Homage to Patagonia
Justin Kerr-Smiley
Last summer I drove to the south of Chile and Patagonia in a battered jeep with two friends: Matthew, whose jeep it was and who spoke Spanish fluently and worked as a merchant banker, and Oliver, cod philosopher and all-round wise guy.
Matthew suggested we begin our tour gently, to get us into the spirit of things. Our first stop therefore was at a hacienda a mere two hours south of Santiago at Los Lingues. It is owned by one of Chile’s oldest and grandest families, the Claro-Liras who have been there since the 16th century and who, perhaps more to the point, are friends of Matthew’s. We arrived dusty and a little bruised, the jeep’s suspension already creaking ominously, and we were greeted by our hosts, German and his elegant wife Maria Elena. Our luggage was taken by white-jacketed servants and we were shown to our rooms and offered icecold grape juice. Oliver and I were slightly stunned by this, but Matthew accepted it all as if it were no more than his birthright, which it probably was. German is renowned for breeding the Aculeo horse, brought to the New World by his conquistador ancestors. The Aculeo is a hardy cross between Numidian and Lippizaner stock. Sure-footed and robust, it is the perfect beast for crossing the Andean foothills.
The next morning we saddled up and set off for a day’s ride through thorn scrub and devil’s fork cacti as vultures wheeled in the blue sky above our heads. I say ‘we’ but Oliver got no further than the stables; his horse, realising he had never ridden before, decided to stay behind and eat hay and there was nothing the south London ladykiller could do about it. When we returned striding bow-legged back to the house after a hard day in the saddle, Oliver was nowhere to be seen. I tramped wearily up the stairs to our room to be greeted by the sounds of bedsprings and girlish giggling. Returning downstairs, I sat on a bench in the courtyard throwing pebbles into the fountain as I waited for Streatham’s Don Juan to appear. A few minutes later a shy girl ghosted past with a smile.
Our next stop was Temuco, Chile’s lake district, where the Villarrica volcano dominates the surrounding countryside. Even in high summer, the volcano has a cap of snow, but its tip glows red at night like the stub of a burning cigar. We stayed at another hacienda, with a resident neo-Nazi. You haven’t really experienced Chile unless you have sat next to someone at dinner who expatiates at length on the virtues of General Pinochet. Ours was originally from Austria and so had some pedigree as far as dictators were concerned.
From now on, though, there were no more cotton sheets or servants; now we were bivouacking in the wilderness and washing in glacial rivers. We continued south and at Puerto Montt we took the boat to Chiloé, a wind-blasted island famous for its honey and its wooden churches. There seemed to be far more churches than people, and after a fish supper among the tars and sea dogs at the port of Castro, we boarded another boat to Chaiten on the mainland. We were now in glacier country and wound our way through gloomy forests of Araucaria pine, the vast primordial trees towering 150 feet above us like pillars in a cathedral.
The further south we travelled, the more our jeep groaned. The brakes began to fail and we developed a serious oil leak. Spotting a road gang, Matthew got out and explained the problem to the engineers. One of them inspected the vehicle. He shook his head and sucked his teeth. The brakes and oil leak could be fixed, but the axle was broken and had been soldered back together. We had been driving a death-trap.
The engineers fixed the brakes and the oil leak and we agreed to take our chances with the axle. We tried to pay them, but they declined, explaining that money was pretty useless out in the forest. But there was a sheep farmer nearby and the boys liked a roast on Friday night. So we found the farmer and bought a sheep from him, leading the woolly innocent back to the road gang. We left Lamb Chop bleating plaintively, tied up next to the carcass of its cousin which hung a few yards away.
We crossed the border from Chile into Patagonia at Coyhaique and made camp by a lake high up in the mountains. For the first time on our journey it rained, and we took shelter in a byre. The place stank of chicken shit, but there was nowhere else to go. Oliver refused to sleep on the ground and spent the rest of the night sitting on a log and smoking cigarettes. The next day the sky was clear, and as we left the mountains and drove down into Patagonia, Matthew and I began to itch. We checked ourselves and found that we were covered in great red weals. A visit to the local hospital, where even the doctors carried pistols, confirmed that we had fleas. Despite our guide’s protestations and Oliver’s acute mirth, the only cure was to thoroughly wash and douse everything with flea powder.
Lover boy was still laughing as we fell asleep by the roadside that night, although the joke was on him the following day when the soft roll of tundra which he had used for a pillow turned out to be road kill. Our tour of Patagonia was curtailed by a further breakdown and after three days camping at a lake near Esquel it was time to go home. On the way back, a stray rock smashed the windscreen and we limped into Santiago, looking wild and smelling worse. The jeep was beyond repair and destined for the scrapyard, but I didn’t regret a single moment of our journey.
Previous page
