Valpo, that`s just jokes!

I have spent the last week in Valparaiso, a large port to the west of Santiago, and in re-tracing Darwin`s hallowed footsteps from Santiago, over the Andes to Mendoza. While in Valparaiso, I stayed in a hostel with three English girls from London, two of whom are going to Oxford next year, and the other to Bristol to read Medecine. Londoners are different, and London girls even more so. Whenever they found something funny, they would break into peals of laughter and cry, "Oh, that`s jokes, real jokes", or "Gosh, do you really think so". They were also incredibly organised, lugging around a thermos flask and a cool bag, (which, incidentally, they lost). They spent long evenings planning exactly where they were going to go, and in writing voluminous notes in their journals (they refused to call them diaries, for some reason) from seven until ten at night. One evening, one of the English girls, Jessie, accidentally missed out two pages in her penguin diary and spent the next twenty minutes agonising about how she could overcome this apparently insuperable problem. Tippex wouldn`t work because the paper was cream, she just couldn`t bear to tear the pages out...etc. On the first night we got there, I was delegated the job of chopping up the mushrooms for the stir-fry, but was reprimanded for my technique...,apparently I wasn´t qualified to chop the onions and the girls debated among themselves the order in which the vegetables should be cooked. I left them to it and fled to the dorm. Another night, a Canadian girl in the hostel started explaining how she was organising a world-wide revolution to spread love and peace, while an American girl was contemplating getting a tattoo; the tattoo would depict the first three sounds that the universe made when it came into existence, sounds that she makes in yoga to find internal peace. Did someone record the sounds? The Canadian topped it all off by suddenly declaring that the American had exacted justice in a past life. It was obvious to any perspicacious adult that the scars on her fingers meant that she had chopped people`s hands off in ancient Rome. It goes without saying, then, that she thought that disabled people had committed sins in a past life, like a certain English football manager.

Maybe there is little difference then, between a girl educated in one of the world`s richest countries, and the inhabitants of Chiloe, (a peninsula in Chile) who make a brief appearance in Bruce Chatwin`s enlightening, hodge-podgey book, "In Patagonia". According to folklore, Chiloe boast a council of witches, the "Council of the Cave", which has its own boat which attracts sailors and then marroons them on an isolated rock. They also have a guardian of the cave, an Invunche. To create this demon, a baby is kidnapped from his parents, his arms and legs are broken, and his head is twisted 180 degrees (exorcist?). It is forced to feed on human flesh and its left arms is twisted behind its back and sown into its right shoulder blade. Since it cannot move, it is carried around by members of the sect.

There were no witches and demons in Valparaiso, only the ghost of an old poet, a politician and a dictator (Pablo Neruda owned a house here, while Allende and Pinochet were born here). The money from international trade and the warehouses has long gone, but it has left an indellible imprint in the huge, imposing banks which line the streets and in the lofty cranes which swing there heads across the bay. Old, battered furniculars creak up the steep hillsides and give tourists access to the maze of streets lined with multicoloured houses painted in every colour from bright yellow and chocolate brown, to electric violet and lime green. There are more telegraph poles in Valparaiso than in any other city that I have ever seen, tangled masses of cables radiating from them like the spokes of a wheel, giving the city a strange, almost Eastern-European air, reminding me of the Alexanderplatz in old East Berlin. And as you wend your way higher and higher into the hills, the wide, semi-circular bay shines below you, new monstruous high rise buildings hugging the shore in Vina where beautiful, old buildings would have stood before the earthquake hit at the start of the 20th century.

The most interesting thing that I saw in Valparaiso, far outstripping my visit to Neruda´s house or the many markets, was a demonstration held outside the Municipalidad, or town hall. A huge crowd of, mostly, women had congregated outside and were being led in a series of ear-splitting chants by an old man with two loudspeakers taped together. I eventually realised that it was a protest of teachers demanding better pay and conditions. There were lots of children dotted amongst the crowd, many of whom thought the noise was a good excuse to prance around, ala Archie at Sarah and Colom´s wedding. The women cut an incongrous spectacle. Instead of banging on drums or shaking tamborines, they clutched pots and pans and were hitting them vociferously with spatulas and other cooking utensils, all the time with honest, earnest faces. One of the women at the back of the crowd, who looked like she was just out for a nice Sunday afternoon, was holding a cheese grater, while another, in the heart of the crowd, beat a biscuit tin with a cake slice. Aftering shouting a lot and marching into the nearby square, they announced a teachers´ strike for the following Monday and dispersed.

That is the sort of protests that I approve of, tied to modest, concrete goals. Che Guevara was nowhere in sight. He stills lives on, however, in Argentinian slang. According to a guardaparque who I was speaking to yesterday, "che" is used in the same way as "amigo" or "tio", as in "Eh, Che, vamos al parque a beber mate". "Che Boludo" is the most commonly used slang (jerga) phrase and combines "che", with "boludo", which means "big ball or testicle". (Pelotudo means the same thing). Like the word, huevon, which means the same thing, it used to be used as an insult (a synonym for estupido), but can now be used affectionately.

After three days in Valparaiso, I was retracing Darwin´s steps from Santiago, across the Andes to Mendoza, a journey that was apparently very useful to him in developing his ideas on volcanology, the uplift of the Andes and how the ocean subsided. First stop, Puente del Inca, a natural bridge that I imagined traversing a deep canyon. We passed small hillocks rising up in sweeping curves, covered in stubbly grass, the only thing that the earth can support when it is so dry (The El Nino effect has meant that rainfall in Chile this year has been unnaturally low). I watched a dire Nicholas Cage movie as we climbed ever higher into the Andes, nostrils invaded with the pungent whiff of fresh manure, the crests of the hills indistinct through the mist. The town, Puente del Inca, is incredible. It is a small dusty excuse of a settlement with corrugated iron roofs and wooden shacks, but it is surrounded on all sides by towering mountains shining dark brown, Cryptonite green and every shade of purple. I would marvel at the rocks again and again as I walked up the valley to Aconcagua the following day, the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas. However, my reaction to the bridge was similar to that of Darwin;

"When one hears of a natural bridge, one pictures to oneself some deep and narrow ravine across which a bold mass of rocks has fallen, or a great archway excavated. Instead of all this, the Incas bridge is a miserable object"

I wouldn´t go quite so far in my strictures, but the bridge itself pales in comparison to the mountains that surround it and the spectacular drive between Puente del Inca and Uspallata to the West. I am now in Mendoza and am planning to get suitably groggy with fine wine when I do the wine tour tomorrow. Until next time...

Coffee, markets and machismo

Before coming to Santiago, I had thought that Argentina was a more interesting country than Chile. After spending more time on The end of the world (the translation of Chile in a native American tongue), and after reading Mi Pais Inventado by Isabelle Allende, I have come to the conlusion that Chile is itself a fascinating mix of reserve and brutality, passion and machismo, superstition and piety.

In Santiago, I stayed in Bellavista, an arty district in the north-east of the city that is full of cafes, bars, artists´ workshops and baroque buildings painted in psychedelic colours. The hostel was called the Bellavista Hostel, and before I discovered the patio upstairs where everyone congregated for drinks, I reverted to watching British TV like Lewis (It was strange how good Lewis seemed after being subjected to nothing but Telenovelas) and the amazing football match between Liverpool and Arsenal. It is worth watching, or rather listening, to a football match in a Spanish speaking country just for the commentators. Whenever the ball hits the back of the net, the commentator gulps in some air, expands his lungs and releases a cry of "gooooool" that lasts for a good ten seconds. They also scorn impartiality. When Torres scored his second goal, the chorus of Fernando by Abba suddenly blared out of the television, the word Fernando being replaced by El Nino. Could you imagine Mottie doing something similar?

That itself is strange given the close link between Chileans and Englishmen...according to Allende anyway. They share numerous virtues and vices. One is a certain reserve, solemnity and lack of exuberance;life is not to be enjoyed, but to be endured. She finds an explanation for this in the huge efforts that the conquisadores made to reach The end of the world, crossing the Andes, fighting hordes of Indians and battling against cold and hunger, before they could root themselves in the unfertile soil of Chile. But while the Chileans may not be the most demonstrative of Latin Americans, Santiago is still an interesting, bustling city.

Santiago is cleaner than almost any city I have ever seen, even Leeds or London. There is no chewing gum on the pavements, armies of state employees can be seen in the parks sweeping up leaves and even shopkeepers clean the pavement adjacent to their shops. Like the British, Chileans are very proud of their country. The huge market, La Vega, was one of the most interesting places that I went in Santiago. It lies across the river from the central market which is orientated towards tourists, the Mercado Central, where I enjoyed a typical Chilean dish, Reineta con salsa de Mariscos. La Vega is for the ordinary people of Santiago. As I crossed the bridge, clasping my camera ever tighter, I saw little old women hauling huge trolleys laden with fresh fruit and vegetables and paper pasted to lamposts advertising Viagra. La Vega is a market of dark, labyerinthine alleyways, harbouring thousands of stalls selling everything from Shitaki mushrooms and pigs trotters to Casio calculators and chicken feet (What are these used for. Soup?). Never have I seen so much fruit accumulated in one place. Tomatoes and potatoes are piled like bricks, seven foot high, and the air is laden with the tangy odour of coriander and spices that are kept in huge, bulging sacks. It is like a giant´s storecupboard. And everything is dirt cheap. The first time I went there, I bought a kg of plums for 350 pesos, around 40 pence.

As you move back towards the centre, everything becomes notably more expensive. As I approached the plaza de Armas, I was confronted with rows of tarrot stalls where Santiguenos sit with grave faces as their fate is revealed to them. This betrays another facet of the Chilean character. Though Chile may be the most developed country in Latin America, people are mystical and deeply superstitious, distrustful of doctors. Every home brewed remedy will be tried before dragging oneself along to a doctor, that most dubious of professions. Allende claims that one of her relations was a saint. Small wings began to grow from her shoulderblades, incorrectly diagnosed as a bone deformity by the doctors, and in the correct light, Allende could see a halo around her head. She also states that her grandmother could move objects with her mind and that she once saw the devil on the bus in Santiago, a green being with goatish hooves . Allende incorporated elements of Buddhism into her beliefs, and knows who she was in a previous life. This reminds me of the instruments that I saw in the Museo de Arte Precolumbiano, which were use to ingest hallucinatory substances. A wooden spatula would be forced down the throat in order to cleanse the stomach, and a special type of dust would be taken through the nose.

All this sits comfortably with devotion to the Catholic church, but despite religion, Chileans are as unfaithful as any other nation. Fifty eight percent of spouses cheat on their other half. Allende tells the story of a male friend who, in a sudden spur of lucid thought, tried to escape his tyrannical lover one morning. As he was walking down the road, he felt someone push him to the ground and start pummeling him in the back; it was the lover who had found the bed empty, run out of the house and down the street stark naked to take revenge.

Machismo is also deeply ingrained in Chilean culture, as demonstrated by the national hero, Pablo Neruda, who had numerous lovers. In the centre of Santiago, there is a chain of cafes labelled as cafe con piernas (coffee with legs). Young women in red uniforms, complete with mini-skirt, high heels and slap serve coffee and alcohol from an upraised bar to middle-aged, vegetating businessmen in sunglasses and crumpled suits. Presumably the bar is upraised so that the legs can be appreciated in all their glory. I was going to try the coffee there in the name of research, but managed to contain myself.

Many of these men wear blazers, which leads me on to another national trait. Chileans seem to assume that foreign goods are superior to their own. Heineken is a case in point. An average, insipid European beer, Heineken is drunk in greater quantaties than far better Chilean and Argentinian beer. The Chilean upper class have a fetish for upper-class Enlish dress, perhaps to cement their noble status in a country where everyone is a mestizo, and a descendent of humble, hard working conquistadores. Walking around the centre of Santiago, I saw a picture of an English aristocrat standing in a field, lank, blonde hair swept across his forehead, riding whip clutched in his hand, finely cut blazer and trousers complementing dark brown leather riding boots, pulled up to the knees. What a calumny. I could barely repress my chuckle...

Pucon was exactly what I expected it to be, a tourist town, but I loved it nonetheless. The number of residents in Pucon stands at 10,000, but in the high season the population swells to 60,000 as tourists from Chile, as well as Europe and America, swarm the streets and taking advantage of the many cafes, internet shops, tour businesses and bars. This is one of the most volcanically active areas in South Americas. The deep rift in the ocean bed of the Chilean coast causes huge upsurges of lava which reach the surface at the hundreds of volcanoes in this area. Volcan Villarrica is Pucon´s raison d´etre and its imposing cone can be seen from different parts of town as you come out of a coffee shop or laze around in a park.

Two days ago, I climbed the volcanoe. I woke up at 6AM, met my group and was driven to the foot of the volcanoe, equipped with protective clothing, helmet, crampons, ice axe and gloves. I would have felt like an intrepid explorer heading out into the wilds of Patagonia had it not been for the fifty of sixty people who surrounded me, many of them hangers-on from the previous day when poor conditions had forced them to give up. At the beginning of the ascent, we were asked whether we would like to take a chairlift two kilometres up the slope or to walk. They stressed that anyone who was not in peak physical condition should take the chairlife because it was important to conserve your energy. Presented with a challenge like that, I could not refuse, but I was joined by only two other, an American from Orange County, California and a French girl. While the sluggards swung along above us, we trudged up through fine volcanic ash, taking two steps up only to slide back one step. Soon, this gave way to big, light, capricious balsitic rock that lay on a layer of ash and would often give way when you stood on it, creating a small landslide that would cascade down the hillside. The guides would suddenly cry rocas and everyone would stop and look up. After a climb of around two hours, we donned our crampons and stepped out onto the sticky ice, walking as if we were wearing flippers so as not to drag our feet and fall over. We slowly zigzagged across the shiny white surface, digging our ice-axes into the snow above us to give us leverage. Meanwhile, James, the Californian, was explaining what it is like to be a fireman in California. In a house full of smoke, the fireman can see nothing, and on several occasions, while trying to find the inhabitants, he has found that he is stepping all over them. On another occasion, a teenager was doing drugs with a propane torch, set light to his bed, left his bedroom to assure his family that the smoke was coming from outside, went back into the bedroom to recover his stash and died of smoke inhalation.

We passed a steep, rugged escarpment of rock which the ice had approached ina huge, sweeping curve, split into segments by narrow, deep crevasses. The views were already incredible, albeit a little hazy because of the morning mist and the hundreds of garden fires spluttering away. Lago Villarrica and the National Park was spread out before us, the arms of the lake stretching out to the feet of the surrounding mountains, dark green wooded projections that looked almost tropical. Volcanoes could be seen on all sides. There was one which had obviously blown its top, but the most impressive was Volcan Lanin which straddles the border between Chile and Argentina and is taller than Volcan Villarrica, itself around 2,800m. A week ago, the volcanologists recorded unusual activity near this volcanoe and it is expcted to erupt within the next week. Everyone in the surrounding towns and villages has been evacuated and the national park has been closed.

We reached the summit at the same time as several other groups which crowded around the crater, munching down their sandwiches and breathing in the sulphurous fumes. A couple of times I caught a full mouthfull of the noxious gas which burned the back of my throat and provoked a coughing fit. Clouds of the gas billowed from the volcanoe´s chimney and the rocks surrounding the crater´s edge curled with smoke or steam. We couldn´t see the bubbling lava beneath, and the volcanoe seemed strangely artificial to me, little different from the one that splits in two in that Bond film. On the way down, we slid down through the snow as the 22 year old guide hit on the French girl, to no avail. A whining seventeen year old Australian impeded us as he kept sitting down and refusing to go on, until he was all but dragged down by the guide.

The hot baths were the perfect accompaniement to the hard walk. Natural springs well up all over the region and have been dammed in Pozones to created deep pools which vary in temperature from tepid to boiling hot. I spent four hours lounging around in the steaming water, sipping beer and admiring the valley, before catching a bus to Santiago for a beggarly 8,000 pesos (around nine pounds). The city seems smarter than Buenos Aires, but I am yet to see whether it has as much charm. For lunch, I am planning to walk to the market where fish of every conceivable size and shape compete with wriggling shellfish and hunks of meat. At least I won´t go hungry...

San Carlos de Bariloche

Last Sunday, I decided to leave hippy town and travel to Bariloche to the north. Unlike El Bolson, Bariloche definitely is a tourist town, but it is charming at the same time. It has a large, paved central square that opens out onto Lago Nahuel Huapi, a huge lake that stretches out into the mountains and the mist and has huge arms (or brazos) that make for great boat trips and walking. Just as in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the names of desaparecidos have been daubed in white onto the paving of the square, along with the year that they were taken (most seemed to be in the mid seventies). In the middle of the day, the square swarms with huge St Bernad dogs, the mascots of Bariloche, little wooden barrels around their necks, waiting to have their picture taken with tourists. Men with saws and chisels attack huge slabs of wood, crafting them into sculptures of lizards, gnomes, naked women and indians, the best being displayed in front of the town hall. As the sun begins to sink low, the square is filled with golden light and the skater crowd turn up, their baggy jeans hanging around their thighs just like in England. They turn up in Vauxhall Corsas and other pieces of crap, neons lights flashing and music booming out. They would often leave the engines running with the music blasting out through the open windows.

Bariloche is also famous for its chocolate, whic I sampled at Mamushka after almost drowning in a huge crowd of people. It was Easter when I was there and eggs of every different shape and size were displayed in the windows. One mechanical chocolate egg opened and closed to reveal a big, yellow chick. After staying the first night in a hostel out of town, I transferred to 1004, a fantastic hostel on the tenth floor of the biggest apartment building in Bariloche. There are no signs, neither at the entrance to the building or on the floor itself. My dorm room, the kitchen and the lounge all have huge windows which look out west over the lake to the mountains, Cerro Campanario and Cerro Catedral, behind which the sun sets every day. Going out in Bariloche, I was astounded by the number of Irish bars, Wilkennys, Pilgrim and others. Some just call themselves Irish bars as a marketing manoeuver; we found a bar in Bolson that was called "Boulevard", had a mock alpine interior and called itself an Irish bar. The Argentinians have also inherited the Spanish contempt for good time management. Even in a sleepy town like Bolson, the bars only started to get busy when we were leaving at around 1, and the clubs don´t kick off until about three. I met a guy working in a pub in Buenos Aires who shuts up shop at around seven in the morning, goes home to sleep until about two and then returns to clean up, waiting for the clients to turn up at around one in the morning.

After taking a chairlift up to a local hill, Cerro Otto, on the first day (and being bought a coffee by a Uruguayan couple because I didnt have any money), I met up with an Irishman from Cork, Tadhg, and did the Circuito Chico, a bike ride on the second. Tadhg is a twenty eight urban planner but he looks like anything but; with long shaggy hair, skinny jeans and a Bob Dylan neck-scarf, he looked exactly as a traveller should look. He started travelling in Vancouver, and has travelled through the states, staying in the National Parks for free with his tent. He loved Montana, and wished he had time to camp in Bariloche too. To camp in Patagonia is the best way of experiencing the dramatic landscape. On the circuito chico, we passed glassy lakes bordered by sandy bays and steep hills of pine trees. The tourist who stays in hostels or hotels only sees a tiny fraction of the Patagonian countryside, just as a normal fisherman could only physically fish 10 percent of the rivers and lakes. I was told that Tiger Woods and other American stars charter helicoptres to take them to remote fjords and rivers in Patagonia, far from any settlements and even more abundant in fish than the lakes that I have seen.

The day before leaving, I decided to go rafting on the Rio Manso which starts in Argentina, cuts its way through the mountains into Chile and ends in the Pacific ocean. After a two hour drive in a cramped minibus, we arrived at a campsite next to the sparkling, green water of the Rio Manso to a breakfast of Medialunas and coffee. I struggled into a wetsuit and a life jacket and then was off down the river with a great guide who took sadistic pleasure in waiting until we approached a rapid and then describing in graphic detail all the disasters that could befall us; "if you don´t paddle hard enough, we´ll get sucked down towards that rock, raised up and tipped over". The water is almost totally transparent, allowing you to see the river bed and in its upper stretches, the river is relatively wide, bordered by tall, golden alamo trees (which I had previously mistaken for Alamo trees) and ancient Alerces. Floating down the river, we could see ahead into Chile, hillsides covered with red and brown nire trees. In the early morning sun, hatches or mayflies skipped off the surface of the water and rose in small clouds as we passed, no doubt providing rich food for the seething life below the surface of the water. Because the season is drawing to a close, the water level has dropped, revealing over a metre of rocks covered in moss. As a result, the rapids were not as exciting as they could have been, but it was still exhilerating to see the rapids approach as the river narrowed and deepened, passing through steep gorges of rounded rock which loomed above us and extinguished the light. You´d stop paddling, hear the roar of the swirling water, and then begin paddling like madmen, even when the waves reared up and crashed over the boat and spray soaked your face. Two hours later, we were in Chile and rounded the trip off with a parrilla of char-grilled meat and beer.

I am now in Pucon, Chile. Tomorrow, I´m going to climb the active volcano, Villarrica, and after that, relax in one of the hot springs that surround the town. I almost feel that I have the opposite problem to Oblomov. Instead of lazing around listlessly or falling into reveries, I always feel that I have to be doing something when I am travelling, given that there is so much to feel and see. This afternoon, though, I think I´m going to buy a beer, sit on the beach and finish my book. Just a shame that I don´t to dress me and feed me like Oblomov. Oh well, life´s hard.

El Bolson was my next destination, "the big bag" which sits below Cerro Piltquitron, a long jagged cliff which rises steeply from the fertile valley floor. Its something of a hippy town; thousands of hippies flooded into El Bolson in the 1960s and they can still be seen in the market that is held numerous times every week. On my first day in El Bolson, I wandered around the market and soon saw an old barefoot man dressed entirely in white linen, sporting half moon glasses and a goatee beard. There are hundreds of stores selling knitwear, wooden clocks, "essential oils", alfaflores ( a type of Argentinian sweet) and anything else that you can think of. You also see a lot of people wearing the traditional clothing of the "gaucho"; check shirt, leather boots, kneckerchief and beret swept to one side. Apart from the tourists for whom they are an affectation, they are worn by genuine country folk who are often seen herding their horses outside town. They also seem to be worn by ordinary people who want to show that they are working class by differentiating themselves from the pomp of Buenos Aires. One good thing though is that El Bolson is inhabited by real people with real lives and real lives, unlike El Calafate and Chalten which were created entirely for tourists and look like theme parks.

When I arrived though, all the hostels in the centre were abandoned. I eventually picked one which was recommended in my Footprint guide as being "nice" and on opening the door, I was greeted by a surly man who showed me to a dirty room and seemed affronted that I coujldn´t pay upfront. It seems that everyone is travelling north with the weather. Or it may be that people skip El Bolson and travel straight to San Carlos de Bariloche to the north.

To my mind, this area, from Esquel northwards, through Trevellin to El Bolson, is one of the most beautiful in Argentina. It doesn´t have the raw, awe-inspiring monoliths of Torres del Paine, or the towering peaks of Chalten, but it makes up for these deficiencies with a fantastic climate. Cool mornings are followed by hot sun in the middle of the day and the four days that I have spent here have been cloudless. The whole area is more fertile than the far south, green fields and towering golden cypress trees providing a welcome contrast to the high peaks and jagged rocks of Cerro Piltquitron. It has something of the "modesty" talked about in The remains of the day.

Yesterday I climbed Pitquitron and ate a lunch of pizza and homemade beer surrounded by mountains on every side. Its truly amazing how lazy most people are. All the way up I was being passed 4x4s. Once kilometre from the summit, they get out of their cars and labour uphill with their walking polls, stopping for regular breaks to catch their breath and curse the steepness of the hill.

Today I went fishing on Lago Puelo to the south of El Bolson. My spanish was obviously insufficient because I ended up trawling from the side of a boat with a huge artificial lure rather than flyfishing. It was great fun and I caught three huge rainbow trout (arco iris), but it lacks the excitement or subtlety of flyfishing. You might as well chuck a grenade into the water, so little skill does it require. Instead of casting, you sit there with the rod motionless or slowly moving back and forth. While a fly is a small target with only one or two hooks, the artificial lure that I was using measured around two inches and was rippling with six hooks. Hooking a fish with the rod I was using this morning is nowhere near as exciting as with a lighter flyfishing rod; the tip of the rod barely bends and you are given no real idea of the fish´s weight. Because the fish is so well hooked and because the breaking strain of the line is so great, you can practically haul the fish in. However frustrating flyfishing may be, the knowledge that the fish could escape at any moment if the tension of the line is not maintained, makes catching it all the more enjoyable. Flyfishing is a much more even fight between man and fish, an art like bullfighting. Trawling is like walking up to the bull and firing a bolt through its brain.

Tomorrow I´m catching a bus to Bariloche, known for its chocolate, outdoor sports and nightlife. I see that the price of oil has risen, so I can now help myself to another ice-cream with a clear conscience. I´m reading "Oblomov" at the moment, a Russian novel by Goncharov following the fate of a man who is confronted with the earth-shaking question; whether to get out of bed! The day after tomorrow, I think I may answer, no.

Venture into the wilderness?

I´ve spent the last four days in the Chilean national Park, Torres del Paine, and am now sitting here with aching legs and tired brain.

Before setting off for the bus I had to decide whether to camp or to stay in the "refugios" which range from relatively plush cabins to simple huts. After much serious cogitation, I decided that I was incapable of messing around with pegs and camp stoves and so opted to stay in the refugios. Little did I know how expensive they were to be. The average refugio costs around 20,000 chilean pesos, the equivalent of four nights stay in a basic hostel. That meant that the 70,000 pesos that I had taken out of the bank accound would only last me three nights. And that meant that I had to complete the "W" trek in a record-breaking three days; hence the sore legs.

After hunting around in search of a tin opener (I was later to learn the delights of opening a tin of tuna using the little piece of metal on your swiss army knife) I was off into the wilderness. In fact, Torres del Paine is nowhere near as wild as the Scottish highlands. You are given a rudimentary map at the entry point and hike along well-worn trails that constitute the "w" or the "circuit". The first day´s trek up to the Torres was steep and arduous, but well worth the effort. Like Mount Fitzroy, the torres rise up vertically from the surrounding rock and are framed by a deep turquoise blue lake. My pocket-full of almonds sufficed as sustenance. That was where the fun really began. The man at the hostel in Natales had told me that all the refugios had cooking stoves available and that I didnt need to take a camp stove. He was wrong. I was reduced to hacking away at a tin of tuna with a swiss army knife and suffered the ignomony of being the object of pity of a German couple who let me use their camp stove. I least I got a mountain of rice out of it. In comparison to the other refugios, this one was plain luxury with a chill out area in front of a wood burner. I uncorked the bottle of wine that I had lugged up there, kicked off my boots and chilled.

As I continued on my way, I kept bumping into people that I had met at different stages of my journey from Peninsula Valdes onwards. The second day´s hike to the Cuernos wasn´t the best because of the cloud, but was to be made up for on the third day. That night I found out why opening those cans had been such a struggle; the tin opener was upside down.

The third day was my longest, and involved a hike to Glacier Grey with a bald Polish lady who is living in London. She claims that English people aren´t open to foreigners and that Americans are more friendly. The pack now lighter given that the wine had been drunk, I hurried on over an undulating path before ascending up a steep valley towards Glacier Gery. It was even more impressive than Perito Moreno because you could see its full extent, curving down from the icefield like a vast motorway and carving its path down to the lake where it split in two around an island of slate. That night I cooked an inordinate amount of lentils and am now suffering the inevitable consequences. I was now thoroughly exhausted and slept for a good four hours on the bus the following day.

My plans have now been scuppered by poor Chilean engineering. The Navimag ferry that I was going to take from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt has broken down and won´t be departing for another week. The only alternative may be to cross the border into Argentina and endure another gruelling bus journey to Bariloche. Got to go because two angry women are waiting to use the computer. Until next time.