12/8/05
PUERTO NATALES, CHILE

Ushuaia is steep and maritime, and I could´ve stayed a month. The wind makes you walk crooked, but every now and then the clouds part and the mountains light up over the rooftops. You can hike in the peaks all day and then plod to a restaurant with lamb stretched over an open wood fire. The meat melts around your fork.

In the hostel I met an American guy who was spending the afternoon making a rubber band ball. In an Irish-Argentine pub, we met three Israeli women with a rental car, and after a couple days the five of us rolled north and into Chile. We got into Punta Arenas in the middle of the night and had to sleep in the car. Not comfortable. We adopted a dog for a couple hours, feeding him empanadas out the window. He had white eyelashes and managed to climb halfway inside. Strays here are well-treated and friendly, as if they´re community pets. Hard to tell which ones are domestics.

The next day happened in a stupid, sleep-deprived haze; looking at glassed-up portraits in a fancy cemetery, wandering around town, trying to figure out the money. The day before, a dollar had been worth 2.9 (Argentinian) pesos; now it was worth 530 (Chilean) pesos. The city was shaking with election brouhaha-- hundreds of posters and banners were staked about the plazas showing smiling candidates. Trucks hauled giant amplifiers blaring campaign songs. A busy corner featured a troupe of cold young women in feathers and G-strings samba-dancing for the Socialists. Chile seems to have rebounded from the Pinochet years.

We drove to Puerto Natales. This is a sleepy town with shops to outfit gringos for Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. The American and I stocked up on food and gear, and in the morning the two of us left in blowing sleet for four days in the Andes. At the trailhead we joined up with a German guy, partly because he was packing stuff like avocados. We stamped uphill.

It´s a staggering, towering landscape. You earn the views by wrecking your legs, back, and lungs. By the end of day two I was taking a needle to blisters. Worth it, of course. You drink straight from streams, can graze on calafate berries, can suck the nectar out of orchids. We watched little torrent ducks swimming in rapids-- they dive, pop up elsewhere, bob around like kayaks. A 70-year-old British naturalist explained them, clearly elated and hugging a giant zoom lens. We saw condors and puma scat and turquoise lakes in bare rock. It snowed in sunshine and trees blew sideways in the wind.