just what the El Caulle company maintained in addition to the adjacent campsite. The people at the category 2 huts--the farmers and locals--were the least friendly. I got an "hola" but nothign more--it seemed like hikers were intruding on their busy lives and they put up with the inconvenience in order to earn money. The farm in La Quebrada and the hospedaje in Parinacota were not built for hikers--they existed for the families long before hikers came along, unlike the refugio systems of category 1. 

Category 3

The third category of huts includes all those that CONAF, the Chilean Park Service, rendered inaccessible. I thought a combination of bad luck and bad timing prevented me from staying in a hut in Lauca, the first CONAF-run place I visited in Chile. The CONAF office in Arica, the nearest large city, assured me I could reserve space for the Lago Chungará refugio from a little town called Putre, at the base of the park. I spent 24hours acclimatizing in Putre and never once found the park service office open, despite the posted hours and despite returning at various times over two days. I found my way to Lauca without any park service information, so when a truck dropped me in Parinacota, I headed to the CONAF office at the end of town (which was only about 200 meters from the front). The office was locked and dark despite posted hours of opening. I could see bunks and a kitchen inside a building attached to the office but no sign of life. When a CONAF truck finally pulled into town the next day, I fired question after question at Ernesto, the park ranger. It turns out that the Parinacota refugio did use to be open to the public but now it is only for CONAF personnel and visiting researchers. I asked when the last researchers were there... months ago. And park service personnel? Well, Lauca only has 5 rangers total, only 2 on duty at a time, and with offices in 3 locations all with long (promised) opening hours, they can't be everywhere at once. And while on duty, they don't actually sleep in either of the park refugios--they descend down to Putre to sleep. So is there any refugio then? The Lago Chungará refugio was open theoretically, but you had to reserve it in advance otherwise there would be no ranger there to open it up. And how can I reserve it if I can never find the rangers? It was a bad cycle. Ernesto was friendly as I peppered him with questions, pointing mostly to inadequate funding as the source of this disorganization. Lauca receives few overnight visitors so there probably aren't too many people demanding to know how lodging there works. And so I left Lauca having seen the refugios but never having seen any sign of life, from a ranger or otherwise, inside of them. 

I explained my experience (or lack thereof) with CONAF refugios in Lauca not to complain but rather to show what Category 3 huts are like. I assumed that my Lauca experience was an anomaly, until I visited other national parks with huts ran by CONAF and never managed to stay in them either. I arrived on the island of Chiloé because I read about the refugios like Colé Colé in the national park right on the Pacific Ocean. But when I asked at the Castro CONAF office, they said the refugios are closed. Of course I couldn't just accept that as an answer. I insisted, pointing out that the maps and trail descriptions written by CONAF all mentioned the availability of refugios. But they insisted, saying that they existed but were nonetheless closed. At the park I got the same story; we were welcome to camp, but there was no access to the refugio, and no reason as to why that was. At Huerquehue, I was less than surprised when the CONAF rangers told me there was no hut. Although the guidebooks and signs still pointed to Refugio Renahue, but the rangers said that the weight of snow had caved it in and now it was gone. And that was it. So we camped at Renahue where we couldn't even see a trace of the refugio that once was there. 

Only when I saw a sign in Nahuel Haupi posted on the door of Refugio La Pedrita warning of the HANTA-virus in the rats did I start to wonder again about the reasons behind CONAF's reluctance to discuss huts. It was a fellow hiker who posted that note on La Pedrita, based on information he got from refugieros at Frey. CONAF, a government organization, didn't dare mention the diseased rats (or other distasteful problems) in their refugios, choosing instead to shut down their operations without explanation. 

My time in these parks was not wasted even if the refugios I planned to visit were inaccessible.I kept hiking as usual and I found other places to sleep of course. Most importantly, I learned as much about Chile and CONAF's conception of wilderness from not being able to access the huts as I had expected.

What's the big idea?

If you remember back to my 1st quarterly report, I concluded that wilderness in Switzerland and India existed where ever there was danger. So the snow and ice-covered mountain peaks frequented by climbers was much more of a wilderness to the Swiss than the easily accessible and well-marked mountain farm land with trails running through it. In India, it was not the danger to human life but rather the threat to national security that turned mountain areas into wilderness. The "no rules-no rescue" warning posted at the entrance signs in national parks in Chile matches up with the impression of wilderness-as-danger that I got in Switzerland and India. These CONAF signs warned that there would be no search-and-rescue parties, no helicopters flying in for a deus-ex-machina finish, and admonishing visitors to be responsible for their own safety. But in Chile, the most relevant questions to the wilderness question were not related to danger, but rather to boundaries and ownership. 

When hiking in Lauca, I sign a sign that said "Private Property No Trespassing Fine." It surprised me because I thought I was in a national park--how could the land be privately owned? Then Ernesto, the park ranger at Lauca, told me that 95% of the land encompassed by Lauca National Park is privately owned. This was the effect of years of making decisions about the park from the capital without effectively transmitting the information to the people who lived there. Now in Lauca there is a precarious balance between the locals who maintain houses there and who want to have farms or run hospedajes, and the CONAF and governmental officials who want to preserve the land as it is. 

But Lauca is not the only place where I was confused by a national park label. In Puyehue, I paid an entrance fee to a private company, El Caulle, rather than to CONAF. The owners assured me that I was entering "one big farm" where no one would check up on me. But Puyehue was a national park at the same time. El Caulle owned the land at the entrance, and so it was that company, not CONAF, that created and maintained the trails and basic refugio. I had to get off the trail for their cows being driven up the mountain. Down there it was a ranch, not a park, but at some undefined point, there was a switch, and I was in a national park, climbing up a volcano. 

In Huerquehue national park, there were no services besides pit toilets ever since the Renahue refugio fell. But the lack of services didn't really matter, because individual families lived at strategic points just beyond park boundaries and offered what the park itself could not: showers, hot bread, a roof for rainy nights. I knew where the park ended and private land began because the barb-wire fence indicated that there were animals to be kept out or in, but the exact boundaries did not really matter. What mattered was that any sense of isolation in the park was broken by the sign at a trail intersection that said "homemade bread, 15minutes" with an arrow pointing downhill. 

In the places where CONAF was definitely in charge, I liked thinking about how much control they had over how visitors experienced the park, even if that meant rendering refugios inaccessible. It seemed that by taking away shelters and services, or by not rebuilding what had once existed, CONAF was making national parks even more wild. When there are not huts, no trails, and no permits, basically anything goes. I met hikers who left a note with rangers saying they would be camping near a certain lake for 3 days, and I met other hikers who left no note, who wanted to travel under the radar. In the case of those kind of visitors, the "no rules- no rescue" saying is even more true. 

Another important consideration for wilderness (and on my list if I ever created a checklist) is: can I drink the water? I felt incredibly free dipping my Nalgene into rivers in Patagonia and being able to drink the icy water without purifying it. The more the boundary between national park and farm blurred, the less safe it was to drink directly from streams. The presence of animals, ski lifts, and even refugios above a stream meant that I had to treat the water. And untreated water felt very much like wilderness. The cleanliness of water isn't a requirement for my understanding of wilderness in the US, where I would always treat the water. But it does make sense to add it to that informal checklist on wilderness.

My experience in Chile was a great success. The frustration I felt in India because of limitations on spontaneous hiking, limitations like permits or guide requirements, dissipated in Chile. I felt free and safe in my movements, and my ability to speak Spanish gave me a chance to have better connections with the locals in the huts and parks. One of my best conversations was with a park ranger, Guillermo, in El Morado. He told me about his vision for building a refugio in the small park in the mountains outside of Santiago and about the surveys that Chileans filled out that said that most wanted their national park free of park benches and BBQs. My conversations in Switzerland and India never got as detailed as that--I could ask pushing questions without communication barriers. But that doesn't mean that I have more answers as a result. This report is a description of the huts I visited along with some musings about what makes the question of wilderness in Chile different than in other places. As I write this from Tanzania, I know there is a lot left to discover. I anticipate some of the same frustrations as India, because there are requirements about guides, porters, and contracting agencies here. But there will be some new twists--- like the fact that my guide on Mt. Meru will have to carry a gun to protect us hikers from any aggressive elephant attacks. As I write this from Dar es Salaam, just having landed on a new continent, my muscles are twitching. They are ready for me to once again head to the hills. 

Puyehue, Nahuel Haupi, and then some

Puyehue National Park, near Osorno Chile. Instead of paying a national park entrance fee, I had to pay a private company called El Caulle because the trail passed through their land. It was that company, and not the park service, that maintained the trail and the refugio. I walked in the restaurant to pay with an Australian couple, and the girl behind the counter gave us a single receipt, thinking we were together. When they asked about a receipt, the guy behind the counter said, don't worry, it's just one big farm, no one is going to check your proof of purchase up there. I thought it was a bit strange to think of my national park visit as more of a farm visit. The first 30 minutes was indeed like a farm, with gates to be opened and closed with barbed wire to keep cows on one side or the other. I closed a last gate then the trail ascended steeply for almost 2 straight hours. It was a poor trail, easy to follow but dusty with loose rock and sand, the grooves in the mountain sometimes following 4 different paths at once. It seemed very run down for a trail, even though there were a lot of people walking it that day. I made it to the top, to the refugio. The El Caulle Refugio was a run-down old shed, with slabs of wood across bunk beds as the place to sleep, and a slow burning wood stove in the center of the single room. The Refugio was free, or at least, included with the entrace fee. I slept in my tent that night, as did every other hiker there (almost 20 tents). The Refugio was not the standard sleeping area, it seemed, just a back-up for bad weather. And our weather was great. Clear blue skies during our long long days. I headed up the trail 25 minutes to get water from a glacial stream. The whole round trip took 50min, which was pretty long just for water, but it was good to stay occupied since I was having a tough time being by myself after Carolyn left. I managed to light the stove without any help and even have some thick chocolate pudding for desert. It seemed like hiking alone just wasn't fun anymore--even though the park was beautiful, I didn't have anyone to share it with me.

The next day I had banana oatmeal for breakfast and hiked up and across scree to cross the lower slopes of the volcano. The mountain turned into rocky dunes, with psychadelic patterns of brown in the sand. The trail was marked by tall bamboo sticks, faded by the sand and time, with red tubing nailed into the top to make them more visible. I left my bag at the tent sight, called Banos 2 because it was by a hot springs, and walked with two Israelis another 2 hours to see geysers. We waded across rivers in our sandals then got rocks in our shoes in the sand. The geysers were yellow and green and bubbling mud, but they didn't smell quite as bad as I remembered from Lassen National Park. On the way back I cut in on their Hebrew conversation (YES!) and talked about the importance of being Jewish according to the religious definition (they hadn't met an American Jew quite like me before). Back at camp, I shared by zapallo soup with them in exchange for pasta with tuna. I enjoyed their company and started to remember a bit more the benefits of being on my own.

I woke up early to go into the hot springs before leaving--I had to because they were there but also because I wanted to since my dusty pants. The bubbling springs mixed with river water right where I was sitting, so I could regulate the amount of heat I got with a wave of my hand. I walked 3 hours back across the sandy dunes, relishing in my ability to drink from the mountain streams. I added flavor packets like peach or lemon to the water and so had icy cold drinks to keep me going to whole day. With the refugio in view below, I left my pack behind a rock and climbed an hour and a half up the snow-filled crater on the top of Volcan Puyehue. Up there I had 360 degree mountain views, even over into Argentina. I almost napped except for the biting flies that kept landed on my face and hands (now finally, the white spots from the fly bites have gone down). I slid down half running in the scree and wrote 20 postcards to send home,since I had been slacking on that front for a while. It was a quiet night at camp, with only 2 tents and 4 people in the refugio compared with about 20 tents two nights earlier. It was my first day since Carolyn left that I was calm the whole day, with no major internal turmoil. I didn´t feel quite so lonely up on the crater when I felt like I could see the whole world.

Without bothering to add 50 minutes up the hill to get more glacier water for the final day, I started down the hill. The few people that were in camp and the refugio had already left so I bid goodbye to the volcano alone and headed down the hill. The descent was shaded in the forest, so it wasn´t hot, but it certainly was tedious. I couldn´t believe that I had managed to walk up that whole way. I shook my head again at the poor state of the trail, the erosion I assumed the influx of hikers had caused. An hour in to my mindless descent, I heard shouts in the distance, then a man on a horse told me in no uncertain terms to get off the trail so that I wouldn´t scare the cows. I moved off a ways but he kept shooing me further and further away. Stay hidden and shut up was the message he gave me. Oh, and there are four more groups of cows coming after his, so wait there for all of them. And so it was that I remembered that this was private farmland, not national park, and that I was invading the space of the cows, and not the other way around. So I ducked down behind bamboo and waited for the cows to pass. After the first group, I skipped a ways down the trail and found a better hiding place. The cowboys on horseback passed with shouts of UY-YUY to keep the cows moving while dogs barked behind them. I wasn´t waiting more than 10 minutes in the bushes, but I could feel the blood rushing to my foot, threatening pins and needles, because I didn´t dare make a sound for fear of another cowboy´s reprimand. When the cows had past, I rejoined the trail, understanding why the trail conditions were so poor. It wasn´t the 70kilo hikers who had pounded the mud down the mountain, but rather the herds of animals who are decidedly less interested in maintaining a single pristine path. And the way down certainly wasn´t pristine after that. I watched carefully where I stepped until I made it all the way back to the end of the trail at the El Caulle restaurant.

I picked up my bag and walked to the road, hoping to catch a ride to the next park instead of backtracking to a city and possibly waiting a few days for the next available bus. It took a while waiting in the sun, but made it most of the way to the next park, stopping at an urban campsite for the night when it was clear I wouldn´t make it all the way. I enjoyed luxuries like a shower and a pomelo soda before going off to sleep. I woke up to pounding rain and pulled all the clothes I had rinsed inside so they wouldn´t get more wet. But it was too late for that. It rained the whole next day, as I broke camp and bussed to the next city, dropped my bag, restocked on mountain food, and bussed to the starting point of the trek at Villa Catedral. This was my one day off from the trail, and my one day of rain, so I didn´t complain too much.

I awoke to clear blue skies and found the trail at the base of some ski lifts. I took the roundabout route through a forest recovering from a major fire, the remaining tree trunks still bright white, but slowly being overtaken by a green understory (good term, right Carolyn?). I dipped my toes in a river before the big uphill started, but it was so cold in the shade that I put my socks on and kept going almost right away. Halfway to Refugio Frey, my destination for the night, I passed a small Refugio called la Pedrita because it was built underneath an overhang in a big boulder. The refugio was made of wood, and was complete with windows, a stove, and a platform with space for maybe 8 sleeping bags. Basic, certainly, but a welcome sight in bad weather, I bet. The way it was built in the rock was so different from anything I have seen-- it was more dramatic even than Aescher Berghaus in Appenzell way back in early August. One problem: a handwritten note by the entrance warned of that there were rats inside that were known to carry the HANTA virus. Now this was something I had heard about, but never had I encountered a refugio or hut that screamed so strongly ¨stay out.¨ So I just poked my head inside for a second, but stayed out as recommended. The hut was unusable, but curiously they CAB, the mountain organization that owns it, chose not to dismantle it. Passing by what would have been my favorite refugio but for the possibility of diseased rats nibbling through my sleeping bag, I headed up the valley, climbing up rocks painted with smiley faces and kilometer numbers to encourage me to the top. A roof then a whole building then 3 buildings came into view. There was a crowd of grungy people and a pile of backpacks all strewn about the rocky ground outside the hut. Frey stood proudly at the foot of a short valley, just past a small lake. Jagged cliffs soared up on both sides of the hut, with the rock climbers´ carabiners glinting hundreds of meters above me in the sun. A woman came outside carrying a freshly baked pizza. I felt like I was back in Switzerland. I sat outside the door in Frey (outside the main hut-- there was also a smaller toilet building--squat but with flush-- and a storage building) and just watched the people below by the water and above on the sheer rock faces, trying to get a feel for the rhythm of life here.

This hut seemed so similar to the European ones I knew. It was a simple two room design on the bottom floor, with a kitchen for guests and a kitchen for the staff, along with some wooden benches and tables. Stairs led up to one big room filled with bunks and mats, maybe 40 or 45 spots in all. The sleeping area wasn´t quite as clean as the ones I remember from Switzerland, and there were certainly no fluffy down comforters arranged just so waiting for tired guests. And the food you could order or buy was different too, of course. Alfajors instead of kuchen, pomelo instead of appenzellerbier. Outside, I felt a difference because there was free camping around the hut and along an entire length of the lake. Some tents I could see from my viewpoint, others were hidden in the leña scrub along the water. The campsites were free, and it seemed like some visitors, especially the climbers, entrenched themselves there for weeks at a time, bathing in the lake whenever the sun shone and descending only to stock up on food (I confirmed this a week later when I saw the same dirty looking campers an entire week later when I returned to Refugio Frey). Every camper who had been there the night before was air-drying all possessions, sleeping bags, underwear, everything. I sat by the lake, the shore dotted with these colorful possessions, and watched the lake surface calm from ripples to mosaics, to glass reflections. I glanced away to assess my dinner food and when I looked back the reflection was gone, the wind picking up as the sun set. I made too much soup, cooking for 2 instead of just 1, and I tried to each as much as I could. I saved the extra broth for breakfast. Mmm.

The next evening I wrote in my journal: ¨nothing like seeing the smoke rising out of the hut´s chimney from far off away a long day hiking.¨ I woke up late, at 10, after a cold and uncomfortable night on what I realized too late was a slanted surface. I walked around the lake up the valley, until loose rock and boulders rose and all sides and I couldn´t imagine there would be a path out. But I trained my eyes to spot the red splashes of paint on the rocks and I picked and dragged my way out of the valley, heaving myself up with 2 hands at points. I bid goodbye to the craggy Catedral Peak and looked out at infinity yet again. A few quiet moments on the top like that is enough to remind me why I am doing this. Downhill was much harder, with more skiing through scree than I felt comfortable with. I fell 3 or 4 times, nothing serious, since the path was so steep I was never too far from the ground, but my confidence was shaken enough to opt for less dangerous route the next day. The most trying part of the two mountain passes I descended was not the loose scree, which just demanded attention, but rather the larger rocks through the trees when I was almost at the bottom. That demanded patience, which was in shorter supply. But like I said in my journal, there is nothing like the smoke rising out of a chimney in a lone building by a lake in a long valley, knowing that I am home for the night. Offcially named Refugio San Martin, my home for the night was more commonly referred to as Refugio Jakob after the lake over which it stood guard. I stopped to talk to an American outside who mentioned how friendly the huts he had visited had been, and walking inside I found the same to be true at Jakob. For the first time ever, including Switzerland, India, and the rest of my time in Chile, I went into a hut and someone greeted me without demanding what I wanted. When I said I didn´t want anything, the guy in charge said that everyone was welcome to hang out in the hut, even campers who weren´t staying there or buying food there. The atmosphere inside felt comfortable too, with strangers sharing tables and couples playing cards, without the pressure I have seen at other huts to buy at least a beer before being able to sit at the tables. The sleeping area was a room with bunks on the ground floor along with a loft up above the dining area. There was a hefty log ladder right by the door to get up to the loft. My last view of the hut before my early night was of a candle-lit room buzzing with conversation.

In the morning I hiked up away from the trail to Laguna de los Tempanos, bounded by a snow patch and high rock walls. I left the refugio at 12, the same times as the rest of the locals--most of the international hikers left hours before. As I mentioned before, I chose not to do the demanding route because I didn´t want to fall any more. The route required extra navigating because rock falls meant the route was unmarked or non-existent in places, so I gave myself and my knees a break and walked slowly down out of the valley instead of up and over the passes. This meant extending my 5 day trek to 6, with a shower in a little town halfway through-- sounds just about right to me. The little demanding part of the route was crossing a stream holding a wire cable above my head. Also a bridge that seemed sketchier than any I crossed in India. I stopped for two hours in the shade of trees by the same river and read Isabel Allende´s Eva Luna while dipping my toes in the glacier water and eating an entire Sahne-Nuss chocolate bar (Amazingly, I carried that chocolate bar in my bag for a week without once feeling inclined to eat in. I knew I was back to my old self when I couldn´t but help myself to another little square or two). I walked down in the dusty late afternoon, yanking off my boots in pain at one point... because ... well... ok, so the night before I dropped a tent stake on my big toe--ouch, but not a big deal-- but I ignored the way the band-aid rubbed against my other toe the next day until it was too late and I had a little circle of raw skin in just the wrong spot. It is healed now, finally, 10 days later, but that was a stupid and terribly painful little spot. The path ended at a T to a jeep trail, with no signs to point me in the right direction and no indication on my poorly labelled map either. I waved down some grandpa-bike riders and asked the way to Colonia Suiza. They told me and said it was 7km, but with great views. I started walking and calculated that I would just make it at dark unless I hitched a ride. I waved down a car and their reaction when I said I was going to Colonia Suiza was that it was still really far-- 7km. Such is the attitude of the mountain bikers from the city vs. the Colonia Suiza locals. I had a shower at the lakeside campground and walked down the only street in town. It was basically just a long block, a curious conglomeration of Swiss flags and food in a random town in the Lakes District of northern Patagonia.

After this I stopped writing in my journal for the rest of my hiking time, because I acquired hiking companions which kept me busy and talking the entire day, right up until I went to sleep.

Ha. I had to take a break and read the Style section of the nytimes just now (what Rachel... style... you. ok. simma). This is just like being back at school (ok, not just): I have postponed this as long as possible, I have thought and talked about writing, I have had my preparatory snack (just like a stop a Diversions back in the day) and I have read all the news I should on nytimes.com. There is nothing left to do but to finish writing. And its not like this is unpleasant to write. No, I enjoy this. Just like I know I will enjoy writing soon about the mountains huts as a system (or not) and what my latest thoughts are on the meaning of wilderness. And I have the time right now to do it. And I am in front of the computer. But now, of all times, I´d like to just lay in bed and read another book, or merely go to sleep. No escaping it this time, though. I will finish this tonight.

So from Colonia Suiza I ascended a gentle path by a river for 4 hours, taking off my boots often to air them out (increasingly smelly after non-stop hiking) and more importantly to give my tent stake/band-aid induced injury a chance to get some air too. After barely being able to tear myself away from the last 20 pages of my book, I started up the last section of the trail. Steep steep steep up and out of a valley. The t-shirts they sold in the hut had a picture of a squirggly line, ok, a squiggle, and said maldito caracol, which means basically damned switchbacks (at least that´s what I understood from my Argentine friend Carolina´s explanation of it... yes I do know that caracol also means snail, but the switchbacks are called that because they go in a kind of spiral like the shell of a snail). And I basically was thinking maldito caracol in other words going up for that hour, but I made it. Refugio de Laguna Negra was the coolest shaped refugio I have seen so far. Well, it was equally as cool as la Pedrita but it had no HANTA rats so that gives it a boost up, I think. The hut was one small building, with the entrance wall at about 9 ft tall and the opposite wall about 15 ft, with a slanting flat roof to cover it and a layer of sheet metal on the lakeside wall. The funny shape--none of this ¨classic¨chalet business--was to help it survive minor avalanches during the winter. The lake after which the refugio is named is not actually black, but the rocks above it are. I sat trying to read by the lake but the wind kept turning the pages too soon, so I gave up and joined the nearest conversation which happened to be in English. I met Carolina, a Porteña, and Naomi and Seth from Brooklyn. Carolina gave us our first taste of mate, which, since I had been preparing myself for drinking grass (according to Callie´s explanation) was a pretty pleasant green tea. We talked the rest of the afternoon, moving a couple times to stay in the sun and finally giving up and going instead to stake out our table for dinner. That night I ordered the hut food instead of making my own dinner. At that hut however, we were the odd ones out because all the locals cooked their own food. I stayed up late, having a class of wine and failing to understand when Carolina tried to explain truco, an Argentine card game like (and I´m going to butcher this spelling) schaffkopf with special cards. We went outside to look at the stars. The wind was warm that night and we watched for shooting stars and satellites together as I pondered why Orion would wear his belt so tilted. After my friends went to bed, I stayed up even longer because I had to finish my book. Some teenagers shared my table around that time. They started hiking at 6.30 and so didn´t arrive until 11.30pm--hiking in the dark doesn´t sound too fun to me but I guess if you know the way... There were still hushed (and not so hushed) conversation going on downstairs when I climbed up to the loft and found my sleeping bag where I had left it spread over a mat in a corner. I went to sleep to the noise of campers going in and out of the hut as they prepared for bed and multiple snorers up in the loft.

From the refugio, I made my way around Laguna Negra up and over rocks (including a brief rapelling section) along with Carolina, Naomi, and Seth. We climbed for an hour up to a dip along the ridge for views of Mt. Tronador right up close. I had seen the same mountain from the other side not too long ago when I was on top of the volcano in Puyehue. From there the red dots disappeared and we (poorly) chose to walk across the loose rock to get to the next part of the ridge. Tired and frustrated, especially since after 2 hours the refugio was still in plain view, we finished that section and talked to some hikers coming the other way. They guessed there were another 6 hours left until Refugio Lopez, which would mean we would arrive... at 8pm. We followed the path along more scarily shaky rocks then down into a sludgy valley. The red splashes disappeared again and so our patience wore thin searching for the trail. The trail descriptions and map I had were of no help; the second group of hikers didn´t help much either. We could see the path in the grassy meadow down in the valley and knew we had to get there, but weren´t sure how. I walked off across more slanting rocks (Mckenna, it was kind of in the style of me searching for our hostel in Florence 2 years ago--I walked like I knew where I was going but really...), but eventually it was Carolina who found the path and I backtracked and humbly followed. We ate lunch around 4.30 in the shade of some trees. Everyone was subdued thinking of the huge climb that awaited us. For lunch I cooked up some veg. soup with rehydrated mushrooms. Not awful, but I couldn´t really call it a success. The climb was one of those loose rock--stab your toe into the shifting dirt--pray that the whole mountain doesn´t come sliding down climbs. I once again felt glad I hadn´t down the more difficult route the day before--this was enough of a challenge. I wasn´t out of breath going up because I went so slowly that that wasn´t possible. But I had to take breaks because my legs were shaky and my heart would start racinh whenever the rocks threatened to slide out from underneath me. The four of us walked far apart, so that any possible falling rocks wouldn´t hit the rest of us. I had to do some Mark Massey style self talk, particularly on the lower half, when I could see I wasn´t even close to done. But there was no choice but to continue. It took 2.5 unnerving hours to get to the top. Carolina thought that called for some mate. We hid from the wind and slurped it up before heading right back down again. The last 1.5 hours to Refugio Lopez, which we could see below us, passed in kind of a daze, because for all of us, our energy and our emotions had gone into the climb, so we had nothing left. 10 hours and 15 minutes after setting out from Laguna Negra, we stumbled into the busy Refugio Lopez. It was just past 9pm, but since this wasn´t Switzerland, that wasn´t too late to order dinner. The bife de chorizo and pomelo felt just right after such a long day. We all talked for a bit but everyone was dead. We didn´t bother busting out a deck for more truco lessons though the rest of the visitors, it seemed, played late into the night. Our bunks were on a separate floor, not a loft, so it was pretty quiet as we put out our sleeping bags and went to sleep.

I shared my oatmeal and dulce de leche for the last morning in the mountains, then we walked down down down away from the refugio. Somehow we ended up on the jeep road, not the path, which took us to the right place but took 4 hours. Those 4 hours did seem pretty easy compared with the day before, but it was still more mindless than other days I´ve had on the trail. We caught a bus just before Colonia Suiza and headed back to town. I got to shower and enjoy fresh fruit, my favorite things after 6 days of hiking.

But I couldn´t leave it at that. I had 1 day left before my very long bus ride to Buenos Aires where I had my flight out of South America. So I went back to Villa Catedral with Erez, an Israeli guy I met at the hostel, for one day of hiking. It was a weekend so the buses were infrequent, and with our poor timing we didn´t actually start the walk until 1.45. The sign warned that the hike to the refugio was 4hours, which I hadn´t cared at all about one week earlier when I was here, but I didn´t want to miss the last bus (a la Puerto Natales). We hiked fast, with only a few short breaks, as I kept calculating how long it would take to get there and back. The last bus was at 9pm. 4 hours and 4 hours and we wouldn´t make it. But we were fast hikers. Up to the top in an impressive 2 hours and 45 min. I gave my feet a rest and ate an artesenal alfajor, accepting an offer of leftover pizza the couple who shared our table (Erez said that reminded him of a kibbutz). We started down at 5.40, half jogging the steep sections and otherwise keeping the same brisk pace. I remembered that a week earlier when I had been listening to conversations, someone had said there was a 7.45 bus. Erez and I decided to try for that one. At 7.45 we were still 20 min away. We saw the bus pulling into the village from the main road and started to jog. The bus had to drop off passengers and drive around the whole parking lot then wait for every new passenger to pay before leaving, so I figured we had a chance. We took a wrong turn when the trail hit a jeep trail almost at the bottom. Hurry hurry as I backtracked then found our way. I saw the bus at the bus stop, with the last passenger pulling herself up. Full out sprint move move move until I was 10m away and knew that the bus driver saw us. We climbed on hot and sweaty and happy to be there. Erez said I was in pretty good shape and I knew it was true. All those hiking days in a row will do it. Back in town I stocked up on fruit for the bus ride and showered before joining Erez and some other Israeli travellers for dinner. I couldn´t speak in Hebrew, but I started to remember enough to respond in English to comments in Hebrew. Yes! After that we walked and bought some gourmet chocolate as an after dinner treat. There was a band playing in the street, and there were crowds out enjoying the summer evening everywhere. A fine last night to cap off my hiking for South America.

In the morning I got on a bus and got off 22 hours later. Callie and I found each other and I unloaded myself and my smelly clothes for a couple days of city adventures. Now I am on my way to Tanzania for another chapter of new food, new people, and new mountain hut systems.