Approaching our last hour in Argentina. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
As we ventured toward the limits of Argentina’s portion of Parque Nacional Patagonia, green-tinged, copper-rich boulders and escarpments gave way to lush pastures and hearty rivers. Even here, at Paso Roballos, there was an Immigration and Customs office and it was the smallest of our trip. Chickens and a speckled white mare meandered outside the tiny office, where the officer and groundskeeper discussed what they’d jointly prepare for lunch and conducted their tasks without internet access or even a computer. We jotted down our names and Horace’s specs into a large, cloth-bound book with hand-ruled pencil lines.
Our last overland border crossing. at Paso Roballos, Argentina—Cochrane, Chile. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
Later that afternoon, in Chile, we scouted out a clearing in the trees along Rio Chico. We set up our camp stove and our communal camp seat purchased from Lider, Walmart’s Chilean branch, on the riverbank and proceeded with dinner preparations—spaghetti boiled with a packet of Maggi dry soup mix and diluted instant coffee. I set the soup to heat up on the stove. The scenery of the day had been so beautiful and a good kind of tired weighted our movements and our quiet chatter. The soup came up to a gentle simmer, and tiny, silvery fish fluttered past us on the river’s current.
Look out! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! Nathan suddenly screamed.
My lungs shriveled and my blood ran cold. While I could vaguely hear Nathan continuing to scream gibberish in my general direction, he sounded far away as I leaped back from the pot into which I had been filtering river water for our coffee. I scanned the river to my right. To my left, a narrow stripe of grass crushed by our footsteps lead back to our tent and motorcycle. I whirled around—nothing but forest and water steadily coursing towards us. Where was the danger? What was the danger? I knew I shouldn’t run. Meanwhile, instead of hurling rocks and standing as tall and powerfully as he could, Nathan rushed over...and crouched to turn off the flame under our camp stove.
Were you gonna let the whole pot boil over? Huh? Huh?!?
It was true—it would be a trial to clean the goopy, half-dissolved soup seasoning from the stove’s pilot light. True, we were hungry and the stove would need to cool completely before being re-lit. But once I had regained my breath and my bearings, I replied that I thought he had seen another puma, as he had the evening before, and colorfully suggested that he cook his own dinner. My sailor’s tongue rang through the coniferous trees and I stomped back to the tent. We ate our meal in shifts that evening, and I spitefully ate the blue Jolly Rancher which I had been saving in my pocket as a surprise for Nathan.
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We set our sights on the town of Cochrane, a former military outpost, and were now officially riding the Carretera Austral, purportedly the most beautiful highway in all the Americas.
Roadside thistles outside of Cochrane. Photo by Diana Juárez.
We took two days to replenish ourselves and our supplies. We restocked our rations at the commissary-cum-grocery store, utilized the town's wifi, groomed ourselves and laundered clothes in our municipal campsite’s bathroom, and tried to repair the mobile phone mount which had sheared clean off of Horace's handlebars on the Argentinian side of Parque Nacional Patagonia a few days prior.
We used almost everything we carried on a daily basis, apart from the emergency supplies that we hoped never to use. But so much of our cargo, it seemed, offered exactly one year of service before spontaneously self-destructing. Thus, we choreographed our daily routines to appease a host of temperamental, half-functional objects so that they might light one more night, warm one more patch of ground, guide us through one more mountain pass. We made due with a permanently deflated inflatable solar lantern, Nathan’s down jacket which could no longer be zipped, my rain pants with huge gashes in the knees, our knee-high-wool-socks-turned-open-toed-leg-warmers, Nathan’s second popped sleeping pad, and both our frayed headset microphone wires. The list went on and on. For the broken RAM phone mount, Nathan made do with a temporary fix of epoxy’d pantyhose, having requested a circlet trimmed from the stockings I carried in my jacket pocket. It satisfied me to note how short the woven tubes had become, trimmed down by necessity as time trimmed down a candle. I remembered the open-air market in Caraz, Peru, where we’d fished them out of a nylon tangle of mauve, taupe, blush, cream, and sepia hosiery. Of course, the color really didn’t matter. But the blush was rather nice.
No no, we had insisted to the concerned vendor. This size will do just fine.
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Our departure from Santiago de Chile loomed large, and we planned to ride everyday. Where the road went, it followed the finger-y coastlines of fjords. Where the road disappeared, we hitched rides on ferries. We still wore every layer of clothing we could, most mornings yanking on damp socks, sodden boots, and swollen gloves that smelled like ripe baloney. But the forests were full of gurgling brooks and creeping mists, and the rivers ran exotic, electric blue. The muddy road and the coniferous tree plantations along either side of it seemed to go on forever—how could anyone, anything, possibly lay on the other side of the blank, white fog before us?
The first caleta, settlement, we came to was called Tortel. Situated at the conjunction of the Baker and Pascual rivers and the Pacific ocean, the whole village was perched on stilts that wrapped sinuously around the sides of the mountains rising up from the fjord. Grateful for the sudden ease from downpour to drizzle, we wandered the narrow wooden boardwalk lacing through the community, past houses, a wooden schoolhouse with children’s artwork hung the windows, and a small library. Charming, single-bench plazas, gleaming with rain, overlooked the glassy, mint-hued water.
Nathan enjoying a micro plaza in Caleta Tortel. Photo by Diana Juárez.
We observed the evidence of perpetual rainfall and the brackish water that flowed, rose, and fell beneath Tortel. We wondered just how soon after each fresh, wooden plank was hammered into place that it rotted beneath one’s feet. I recalled the rusty ladder descending from the standing docks of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, which I would climb down to meet Nathan on his boat, the Famiglia Santa. One of the rungs had broken in half some time ago, and others groaned worryingly with each step. Low tide exposed the barnacles and algae that colonized the ladder and the other substances of more questionable composition that covered the lowest rungs. Fortunately, I rarely had to grab hold of those. And I learned back then never to take my next step for granted.
A rugged-looking man toting a bag of raw wool, stuffed to bursting, noticed the fair hair escaping from under Nathan’s cap. He waved.
How do you like my home? He called out.
I like it! Very good! Nathan replied.
We camped that night on the nearest grassy bank of a stream. We kicked away a number of mostly-desiccated cow pies and scrambled to set up our tent as torrents of rain began to lash down. The storm would continue for the next 48 hours. The large sheepskin draped over our motorcycle seat, named Woolworth and purchased from a Quechua woman in Peru, was now of prime importance, as Nathan was sleeping on it instead of his punctured inflatable sleeping pad. Although rain tended to pool on Woolworth’s shaggy tendrils that fringed the sides of our legs as we rode, giving it several strong shakes during a break in the downpour would rid the hide of most of the moisture. And Nathan would stay warm throughout the night.
While the weather was unrelenting, we never wanted for convenient, fuel-free camp fare, as we had in previous locales. At any bodega in the Aysén region, few and far between though they were, we could stock up on vacuum-sealed charcuterie and sliced cheese, flour tortillas, bakery buns, bags of gerkin pickles, and little bottles of dijon. Fresh produce, however, was difficult to come by on either side of Patagonia, and we were lucky to find an onion or an overripe tomato in the markets.
Dogoberto Goodboy. Photo by Diana Juárez.
It was still pouring the morning after Tortel, so we scurried into a partially-roofed shack to light our camp stove to make instant coffee and porridge. Each of our movements had to be just so—we balanced on top of the bulky roots of a tree to stay out of the puddly earth; the remains of the corrugated roof leaked in all but a few places; and our stove balanced precariously on the structure’s broadest horizontal beam. Our life together continued to be an exercise in the economy of movement. We sipped quietly from separate collapsible silicone cups, a luxury, but dipped our titanium sporks into the same cooking pot. We shared so much. Nearly everything.
Too much, some would say. And we sometimes questioned whether we were really cut out to do so. But sometimes, there were morning like that morning outside of Tortel. Sometimes, the limbs we teetered on felt like a sort of peace we’d made with the odd spaces that our two lives had flowed into.
Upon reaching Puerto Yungay, we had to cross yet another strait of water, via an hour’s ferry ride, to get back on the Austral. Our destination was Villa O’Higgins, a logging town in what is considered the most remote area of Chile. Befuddlingly enough, it lay only 62 miles away from Argentina’s trekking capital, El Chalten, where we had swooned over the sight of our first glacier on our way south to Ushuaia. Yet, prior to the completion of the Carretera Austral and the implementation of a regular ferry service for the area in 2000, no roads had ever been constructed to or from this region. The sense that the edge of the earth lay at the end of this road was what propelled us toward it.
Next stop, last stop—Comuna O’Higgins. Horace is behind the man standing on the far left. Photo by Diana Juárez.
What we found squatting on this particular edge of the earth were griege administrative buildings of a Chilean naval base. We shrugged, snapped a soggy selfie in the parking lot, and turned around. On the way out of town, we stopped into a cafe for a warming drink. We bothered the bored proprietress with our orders of a coffee, latte, and cake, and sipped slowly while our gloves steamed on the floor before the wood burning stove. Though all our clothes were soaked through, it was the driest hour we would spend throughout the long wet evening and night. When I woke up the next morning, I found that the index finger of my right hand was swollen to complete immobility with mosquito bites. Though we moved stiffly and feebly in the cold as we packed away our camp, the frigid temperatures beneath the trees turned out to be a kindness. My fingers, at least, were too numb to itch.
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La Capilla of Las Cuevas de Marmol. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
From the town of Rio Tranquilo, we motored out on Lago General Carrera’s icy cerulean water with a local tour company. The hull of the motorboat thwacked hard against each oncoming wave. We stopped when we came to swirling, marble formations rising from the water and tucked into one of the many shadowy caverns of a rock called La Capilla, the Chapel. Above our heads, the swooping curves and hollows of the smooth, white rock reflected the blue water and the webby, geometric drift of light across it. While the waves whittled such spaces into the marble over a 6,000 year period, the marble itself was the buildup of billions of years’ worth of calcium carbonate detritus, from billions of crustacean exoskeletons, compressed by the weight of bygone glaciers. Onward from here.
As we rode out, I pointed out a street sign bearing the name of a military general, Dagoberto Godoy. Dogoberto Goodboy? Maybe we’d get a dog someday. The sunshine made us silly. We put the name in our back pockets and laughed.
A leisurely coffee break. Photo by Diana Juárez.
Halfway through the Austral, we shifted into warmer climes and better moods. We lingered longer. We began to dig the camp stove out of our pannier in the afternoons and indulge in slow, roadside coffee klatches. We shed our bulky, heavy layers more often and breathed deeply. We unwound our shoulders and allowed the stillness of the air to gather around our cheeks and necks. Less than one month remained of our journey. We knew we were testing ourselves—how far could we stretch our time and still reach Santiago on time? I wanted this freedom and nothing more; to pause, to move my body freely, and to take it all in; to comb through our surroundings using all the organs of my senses. I had already noticed that I could smell the changes in ecology before I had visual evidence of them. I understood that I was feeling joy in my skin, in full sun, before I had articulated the positive change in my mindset.
Santuario de la Virgen de las Cascadas. Photo by Diana Juárez.
On one particular day, we stopped to rest next to the Sanctuario de San Sebastian, another elaborate roadside shrine in the typical, walk-in Chilean style. The shrines of Chilean Patagonia were especially impressive, with a nearly-uniform aesthetic of cadmium yellow walls with red trim. Up close, I could see the resourcefulness of their builders—the flagpoles bearing the region’s coat of arms were broomsticks or mop handles, and the crazy-quilt patchwork panels of the walls each bore a constellation of bolts unique to wherever the scrap metal could be joined. Distant passing cars could spot them immediately through the trees and would honk three times to invoke the saints’ intercessions on their behalf:
Ruega por nosotros San Sebastian. Ruega por nosotros Santa Maria. Pray for us.
We adopted the ritual too. If Nathan, our horn operator, ever forgot to honk, I would pound my first against his hip three times to remind him. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the heavens, Horace was outfitted with a truck horn.
We had gathered so many charms around us. Hunks of obsidian from the Bolivian altiplano and a glass bottle of fragrant, handmade Agua de Florida, a gift from the shamans of a community outside of Medellin, Colombia, rattled in our pannier. Milagritos from Mexico, tiny pewter medallions for luck in the shape of a leg, a coyote, and the Virgin Mary, jingled from our headlight grate. We had pared down our belongings, and yet, it didn’t escape me that we had filled the empty space in our luggage with rocks. But to us, the objects were more than trinkets. We loved the compact spirit of these things. Praying or not, the saints could hear that we were on our way.
At home in forests. Photo by Diana Juárez.