En Patagonia: Chapter Six

 

The next morning, I was packing to leave again, but this would be my last bus journey for a while – I was going to spend two weeks in El Chaltén, and everything I planned to do there was on foot or on bike (with potentially a little bit of hitchhiking thrown in). I liked the scene at these South American bus stations – it could look like chaos from the outside, but it was actually pretty chilled. There would normally be a couple of dogs lying about in the sun – maybe hoping for a bite to eat or a scratch behind the ears. It always amazes me how they never seem to pester anyone – and the only dogs I’ve really heard barking are the ones locked behind a fence or the slightly crazy ones who gang up and go for cars. That was quite a sight to see in Puerto Natales last year. I was with my friend Matt, and we had wandered down to the lake in the hope of seeing a nice sunset. That never materialised, so instead we took to watching these four or five dogs chasing every car or pick-up truck that came through the junction. I’m not really sure what they were trying to achieve – maybe they were just messing around and having a laugh. When the traffic dwindled though, the dogs came over to us and lay down quietly near our feet. But these El Calafate dogs obviously thought it was far too warm to be running around at all, and they were starting as they meant to go on – lying, sprawled on the hot concrete.

I boarded the bus and took my seat – I was upstairs, and just one row back from the front. I was sat next to an amiable man from the Czech Republic. We were chatting away when he paused for a moment to take a sip of his drink. On first impressions it was blackcurrant squash in an empty mineral water bottle. But then he lent in somewhat conspiratorially and told me that it was leftover wine – ‘so that I can get a little buzzed on the bus’. He went on to say how the wine is very good here, and that it’s cheaper than Coca Cola, and probably better for you - “It reminds me of the good old days back home when the beer was cheaper than bottled water – but sadly that is not the case anymore.” It seemed that this guy was more than a little buzzed already – he soon fell asleep and started snoring. So, I put my headphones in, sat back, and watched the amazing scenery unfold. It was all Patagonian Steppe and far off mountains to begin with - but those peaks came gradually closer as the journey went on. And with 45 minutes or so to go the breathtaking sight of Monte Fitz Roy came sharply into view. It wasn’t a completely cloudless sky, but all the spires of the Fitz Roy range were visible. Monte Fitz Roy stands at 3,405 metres – and it is particularly striking due to its sheer granite walls which protrude directly up out of the ice.

The road to El Chaltén

El Chaltén itself is a small mountain village and has been named as the National Capital of Trekking in Argentina. It was a hive of activity when we pulled into the bus terminal, the air was full of excited chatter, and almost everyone was dressed in outdoor gear and carrying fully-ladened rucksacks.  El Chaltén has a strong frontier-town-vibe to it, and it was in fact the subject of a border dispute between Argentina and Chile in 1985. But no actual war broke out, and the Argentine flag peacefully flies. The streets are a collection of souvenir shops, microbreweries, hostels, cafés, restaurants, outdoor stores (both selling and renting gear), and a mismatch of houses – some of them modern, some of them in disrepair.

The National Capital of Trekking

 There was also a school, a bank, and a post office with a battered red post box outside which I suspect was seldom used given that nowhere (not even the post office) seemed to sell stamps.

El Chaltén's Post Box

El Chaltén thrives primarily on tourism, with the peak tourist season being between December and March. The permanent population of the village is around the 3,000 mark (in 2001 this figure was at 371). I wandered up the main street to find the accommodation that I had booked, dropped off my bag, and went out for an explore. It was only mid-afternoon, and although it was very windy the day was bright, and it was warm. I decided on a short-ish trail that took me across the river and up above the cliffs that flanked one side of the village.

Rio de las Vueltas

The views were incredible with the mountains still out of the clouds, and even the wind added a special touch of beauty to this Patagonian landscape. I came across a small lake, not really much more than a pond. And with each strong gust, the top layer of water would be scraped off up into the air and these amazing rainbows would form where the sunlight collided with the floating droplets.

Rainbows in the wind 

 I found a sheltered spot and sat for a while gazing up at Monte Fitz Roy, and several times I said out loud to myself that I couldn’t believe that I’m here. I looked and looked, and smiled and smiled, and I thought about many things – mostly about how I didn’t want any of this to be an isolated experience in my life. I didn’t want it to simply be a collection of memories and photographs which I could pick up and put down. I wanted it to be a thread that wove its way and connected these days and all the ones that lay ahead.

Monte Fitz Roy

A few years ago, I watched a documentary about Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold’s successful completion of the Fitz Traverse – an incredible and inspirational sporting feat (link included below). But not being a climber myself, it is hard to grasp the extent of the difficulty and the skill required to have pulled that off. The men and women who climb those spires and those big walls are simply on another level, and I find myself fascinated by the literature and the stories surrounding it. Above all, I think what draws me in is the dedication, focus, and passion that goes into achieving their goal. The most high-profile example of this in recent years is surely Alex Honnold’s Free Solo of El Capitan – the film of which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. In a world of quick fixes, and of giving up if we don’t see instant results, I found it deeply inspiring to see how a project of eight years developed and came to its conclusion. And it certainly made me think about my own life, and what would be my equivalent of El Capitan – what would I dedicate eight years of my life to in trying to achieve or in trying to create, and would I ever truly want to?  Because I don’t think it would be enough to simply want the end result, you’ve got to love the process of it all as well. And maybe it wouldn’t be as long as eight years, or maybe it would be much longer than that, and maybe you would start but never see the end of it and would you still think it would be worth it even if you knew that? These are things which I have been giving increasing thought to in the past few years and there was something about arriving in El Chaltén which brought them back to mind in earnest. For me of course it would not be climbing, it would be a writing project. And it was in those first few days in El Chaltén that I started writing this series of blog posts titled, En Patagonia (a nod to Bruce Chatwin). I had also written a few posts down on Station – loosely titled: Everyday Things at the Bottom of the World. It was a conscious decision that I made before coming South this season – that I wanted to get back into writing more regularly. And although my output on Station was not particularly high, it didn’t really matter. The important thing was that I had made a start and that I was doing something again. Sometimes I fear my own dream, sometimes I am scared to start in case the words never come. There is also the fear of whether the writing is any good. And while that is a natural fear to have, it is also a fear largely without substance; whether someone thinks that it is good or bad is not what causes a thing to exist or to disappear. It exists because you make it so, and because you have wanted to make it so. And that is the beauty of art – bad and good are irrelevant, it either exists or it doesn’t. And I almost feel compelled at times to bring something into existence, it feels like necessity, and it feels like purpose. And when the lines that form the individual letters, and the words that swirl about the page suddenly make known something that was previously hidden in your soul, well, then, it begins to feel an awful lot like joy. 

A Line Across the Sky | Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold | Patagonia - YouTube