The 15 hour long busride to Chaitén leaves tomorrow morning at 7:00. I´m giving myself an extra 10 minutes to pack my tent up since it´ll still be very dark out when my alarm clock hits an hour before departure time. So yesterday I finally managed to get out of Coyhaique for a night. I walked a ways south of town and noticed chalk marks on the sides of one of the big hills above town; the more I see things like that, like posters of climbers in hostels and restaurants and travel agencies plus views of huge, intimidating cliffs like that one, the more I think about giving rock climbing a serious shot when I get back to Reno. We´ll see how much I want to pay Rocksport 60 bucks to join plus however much per month after that, if not I´ll just get a hangboard and work on that. It´ll all be good for the guitar playing if anything.
So I finally got picked up and taken about 15 kilometers outside of town to where the road towards these three lakes breaks off the Carretera Austral. My plan was to check out these three lakes: Frio, Pollux, and Castor (I´ll get to the names in a minute) and camp out by the most scenic one. About five minutes up this steep dirt road these two guys who work on the estancias picked me up and we got to talkin´. The driver asked me where I was from, then when I told him that I was from the US he asked me about the process of selling a mine to a US mining company. This being one of those times when I decided not to play pretend with whoever was driving me, I said I didn´t know and asked him why. He motioned to his partner to pull the trash container in the dashboard all the way out, then said to me, "I found a gold mine." Hidden way in the back of the trash container where nobody would EVER think to look was a piece of rock with a chunk of quartz on it. "Where´s there´s quartz, there´s gold," he said with glee. I tried to imagine him with an eyepatch, which turned out to be a pretty good image. I wish I could show it to everyone.
Anyway, they dropped me off by Lake Frio (Lake Cold) which turned out to also be called Lake Boring and Not Very Scenic With No Apparent Places To Camp, so I doubled back on foot towards Lake Pollux.
Living in Costa Rica for a time I became aware of the Costa Rica/Hollywood connection, basically meaning that priviliged members of the movie community and other celebrities are taking a pretty big interest in Costa Rica as a place for a vacation. The northwest is still relatively undeveloped and since it´s Costa Rica you´ve got both anonimity and safety (at least on the Pacific side; the Caribbean side can go fuck itself. Yea, I´m talkin´ to you, Puerto Limón.) The Red Hot Past Their Prime Chili Peppers have a beachhouse at Playa Tamarindo and I met a few other ticos who´ve told me about other stars they´ve heard about stopping by to check out the beaches. While this makes perfect sense in the tropics, I´ve also recently learned that southern Chile and Argentina are starting to be tapped as sources for vacation houses for the annoyingly rich and famous. I met one girl who spotted none other than Clint Eastwood on a boat tour and that rad sandwichshop owner I talked to on my last night in Buenos Aires told me that Ted Koppel has a house near Villa Angostura which is relatively close to Argentine ski and winter activity headquarters Bariloche, where I´ll be in all of a weeks time. Wouldn´t it be great to squat in Ted Koppel´s house? I can imagine myself writing on the walls, "I think I hate Ted Koppel! Wait, he´s informative and witty." Dan´s probably gonna be the only one of you who get´s that one. Anyway, what this is all getting to is that the ridiculous, explosion happy movie Face-Off with Travolta and Nick Cage that came out about 5 years ago has two characters named Pollux and Castor, the exact same as them two lakes. I kept my eyes peeled for the multimillion dollar home of some studio executive hidden amongst the hills, but no luck. And then last night in my tent it hit me that Pollux and Castor might just be two historical figures who´s names got bastardized into a John Travolta character and two lakes in the butt fucking middle of nowhere Chilean Patagonia, precisely where I was this time yesterday. Lake Pollux was a lot prettier, actually, no, it wasn´t too much prettier than Lake Cold, but it did have a dope halfway hidden camping spot where I got my camp on last night. All full of rice I laid me down to rest yesterday at about 5 and slept like a baby as rain gently fell on my tent all night long, then letting up this morning almost enough time for me to pack up my things and head back into town. It was good.
In a piece of sad news, I hate fucking hate cameras. The little bastard I got in Buenos Aires already dun´ gone an´ fucked me over a roll. I snapped the last of 36 exposures in Tierra Del Fuego national park a little over a week ago, and though the fucking batteries had enough juice in them to take that last photo, they fucking died when it came to the task of rewinding the roll. Stupid me, thinking it had been rewound like the fucking camera promised me it would, popped ´er open and overexposed 36 hard earned photos of such beautiful places as Colonia and Montevideo, Uruguay, and Ushuaia, Argentina, not to fucking mention all the fucking pictures I took inside the national park. I could give you a more detailed explanation of what happened to the photos, but that would remind me of that photography class I took a few years ago at TMCC and I don´t ever want to think about that class again. Anyway, I´ve got about four exposures left on this third roll so if she takes a big fat crap on me again when it comes to rewinding time then this little camera´s gonna be sleepin´ with the fishies after I chuck its punk ass off the ferry between Chaitén and Chiloé Island.
While tomorrow´s all day busride is going to suck ass at least when it´s done I´ll be only a ferry ride away from Chiloé. This island´s supposed to be really cool, each little town has it´s own tiny, old, colorful church plus dirt cheap accomodations for dirt cheap me. I´m planning on about 5 days on the island, hopefully getting to know Castro, Ancud plus 1 other smaller town that´ll only warrant a night´s stay. After that I only have to go through Argentine/ Chilean customs two more times, then back home to my beloved Santiago.
Finally, I bid farewell to the charming old man who´s front yard I´ve been camping on here in Coyhaique before coming here. He had me write down my name and where I from, then when he saw that I´m from Reno he exclaimed, "Reno! That´s that town where everyone goes to get divorced!"