Torres del Paine or Lots of Walking, Part One

This post is the first essay in the second chapter of my thesis. This chapter is titled Patagonia, and it features all of my stories from the three week trip that I took between summer classes (for them) and the start of the spring semester.

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Torres del Paine is a gorgeous national park in southern Chile, where I ended up spending four nights and five days backpacking with three friends on its breathtaking, if not always well-marked, trails. The day that sticks out most in my memory is the day we hiked nearly thirty kilometers (around nineteen miles). I only slept until 7 a.m. that morning, but between packing up and eating the first of many oatmeal concoctions (cooked with the pocket-size Bunson burner) we didn't start climbing up to the lookout until around 9 a.m. Thankfully, we went without our packs, because when I say climbing, I mean climbing. The trail to the Torres lookout, the mountains for which the park is named, is only a kilometer or so long, but the trail leads you up, alongside, (and occasionally in) a stream until you get to a field of rocks—rocks from the size of eggs up to the size of small houses. It looks somewhat strange because on one side stands the forest and on the other there is nothing but boulders as if at one point part of the mountain broke off and slid down alongside the trail.

Emerging from the trees, I spent a minute or two staring at this field of rocks wondering where the trail went. Then, looking up, I realized that the orange metal bar sticking up from the rocks was a trail marker. It meant that I had to climb up and over all those rocks. 

Right, okay, going up. I actually had a good deal of fun scrambling over rocks for about half an hour to reach the top. Somewhat out of breath, I climbed up the last rock and stood looking down into a bowl. The Torres stood directly across from me, covered in wisps of clouds, with a greenish blue lagoon at their feet. A number of different languages spoken by my fellow sojourners greeted me as I topped the ridge. They were resting on the rocks, admiring the view or clambering around below, exploring. 


A short rest and a couple of amazing pictures later we decided to make our way back down the rockslide to the camp. The four of us walk at different paces so we spread out along the path; well, in reality we made our own paths. 


Fortunately, I was alone when skipping and jumping from rock to rock, trying to think like a mountain goat, I found myself with my feet above my head landing flat on my back. I still have no idea exactly how I did that. 



I managed to make it the rest of the way back to camp without further mishap, and Sara and I set out around 11 a.m. hiking down the same hill we had come up the day before. We left the other two behind to pack up their tent; they walked faster than we did anyway. The trail is called the doble vu (or W in Spanish) and takes about five to six days to complete. The problem with the doble vu is that it backtracks quite a bit. It really looks like a W or more like a double U.

Rain

I opened my eyes and rolled over, groping for my clock on the bedside table—green numbers read 4:07 a.m.

“What am I doing awake?” I asked myself groggily. I settled back into my nest of covers, six in all, and noticed the sound of heavy rain pounding on the roof above. Mystery solved. A very familiar sound, rain, but one I hadn’t heard in months. It had rained maybe twice since I arrived in January, but only lightly. This May night was a real rainstorm that continued steadily all night and into the next day.

Apparently Chile has somewhat of a rainy season, meaning that it rains a lot during the winter usually starting in late April or early May and lasting into late August or early September when spring starts. This winter, however, has been unusually dry. We have only had three or so large rainstorms as of today.

Nonetheless, these few have been rather memorable. Being from the South, I am accustomed to summer downpours and even days of unending rain, but Chilean rain is a completely different thing. Usually the rain begins in the late evening or night and lasts steadily for a number of hours similar to the rainstorms of the southern United States. However, the problems begin when you want to go somewhere in it.

The next day I set out in the rain to go to the supermarket, a relatively simple chore. I don’t have rain shoes or an umbrella, so I donned my tennis shoes and rain jacket and began the 3- or 4-block walk to the store. Within minutes the rain had completely soaked my shoes and pants, and it was completely flooded everywhere. Something about this city being right at sea level or having a sandy foundation or something causes it to flood with only an hour or two of steady rain. I’m not talking about little dinky puddles, but rather the kind that, if you step in them, your foot disappears completely.

I continued walking, thinking I was already soaked so I might as well keep going. A few minutes later, I made it to the crosswalk where the store stood across the street. Walking to the edge of the sidewalk, I stopped and looked down. A small river had formed on the side of the street. Its twin ran down the other side leaving only a small strip of uncovered road in the middle of the street. The river stretched four or five feet from the sidewalk into the road–much too big for me to jump over.

Perplexed, never having encountered this problem before, I begin to backtrack looking for a place to cross the street. I couldn’t go forward because the side street was also largely flooded. I still wasn’t quite soaked enough that I was willing to jump into a 6-inch-deep puddle.

I walked back along the sidewalk peering between the parked cars to see if the river was small enough to jump. About a block later, I came to the large speed bump that runs across the main road. It is raised high enough that I could jump the small stream running over it and use it to cross the street. Checking the traffic, I ran across, balanced like a trapeze artist as I tried not to slip on the slick painted concrete.

I still had to jump across a smaller river to cross the side street between me and the supermarket, but it was fortunately much smaller than the other. So I did finally make it to the supermarket with my hair plastered to my head despite my hood, leaving a trail of water wherever I walked. The other shoppers looked considerably less soaked—maybe their umbrellas has something to do with it.

Having bought a few things, I ventured back out into the rain to take the bus across town. I jumped a few more small rivers and discovered the danger of walking too close to the edge of the busy street. The waves of water the buses could make were exceptionally impressive–three and four feet high.

Peering through the fogged up window of the bus as we crossed the bridge, my mouth fell open at the sight of the river. I use the term river loosely, because normally the mighty Marga-Marga looks more like a glorified drainage ditch off to one side of a dried-out riverbed. The city dwellers normally use the area for parking cars and holding the weekly open-air market.

You couldn’t see the riverbed now because it was full of brown water that churned under the bridge and out to the sea. The river now stretched from bank to bank, shallow, but about six times larger than normal. I wondered, what if you were one of those people who parked in the riverbed, what would happen if you didn’t check the weather or if you didn’t wake up at 4 a.m. when it started to rain…

July 4, 2009

Unexpected Discovery

I finally got around to seeing the Star Trek movie the other day, making the thirty-minute trip to a neighboring city to get my Trekkie fix. After the movie ended, a friend and I walked to the metro station, where I tried to swipe my card to go through the turnstile, but it beeped at me and said "bloqueado" on the little LCD screen.

Perplexed, I took my card over to the attendant to find out why it had been blocked. Turns out, the other day it had read an entrance twice, but it had only read one exit—sometimes the cards don't like to read on first swipe, so you have to swipe the card twice before it lets you go through the turnstile. It was easily fixed by swiping the card on the other side of the turnstile and paying for a trip I didn't take.

But I did make it through, and we walked up the stairs to the platform. I took a few steps alongside the tracks when I stopped, astounded.

"Do you hear that?" I asked, disbelievingly.

"Yeah, I do. Where is it coming from?" responded my friend with the same look of disbelief.

We both ran to the railing and peered out into the darkness at the plaza across the street, where we could just barely make out the silhouette of a bagpiper.

Looking at each other with goofy grins, we decided we had to go say hi, and off we ran. I paid for another trip to nowhere before running across the street.

Now, let me explain why we found this discovery so exciting. I own bagpipes and at one point could play reasonably well. As of now, I am very out of practice (read can't play period), and I didn’t bring them here to Chile. My friend plays the Scottish snare. Bagpipe bands consist of Scottish snares, tenors, and bases, as well as the pipers.

It’s odd enough that two kids from opposite ends of the United States manage to meet in Chile and happen to play Scottish instruments, but what's more, we found a Chilean bagpiper, which we thought was about as rare as winning the lottery. However, Daniel, the piper, told us there are a number of them in Santiago.

He had taught himself using YouTube and a practice chanter, before deciding to buy bagpipes, the same brand as mine, actually. He didn't play perfectly, but for someone who learned a very difficult instrument without a teacher, he played extremely well.

After a few minutes of excited bagpipe babble, a failed attempt, on my part, to play something, and a photo or two, we made our way, more slowly this time, back to the train station. I think we both glowed with delight for the next two days because of our unexpected discovery.

June 16, 2009

Culture Shock

On the eve of my second control de lectura or reading test for geography, I would like to share with you how shocking the first control was, and how a test like this would have never happened in the States. The articles we had to read were not very difficult to understand and revolved around fecundity in Chile. In the class, Geography of the Population, we study demographics, concepts such as birth rates, fecundity rates, population growth and composition, etc. 

After reading the one-hundred-and-eighty pages of text required for this test, we each took a section of thirty or so pages and made study guides based off the key terms and ideas. “We” are the six gringas in the class of around sixty Chileans. Next, we met together and went over each section, studying for at least three hours. Altogether, the study guide came to twenty-six typed pages.

All in all, I felt pretty well-prepared, but still nervous as I walked into the room at 8:15 that morning, well, probably 8:25, as the professor is chronically late, and the door stays locked until he gets there. The next few minutes were slightly chaotic as we rearranged the rows to put more space between the desks. We even put desks on the small platform at the front of the room—amazing how the class grows on test days.

Once we had settled down, the professor handed out the one-page test. The first eight questions were fill-in-the-blank, easy right? Not so much when you can’t seem to make your answers concise enough to fit in the blank. Nonetheless, the questions weren’t totally unfamiliar, and I slogged through them.

           

“Qué significa: ES, CENTA, MJH, TGF, SUF, CEE, RIP”

“No… no way, he cannot be asking us random abbreviations,” I thought. “One-hundred-and-eighty pages of text, and I’m getting asked about abbreviations?”

These were seven of the eight multiple-choice questions that followed the fill-in-the-blanks. At this point, my normal test nervousness turned into panic as I laughed silently at the absurdity of these questions.

“Now is SUF subsidio unido familiar or subsidio unico familiar?”

Glowering, I waivered somewhere between wanting to ball the test up and bounce it off the professor’s head and wondering what an F would do to my average. Looking up, I made a face at one of my classmates, who looked slightly nauseous, and turned back to the dreaded abbreviations. After a few well-educated guesses as to whether CENTA meant Centro Nacional de Tecnologia Argicola o Centro Nacional de Tecnologia Agropecuaria, I moved on to the final section: true-or-false. This section consisted of random sentences lifted from the text.  

“Yes!” I thought. “I remember reading this sentence. It has got to be true.”

Or not. One word of the sentence had been changed, therefore making it false. Needless to say, I didn’t do well, though I felt somewhat better when the majority of the class failed with me. The highest grade was a 4.7, which is more or less equivalent to a 77.

Now, in my experience, if something like this happens, the professor then realizes that he either didn’t teach the material well or that he didn’t give a sufficient explanation of what the test would cover. Instead the professor told us, with a completely straight face, that you know if there are eight true or false questions then four have to be true and four have to be false. That statement caused quite an uproar. If you tell me to read a text because you’re going to test me on it, I’m going to focus on main ideas and terms. I probably won’t pay much attention to the abbreviations; I mean, why would I waste my time memorizing that? Fortunately, the professor explained the next test, over our notes instead of readings, better; and it went slightly better, though the grades were far from good. I made sure that I had an even number of true and false answers on that one.

Tomorrow, at 8:15, I will be sitting in a desk close to the window on the fourth floor of the Ruben Castro building in Valparaíso, Chile, taking my second reading test for Geography that covers an 11-page text, plus 11 news articles.

I have memorized every single abbreviation, so much for the overall ideas.

June 8, 2009