From the Austral Highway

One of the most intriguing parts of Patagonia, for me, is the Austral Highway, a narrow slice of dirt that cuts 100's of miles from the Valdivian rainforests and steep-sided fjords in the north to the open beech forests, massive lakes and wide glacier-carved valleys in the south. A seldom-traveled route took us from the Laguna del Desierto near Chalten, 31 kilometers north to Lago O' Higgins, across which starts the Austral Highway.

"Big Dream, Caution! One at a time." The imagination only supports one truly big dream at a time, I suppose?

Lago del Desierto, Argentina

Lago O' Higgins, Chile

Villa O' Higgins, Chile

Carretera Austral, Chile

Puerto Bertrand, Chile

Freeze and thaw

The Patagonian summer of 2007 was a timid one indeed, not really sure how to assert itself over the waning winter and so it didn’t. It sort of sat back and watched the winter keep its hold on the glaciers, on the forests where it continued to drop snow and on the skies where it kept away the summer’s sun. Summer tried a few times in January and actually punched through the crisp and cold curtain but only briefly before the winter’s wind kicked back in again and chased off any hopes for warmth or even thaw. This year winter came in and stuck. Agapito knew it was a large-scale shuffling of currents and tides, air temperatures and atmospheric composition – everybody knows that these days, especially in the south of the Southern Hemisphere where the ozone is badly in need of a bandage that is yet to be built by modern medicine. Although the hole in the ozone layer and greenhouse gas emissions are two separate entities, they are definitely two heads on the same monstrous body, two manifestations of the gross underestimation of the mesh-like nature of the world.

Agapito was tired of wondering about the hole in the ozone layer and imagined himself flying and poking around for a few days inside of it. He was climbing Osorno, a cylindrical volcano so nearly perfect you would think it were spinning on a potter’s wheel with some cosmic hands perpetually smoothing it’s contours. He walked dizzyingly up and around its flanks, lost in the continually perfect curve, when he noticed a speck of light above the summit. He first saw it as a star, but in realizing that no other stars were in the sky and that it was eleven in the morning, Agapito regained the focus and sense of awareness that he had lost in his conical course. About UFO’s Agapito had always been agnostic and about miracles increasingly accepting – he had seen his share of miracles but never a UFO.

Thinking back to encounters with people who claimed to have seen UFO’s he became even more skeptical, with each of the stories and personalities touched with lunacy. One such encounter was with a woman in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico from “Watts, Los Angeles” who spent two hours reciting a poem about blue-blood lines, Illuminati, terror and conspiracy, active human incinerators in the US and, ultimately, the battle between good and evil that is coming to a head. This is all tragic and probably true and eternally disappointing and overwhelming and it brought Agapito to tears with each new revelation about the struggle for light in these dark days, until the woman turned to Agapito and asked,

“Have you ever seen a UFO?”

He actually considered the question seriously for a moment before losing all interest in the conversation. She continued to tell the story of her first UFO sighting near her campsite by a mountain lake in New Mexico . . . and Agapito began thinking of how yummy the mango on a stick sprinkled with chili powder that the Mayan woman down the street was selling would be at that moment. Although she spent the next hour talking about the various UFO sightings she’d had, Agapito’s attention never strayed from his belly and how badly it wanted to be filled with mango and chili. His agnosticism about the matter was so chronic and debilitating to his attention span that he was never able to learn whether the ‘F’ in UFO stood for ‘flying’ or ‘floating’ and whether the ‘O’ was for ‘object’ or ‘obstacle’ or whether the whole abbreviation stands for “Un-objectified Feminine Object,” which is also a rare occurrence these days.

He came to again on Volcan Osorno with the celestial mystery still speckling the sky above the summit and his curiosity piqued by the recent absent-minded daydreaming about the woman in San Cristobal. Was this his first UFO sighting?

In the Ralun hot springs just south of the volcano, a few days prior, he actually had a conversation with a man about the relationship between the hole in the ozone layer and the presence of UFO’s in the area. Although Agapito’s attention at the moment was put toward how much better the hot-springs would feel if this man were not talking to him about UFO’s, he did manage to glean the theory that the ozone hole opens and closes depending on the size and quantity of objects that want to fly or float into the Earth’s atmosphere at any given time. Being that the hole is directly above this part of Patagonia, this man had seen countless UFO’s. Agapito remained a paralyzed agnostic on the matter and for that he only heard a few words of the man’s two-hour monologue, diligently maintaining that hot springs should be UFO-free zones.

So again, Agapito is on Volcan Osorno, staring up at the speck of light in the late-morning, full-daylight, full-azure sky, remembering these two conversations about UFO’s and wondering what the heaven he is looking at. He wanted to go back to ask Fitz Roy, who he suspected must have many similar encounters in this part of the world. But he was now over a thousand miles from the Fitz and was not sure when he would return. As he closed his eyes he began to think of another woman who had left the US to live in Costa Rica because her communication with extra-terrestrials who were involved in controlling world economics and were going to implement universal-debt relief and forgiveness, including debts to credit card companies and “third world debt to the first world,” was less impeded in the tropics than in the US because the US is full of mind-control devices and . . .

He began to journey.

A sombrero began to form on the volcano, which is like a lenticular cloud that forms when ice-crystals consolidate from cold air and high winds. The sombrero that forms on Osorno is a curious thing in the way it forms a large shade-giving brim, a perfect disk that looks like a 10,000 gallon Mexican hat when viewed from afar although the sterile white color of the thing is not quite as spicy as its typical Mexican counterpart. The sombrero does not move in from the west as many clouds do, rather it forms out of thin air, manifesting from the moisture in the air that is affected by the wind and cold, and “poof,” there it is! It spins in a perfect circle as well, like a record player spinning vinyl. As Agapito began to drift, he found himself spinning on the sombrero, standing on ice crystals and rising toward the speck in the sky. Surfing on his ice saucer he neared the light and as it expanded he began to see that although it displayed a brilliant light, this object was actually refracting the sun’s rays and was a thick floating chunk of ice.


The ice was spinning, and was shaped like a diamond, colder than ice at the bottom of a glacier and as hard as glass. Agapito imagined it to be a large chunk of Ice 9, from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which can instantly freeze any water it comes in contact with, because of its extraordinarily high freezing temperature. Agapito was suddenly very cold and realized that he had been cold for months now. He was glad to know at least that this speck was not a UFO (unless that stands for ‘Unidentified Frozen Object”), so he could remain agnostic about the existence of extra-terrestrials. Circling the ice, he wondered about our future existence and whether the Earth would get warmer or colder or both, whether the ice was coming or going and for how much longer; he was somehow mystified to find himself alive at such an exciting time in history.

Everything happening these days seems to be the most important to have ever happened in the world – at least as far as human existence goes. But then he thought about the countless other high civilizations that may have come and gone even before the Egyptians and Chinese and Greeks and Mayans and Romans and the infinite others that could exist throughout the universe, and realized that the play here on earth was small beans indeed – so small yet so important and worth caring passionately about while also worth realizing how relatively microscopic the beans we’re playing with are. But this is different, isn’t it? This is new in history, a world completely connected, all the world’s cultures able to communicate and travel? This time the Apocalypse could be for real, right? Maybe so.

He knew what the ice was all about, he knew it was about to spread itself completely over the southern hemisphere’s summer and that winter was now here to stay. It didn’t bother him as much as it could have yet he began to cry tears that froze immediately to his cheeks. Could he live in such a cold world? Could the ingenuity of humanity thaw out such a cold world? Maybe so.

Circling on his saucer he knew he would not find those answers talking to a hunk of ice in the stratosphere and began to descend back to the volcano. As he neared the volcano, the sombrero on which he was flying began to circle rapidly around the summit and he was tossed off his stance, finding himself laying on his back on the summit ice-cap looking up at the same blue sky. The speck was gone and he was shivering on the cold ice, eager to return to town for a cup of coffee and an empanada.

The following day Agapito was on a bus toward the coast in central Chile, eager to catch a moment in the sun. His headphones were on and Modest Mouse was playing something off The Moon and Antarctica that goes like,

“So
long
to this
cold,
cold
part of the world . . .”

La Chocolateria de Chalten

In Chalten there is a chocolate shop where magic is crafted into obscenely delicious delicacies voraciously consumed by wind-weary travelers and climbers revolving around Fitz Roy or Cerro Torre. Like Water for Chocolate could be a good book or movie as a starting point for understanding this place, the romance of Patagonia and the desires of all Patagonian adventurers mixed into the uniquely Native American and ubiquitously sensuous smack of cocoa, the food of the Gods. Sure, chocolate is a far cry from the Xocolatl of Mesoamerica, a far cry from the food that “Mr. Chocolate,” one of Mayan Tikal’s great kings ceremoniously consumed, but the way the bean moves into our hidden passion-pipes has been the same for millennia. These days you can buy chocolate advertised not only as a giving elevation to your libido, but also packs antioxidants and other goodies with a force that muscles away pomegranates and spinach – chocolate as a dietary supplement. Fine by me.

And here at the Chocolateria of Chalten, in one of the original log cabins of this frontier town, they know how to make chocolate with a rustic, rugged, Patagonian twist. Cakes and crumbles, bars, stacked cookies and liqueur: what is most impressive about the place is not necessarily the sweetness of the treats or the view the mountains from the log-loft, or the fact that it is the most ambient place in the end of the world, but the fact that the food moves you and is moved by those that make it here. When thinking of Patagonia, some would think of leather and big skies, some of jagged mountains and maté, dirt and longing, contrast and culmination, condors and sheep, wind and water – I still think of those things as well as La Chocolateria here in Chalten. It’s magical.