Forest Colossi

About 15 minutes’ ripio drive from Caleta Gonzalo, aside the Carretera Austral, is a magical forest of bejeweled, green giants giving a rare glimpse of how much greater the still spectacular Valdivian rainforest once was.

The Alerce pine is among the world’s oldest and most massive living things. These remarkable trees (see last blog) were once common over thousands of square miles of Patagonia; today, Pumalin Park retains about 25% of the world’s population. The Alerce Trail, along which Carlos and I are hiking, traverses the translucent, tumbling river that drains the surrounding mountains, swollen by yesterday’s heavenly outburst (today’s broken cloud and patchy blue sky are a welcome relief). I feel like a mouse crawling through a corn field as the trail weaves us around stout, towering columns in the domain of giants. The Alerces, festooned with moss, ferns and other hanging greenery, sparkle like a million fairy lights as yesterday’s captured raindrops glint in shafts of sun. Their fibrous, red-brown bark coating trunks of massive girth is similar to that of California’s sequoias, as is their slow rate of growth. Alerce timber has been sought after for decades causing the rapid decline of these trees. Their regeneration on surrounding hillsides has been stymied by frequent forest fires as witnessed by their denuded, white skeletons, frozen, grasping for the sky above the surrounding southern beeches. Thankfully the protection and restoration afforded by Pumalin’s dedicated people means that, in patches, the Alerce forest is gradually returning.

Uplifted on leaving the impressive Alerces we continue south along the Carretera Austral, Carlos pointing out features of interest on the way. Although the park is private land the Carretera running through it is a public road and, as the authorities maintain the road, they lack care over restoring the natural aesthetic and leave linear, eroding scars of bare soil and uprooted trees that line the road for miles through the wilderness. A contrast to the elegant forest experience that I have just had; come on Chile, you can do better than that!

Pumalin Park, Patagonia. Part 1: Rain

Happy Christmas to all you fine people, wherever you are, and a big, festive thank you for taking the time to read my blog!

Now I know how a fairy feels atop a Christmas tree, sort of! The key differences, other than gender, being that I’m dressed from head to toe in sodden, black waterproofs and the tree on which I’m perched has neither branches nor leaves (although it did once). I’m on the lower slope of a high mountain, surrounded by a young forest of bright-leaved, Southern Beech trees emerging through the fallen, weather-bleached, wooden skeletons of their parents. The weather has changed completely from yesterday’s endless blue skies to an all-enveloping, sombre spectrum of muted greys, heavy clouds roofing the misty fjord down to the slatey sea at the mouth of the U-shaped Vodudahue Valley. It’s raining – lordy is it raining! This coastal part of Chilean Patagonia receives seven metres of rain per year and it all appears to be arriving at once – today. My waterproofs lived up to their name for less than ten minutes – and that was three hours ago! The torrential rain greases the inclined log on which I’m teetering, but the view along the valley in this small part of Pumalin Park is stunning nevertheless.

Vodudahue river in the pouring rain

Carlos and the farm from the top of my perch

I am accompanied by Carlos, the Head Guard at Pumalin Park, who is generously giving me a two-day tour of landscape restoration work around the park. First stop is Vodudahue Farm, one of several around the park. Geography makes even short distances here an adventure; the few kilometres from my Caleta Gonzalo cabaña involved two boat rides and a short stretch of ripio, followed by a two-kilometre drive on a tractor trailer! During an early engagement in our respective languages, with rain dripping off the ends of our noses, we agree a bilingual approach; Carlos talks in English to practice my native tongue, I speak in Spanish to enhance his. During the damp walk through the farm and the tricky scramble up to our current vantage point, Carlos and I discussed the purpose and the work of the tree nursery which raises native trees to restore the surrounding rainforest, and the fruit farm where a range of berries are grown, including the delicious, native murta. From our hill-side viewpoint Carlos points out the neat rows of the tree nursery, the restored and well-maintained farm tracks and the red-roofed, timber farm buildings reflecting the predominant reds and browns of the rainforest in the architectural mind’s eye of their designer.

Soaked!

Rainforest colour in the gloom

Pumalin extends over 1,200 square miles of Chilean fiords and mountains, blanketed in seemingly endless Valdivian temperate rainforest and home to spectacular animals, large and small, such as the puma and the humming bird. The names of the park and its top predator imply an etymological link, reinforced by their combination in the park logo, but Carlos explained that Pumalin, in the indigenous language, is a dry piece of land between wet areas, whereas puma is, er, a big cat! The park is nationally protected, but privately-owned by the Conservation Land Trust (CLT) – a charity set-up by Doug Tompkins to acquire and preserve important wilderness areas. He also lives locally, in fact, a few kilometres around the corner by boat! The fascinating story of the man, his wife (Kris Tompkins) and their work is described a million times on the internet, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say that I am now immersed in it, and will be for the next two weeks, and the results are exemplary and world class.

Before the park the land was not protected and, as over vast areas of Patagonia, the flatter valley floors and less steep valley sides were converted to cattle and sheep farms by pioneers during the 20th century, which involved clear-cutting and setting fires to clear the densely forested land. Millions and millions of hectares of land were cleared in this way – sometimes the fires burning unchecked for months. The fragile forest in areas not blessed with land good enough for agriculture was logged extensively for valuable timber trees such as the Alerce pine – the Patagonian equivalent of California’s spectacular redwoods in both size and age. They were extracted, damaging the surrounding forest and depleting much of the Valdivian temperate rainforest of these impressive arboreal giants.

Carlos with Alerce saplings

When Vodudahue was originally acquired it was a depressing economic and environmental disaster area, over-grazed by sheep and cows, crumbling riverbanks, broken fences, pot-holed and eroding roads, dilapidated buildings and degraded forests with no chance of regeneration given the intense grazing regime and frequent fires. Today, the farm is organic and produces berries, native trees and the most delicious honey I have ever tasted. It also farms horses and the aim is for these to become working horses. Farm products are sold throughout the CLT-owned properties in Chile and in various shops in the towns scattered widely through southern Chile. A new programme is being developed for visitors to Pumalin Park to sponsor an Alerce pine sapling to raise funds to restore these already impressive forests to their former magnificence.

On the return from Vodudahue, at the end of the day, it is still raining and still grey. Carlos invites me into his cozy house at the restored Pillán Farm, in the next valley along (which involves rides on a tractor, boat and truck), where I am introduced to his wife and we share coffee and chocolate (two dietary staples of mine). Pillán also serves as one of the main office areas for the Pumalin Park. The isolation and rugged terrain impedes communications – both physical and electronic – so each sector of the park has its own office and workshop infrastructure. The Pillán workshop originally provided the finely crafted furniture of my cabaña and all made from local wood.

Boat taxi

Tractor taxi

Already, from my experiences of Pumalin’s buildings in Puerto Varas, Caleta Gonzalo, Vodudahue and Pillán, I can see that great effort is expended on creating a homely architectural and interior design style that speaks a common language through and around the scattered settlements and restored buildings of the park. It’s a language of local, natural materials, attention to detail and quality, and a rusticity adapted from the American wilds, with a hint of a Shaker accent. Geographically, I feel lost in the middle of nowhere; geography and design meet awkwardly here at first experience, particularly in my already overwhelmed head, but with increasing exposure they combine creating a unique sense of place – simultaneously welcoming and wild!

Carlos' house

A restored building at Vodudahue farm

My cabana

Back in my cabaña after a long, damp day, I hang my dripping clothes around the small, electric radiator powered by a micro-hydropower turbine in a nearby mountain stream. The turbine’s oscillations cause a cyclical flickering in my low wattage, bed side light bulb. The rustic interior walls of un-planed timber, some with residual bark, create a relaxing texture with the mellow light as I settle for the night. It just feels right.

Tomorrow, Carlos and I will be heading deeper into the park. I hope by then my clothes will be dry. Read about it in the next blog.

Welcome to Patagonia

Poor picture of a lovely, restored building, the Pumalin Park HQ in Puerto Varas

I’ve become utterly disorientated and am struggling to determine what happens next after three days of travelling from Brazil’s central Amazon to the northern tip of Chilean Patagonia, compounding the intense experiences of the previous five weeks. I manage to hold it together enough to get to my accommodation for the night – the head office of the Pumalin Park - soon to be a new national park, in Puerto Varas. It’s late evening. My patient, kindly airport taxi driver allowed me to practice my Spanish on him as I have spent the last two weeks in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, which has returned my Spanish to square one again.

There to welcome me at the Pumalin Park office are Maria and Carolina, who has helped me make the necessary arrangements for the next section of my journey. Maria shows me around the impressive, homely building; it’s a huge, century-old, wooden house that has been restored to a high quality and with attention detail, but with a simple design. Natural materials, particularly wood, dominate and the new floorboards creak reassuringly. The refit may be recent, but the furniture is old and chunky and emits a bees’ wax scent that pervades the building. Hanging from any wall space large enough to accommodate them are impressive black and white photographs of Patagonia’s wildlife and scenery, framed in black wood. It’s a mind warp after Brazil's Amazon, but it’s a style that will become familiar and the stunning photographs dictate scenes in which I will be immersed for real in the very near future.



Carretera Austral and that funky duck!

In less than eight hours I am on the road again, waiting at the unwelcoming Puerto Montt bus station, the sun just rising and burning through the early sea mist releasing distant mountains to view. There are a couple of scruffy blokes and some stray dogs, one of which growls at a passer-by; the growl becomes a yelp after a well-aimed kick by one of the scruffy blokes. I wait with some trepidation as I’m not a big fan of long bus journeys and this one should take around 10 hours. It’s a small bus with tiny seats, but, thankfully only half full. We set off along a paved road for a few miles before it mutates to ripio (gravel road) and begins winding around a forested coastline. That will be the last paved road that I will see for some days and for a couple of hundred kilometres. A fluffy, yellow, toy duck swings in the windscreen, right in my line of sight, specially designed to test my good humour. The road we are on is renowned in Latin American travel lore; it’s the southern Chilean end of the Pan-American Highway (except it doesn’t really feel like a highway, or even a road) and is called the Carretera Austral. Over the next 10 days or so I am to become very well-acquainted with the Carretera.

Through the bus window I begin to notice wild plants familiar from my own garden and from my days at the Eden Project and its beautiful Wild Chile exhibit. Chilean Fire Bush is in full crimson bloom as are the fuchsias and the gorse – yes, the golden pride of Cornwall persists here as an introduced pest plant! We pass occasional, coastal salmon farms and sparse groups of small wooden houses surrounded by recently cleared patches of the forest. You can tell the houses are new – the corrugated metal roofs are still silvery and shiny. We wind southerly onwards flanked by steep mountains to the east, sea to the west.

Just as the ripio rattling of my body starts to affect my brain, we arrive in the tiny coastal village of La Arena nestled between a steep valley and the sea, wood smoke rising from metallic chimneys tainting the air with that familiar, homely scent. A growing queue of cars and trucks waits at the top of a concrete ramp at the other end of which are two orange ferries in the style of military landing craft. We are still waiting an hour later and I’m getting hungry since I missed breakfast and an evening meal last night. At that moment, a small local food angel jumps onto our stationery bus to dish out hot empanadas (like a small Cornish pasty, but without the Cornish) from a large polystyrene box under her arm, and sugary, black coffee from a Thermos flask.

La Arena. Our bus, the Kemelbus, is at the top of the ramp

Waiting for the tide to rise!

I wonder what we are waiting for – there are two ferries and plenty of customers. Jokingly I ask a chap in the local café if they are waiting for the tide to rise; and actually they really are. Since a recent earthquake changed the height of the land in relation to the sea around here, the jetty/ramp is now at the wrong depth at low tide ( I was given two versions of this story: some say the land rose relative to the sea, while others say it fell. They can’t both be right!).

Leaving La Arena

Someone decides somehow that the sea has reached the right depth and vehicular activity begins – at precisely the same moment that I have just bought a coffee, that I have to neck and burn my throat. Under the watchful eyes of the local sea lions vehicles are crammed onto the craft like sardines before we sail away around a spectacularly steep mountain headland that has evidently proved too much of an obstacle for local road builders. The caerulean sea is silky calm under a perfect blue sky. We traverse a deep sea fjord – the profound geological scar of a long melted glacier - and get our first glimpse of the high Andean peaks to the east.

On the other side we disembark and carry on ever southwards. Around every turn is a new vista of whatever combination of mountains, fjords, snow, forest, sea and isolated wooden shacks you care to imagine, and it’s all jaw-droppingly stunning – a view spoilt only by the incessantly swinging fluffy duck.

We emerge around a corner to the large village of Hornopiren at the foot of one of those cliched, but nevertheless impressive, snow-capped, conical volcanoes. From here we embark on a more substantial orange ferry for more than four hours of sailing to the next stretch of the Carretera. As we pull away from Hornopiren, the Hornopiren Volcano, which close-up seemed so high, appears dwarfed by the sugar-capped peaks behind, which till now had been obscured.

Hornopiren and its eponymous volcano

Cruising the line between forested mountains and islands, high waterfalls leap from precipitous, bare rock and hanging valleys tantalize with views of secret peaks. In the distance white splashes glinting in the bright sunlight indicate disturbance in the water. The disturbance moves closer until we can discern 20 or so dolphins porpoising towards us before veering off between our boat and the land and melting into the distance. Here and there, on the kinder gradients, the forest mantle has been removed and replaced with grass for cows and the occasional farm building. I wonder how anyone can make a living here; or do they just live?

Slow boat on the Pan-American Highway

On the ferry we have time to wander and chat with fellow passengers. I meet Lisi, an ecological economics professor from New York, who is travelling with Jane, a family friend and recent visitor to southern Chile. Lisi is also on her way to Pumalin Park to meet Doug and Liz, the brains behind the development of the park and many other exemplary conservation projects in southern Chile and Argentina and the main reason I am in this part of the world. On my whole journey I have met very few British people, but there are two on this ferry – Charlie and Jane – on a six-month backpacking tour of South America. They are now into month five and are also heading to Caleta Gonzalo. I also chat with a local Chilean about the area. He runs a tourist fly-fishing business on the majestic rivers further south. He explains that there are plans to replace this five-hour ferry journey – an experience of enforced relaxation and contemplation – with a new section of the Carretera bulldozed through the forests and mountains. His thought is that the most obvious and flexible way to increase capacity is to increase the number and frequency of ferries. Seems like a no-brainer to me!

Chasing the Sun on the boat to nowhere, with Lisi

Our large ferry pulls up onto a tiny ramp seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We disembark and drive up past the queue of diverse vehicles waiting to get on. I notice the first Pumalin Park signs, carved intricately from a mellow wood, at the Leptepu entrance. Another bumpy, dusty, fluffy-duck bouncing 20-minute drive later and we arrive at another in-the-middle-of-nowhere ramp into the sea. Another orange landing-craft takes us across another impressive fjord to a collection of five or six, single-storey wooden buildings, intimidated by the surrounding natural splendour, but cosily nestled at the top of a small delta beach. White wood smoke spiralling from the cabins promises a fine welcome and the end of 10 hours and 180 kilometres of ripio, sea and fluffy, yellow ducks.

Caleta Gonzalo, home for the next three nights