by Jim Malusa
But these alerce were cut long ago (the wood does not rot), perhaps by the missing Germans. They came to Patagonia at the urging of Chilean immigration offices that were set up in Europe after 1850. Chile, officially and freshly independent as of 1811, wanted someone to settle the land and build a nation. A new nation, that is. Around a million people called the Mapuche already lived in the south, but the government did not consider them a model for future development, despite their obvious vigor. In 1541, the Spanish explorer Lopez Vaz regarded the Mapuche as “the most valiant and furious people in all America.” The Incas, in contrast, were dandies in feathered plumes. And just as the Mapuche had repelled the Incas, they roughed up the conquistadors. The first Spanish governor, Pedro de Valdivia, was not merely humiliated in defeat; the Mapuche gouged out his thumping heart and made lunch of it.
The Mapuche had a thing for raw freedom, and for three centuries the Spaniards failed in Patagonia. Their foes were brilliant guerrilla fighters, having practiced on themselves for several thousand years. They had no urge to write; oratory skills were so esteemed that history never died. They disciplined naughty kids with a dose of the hallucinogenic and occasionally lethal blossoms of floripondio, great drooping trumpets colored lemon and red.
Yet the Mapuche were not indestructible. Ground down by three hundred years of war, they were further weakened with booze brought by the Europeans. The new Chilean government saw its chance to displace the Mapuche with someone willing to live under the flag of Chile—otherwise, Argentina might claim all of Patagonia. The Chilean army did its work, and the Germans came. (Some Swiss, Dutch, and Italians did too.)
The Germans cleared and claimed their homesteads and presumably founded the “German Club” restaurant I find along the main street in Puerto Varas. Unfortunately, it is closed. There’s not a German in sight.
Onward, along the shores of Lago Llanquihue, under gathering clouds. The road is paved and busy with people on their way to fun, towing Jet Skis and dirt bikes to and from vacation homes and hotels with names like Enchanted Lake and Hidden Cove. Between windrows of cypress and eucalyptus (another immigrant) are gray gothic farmhouses, huge homes with ornate gables and creaking wind vanes in a breeze that is beginning to worry me. In very green pastures the beasts of Patagonia slobber and chomp and train their indifferent eyes on the solo cyclist. Dairy cows, I presume; one farm has an old sign proclaiming, We use a Girton Milk Tank. There are indecipherable German signs, too: Ist gesund und schmeckt gut!
Volcan Osorno, 8,600 feet high, disappears and reappears behind fast clouds. It’s huge and pointy and perfectly buried in snow down to 4,000 feet. When it begins to rain I’m relieved to see a sign for yet another German Club.
This one is open and looks vaguely Bavarian, although I’ve never been to Bavaria. In the parking lot is a BMW. The staff, however, is definitely Chilean. I order a bowl of asparagus soup and ask my black-tie waiter Carlos if any Germans are about.
“There are none. This is a restaurant with German food.”
Where can I find them?
“I would look in Puerto Varas.”
I was there, and didn’t see any. What do they look like?
“They are big and have blond hair.”
And they can be found in this region?
“One was here very recently.”
Do you know where he or she lives?
“Not here—he was a tourist.”
I visit the bathroom, and it’s clear that Germans were here. The place is suitable for surgery, blindingly lit by miniature spotlights. And there’s a Siemens hand dryer tagged, Made in Germany.
The rain quits but the clouds won’t. The yellow lupines along the road are a fair substitute for the sun. I pass an encouraging sign: Lots for Sale, Call F. Gunther. A growl of thunder keeps me moving. I spy a little sign that says Kucher, pointing to a lovely old two-story home. Out front there’s one of my favorite species, a silver-crested porch sitter—a female in a peach cardigan.
Hello, I say—What’s a kucher?
“It’s a pastry, of dough and fruit and baked in an oven. Like a tart. It’s German.”
And are you German?
“Three generations back. Now I’m Chilean, of course.”
Of course. I want to know more; she wants to feed me kucher. There is no greater stimulant to the mothering urge than the sight of a skinny bicyclist. The kucher is wonderful. Raspberry, and baked in a wood-burning stove.
Her name is Magaly Brimtrup Birke. She still speaks German, as does her husband, Orlando, as did her predecessors in the late 1800s. She gestures toward the perfect pastures and the moo cows and says, “This was all a forest then.”
Some trees survived, including a surreal araucaria in the front yard. This is a conifer whose repeating form, branching like a snowflake, gives it the look of a pagoda tapering to a point fifty feet high. The leaves are like pine needles except wider and creased into inch-long daggers. It’s the oddest tree—and, says Magaly, it used to be the most important tree. The Mapuche ate the seeds. “They lived off those trees.”
The Chilean government gave title to thousands of square miles of Mapuche lands to the settlers, lands that, a century later, they hoped to recover with the election of Salvador Allende. The landowners hoped otherwise. With the reign of Pinochet, land reform died—along with anyone who stood up for the people who ate the seeds of the araucaria. Magaly says, “It was a lot of work to cut down all those trees.” She’s still working. Chickens, ducks, and a stupendous garden with two hothouses for tomatoes. Is she tempted to sell out to holiday subdivisions?
“No. We like the tranquility, and we’re doing fine by renting some cabins we built by the beach.”
One more thing, please: what do you call the plant with the trumpet-shaped, hanging yellow and red flowers?
“Floripondio,” says Magaly. “But why are you writing this down?”
I’m writing a story. I think it’s about Chile and Germans.
“And you didn’t visit the German museum in Frutillar? Shame.”
I promise to visit next time, with my wife, who speaks German simply because she likes German. Magaly is touched, and that’s good for another hunk of kucher for the road. It goes well with the ChocMan XL candy bar, Cristal beer, and empanada meat pie I pick up in the next town. Beyond, the road climbs past cliffs of volcanic rock, homogeneous and smooth, a frozen wave of ash. Lago Llanquihue falls behind as the road turns to gravel and parallels the Petrohue River feeding the lake.
The valley tightens. Nobody lives here. The river plunges over ledges of polished stone. There is absolutely no way to cross without a bridge, and there is no bridge. The only way is to follow the river, into the Andes.
IF MY WIFE is right on these matters, the patter of rain on my tent this morning is wonderful for my skin, plumping it with moisture. But the humidity is terrible for my map, turning it into a limp rag that tears in my hands. In truth I hardly need it. From my camp, there is only one way over the Andes to Argentina, the Paso de Pérez Rosales. The road over the pass is mapped as a lonely noodle, twenty miles long, connecting a lake in Chile with a lake in Argentina. It does not connect to any other road. Only ferries cross the lakes, and they carry not cars but only people, who are shuttled in minibuses over the pass, twice a day. The rest of the time the pass will be mine.
I refuse to emerge from the tent until the trills and sliding whistles of birds signal that my chance has come. Outside, shags of moss hang from branches and upholster the earth. In the drab cold I don’t expect to see a big green and red Tarzan parrot—but there it goes, squawking as it flaps toward the glacial gloom of Volcán Osorno.
The gravel road to the lake has been wiped out and rebuilt in two places, the victim of landslides off Osorno. When Charles Darwin poked around Chile in 1832, the volcano was “spouting volumes of smoke.” It’s quiet today, vaguely opalescent in the watery light, but it’s plain to see that Osorno created the lake at road’s end. It dammed the river with a stea
ming torrent of ash. The river rose into a lake and topped the dam and chewed it away until Osorno blew again and made the dam higher still.
In the contest between eruption and erosion, the volcano appears to be winning: the lake, Todos los Santos, is over a thousand feet deep. It’s also twenty miles long and narrowly tucked between mountains so steep it’s no wonder that the ferry Esmeralda is the only way to the other side. The tourists on deck are fairly chipper considering the curtains of rain sweeping the lake for two hours. Between announcements in Spanish, English, and German, the ubiquitous Four Seasons plays over the sound system, but everyone is hoping for just one season, the dry season. The tours begin in Puerto Montt, which is fairly wallpapered with posters advertising this route, posters picturing frozen volcanoes and mossy forests under a cloudless sky.
Lies, all lies. There is no dry season, only a less-wet season. Each year brings 160 inches of rain—yet I, too, stand patiently on deck and wait for Osorno to reappear. So does Mr. Hideo (“It rhymes with video!”) of Osaka, who faithfully records the waterfalls that slide out of the mountain clouds, sluicing down gorges directly into the lake.
At the far end of the lake is an old hotel, three stories of stucco under a hipped roof that would not look out of place in the Black Forest. In the tastefully rustic lobby, a tour group of California oldsters swaps stories of “treks,” which I believe are “hikes” in places where people don’t speak English. One sturdy fellow is crazy for Argentine Patagonia.
“The archaeologists find dinosaurs out there, you know. It’s better than the Gobi Desert. They’ve just discovered that very big dinosaurs, say forty feet long, come from eggs no longer than this.”
He holds a thumb and finger five inches apart. The audience, not clear on the concept, listens for the import of these five inches.
“That’s not nearly as big as you’d expect from a forty-foot dinosaur!”
“Eighty feet!” interjects another man.
“Yes, eighty feet—that’s even more amazing.”
But it’s not as amazing as the sudden flood of sunlight through the windows. I ignore the little fact paddling around in my brain—160 inches of rain—and give in to the urge to leave the hotel and find a camp.
A kind waitress wraps up two ham-and-cheese sandwiches for me. That should do me for dinner and breakfast, then I’ll pedal over the Paso de Pérez Rosales into Argentina for lunch on the shore of Lago Nahuel Huapi. The pass is only 3,300 feet above the Pacific—hardly a workout for a real he-cyclist.
The road is deep black gravel peppered with smooth cobbles, and I must deflate my tires for traction. All is gorgeous for about ten minutes, the snowfields bronzed and the waterfalls so high and thin. There are several abandoned homes and apple orchards, so somebody must have stood here in the sun and thought: this is the place. A pasture to park a cow; inviolate citadels above.
Where did the settlers go? Insane, I’d guess, from the drip and plop of rain. The clouds, loitering on the summits, spill into the valley and hasten the coming of night. With the pastures now behind me and forest on all sides, I’m lucky to find an open spot on a gravel bar above a looping stream, and get my tent up just as the rain comes down. The hell with flood danger: I’m dry for now.
The first sandwich is gone in thirty seconds. I’m eyeing the breakfast sandwich when I remember my Emergency Soup. I fire up the stove and open the tent zipper for a bit of fresh air. Mosquitoes sneak in, and while I’m slapping about my ears, the noodles boil over and a cloud of steam fills the tent. My glasses instantly fog over. I grope for the roaring stove, kill the flame. The mosquitoes are thrilled by the mist and resume the attack. Lacking repellent, I rely on an internal remedy: a half-liter of red wine.
Two hours later, life is much improved. The rain’s stopping. The stream purls by with restless liquid sounds. Frogs croak amiably, hoping to get lucky. And when I open the tent and look to the sky I see that my night wish has been granted. Above the Andes is a terrific blaze of stars.
IT’S AS COLD as a meat locker in the morning, yet bordering the stream is a shock of bamboo twenty feet high. During a walk that will be shorter than anticipated, I discover that bamboo is friendly only when encountered post-harvest in Polynesian restaurants. Living bamboo is impenetrable.
The rest of the forest is a confusion of moldering logs and a tangle of creepers encircling the lichen-mottled trunks of the beech trees called Nothofagus. Duck under a branch, and with the faintest vibration the dripping mats of moss release a thousand droplets. It’s always raining in this rainforest, and I bet the first Europeans to come this way must have despised this wall of murk as much as I do.
They were Spaniards. They weren’t sure where they were going, but knew what they hoped to find. It was 1621, and the legend was already a century old.
In 1528, Francisco Cesar and fifteen men set out from somewhere in the moist heart of the continent, to find a city where the roofs were plated with pure silver. Another account has Cesar setting out with four men in search of the “White King,” an uncommonly generous ruler who made gifts of gold and precious stones. The details vary, but the ending is the same: the survivors laid eyes on an “Enchanted City.” They swore it was true.
It sounds like nonsense, but only a few years later Pizarro proved that the Incas certainly had gold and knew a thing or two about master-planned communities. As the years passed the legend of the Enchanted City swelled and metamorphosed into a place where even the furniture was gold. Some called it El Dorado.
That was enough to propel Diego Flores de Léon and a crew of forty-six from the Pacific into this canyon. I imagine they avoided the bamboo by thrashing up the flood channel of the Rio Peulla. Perhaps they rested here. They would ultimately fail in their quest, but at least they could have enjoyed this excellent camp, with a flattish rock for a seat where I eat my slim breakfast. I’m not game for another walk in a place where you stumble in the dimness and try to guess whether that orange blob is a fungus or a slime mold. Too wet to catch fire, this forest simply grows deeper and blacker until an old tree dies and falls over and creates an open space in the canopy.
But not on the ground. Mr. Darwin, always ready for an alternative to being seasick aboard the HMS Beagle, penetrated the forest near Puerto Montt and encountered “a mass of dying and dead trunks.” “I am sure,” he wrote, “that often, for more than ten minutes together, our feet never touched the ground, and we were frequently ten or fifteen feet above it, so that the seamen as a joke called out the soundings.”
I’ve got it easy: a road along the canyon bottom, without traffic. The clouds are back, low and gauzy and clinging to the canyon walls, but it’s not raining. I pedal and stop where I please, keeping an eye out for a hummingbird called the green-backed firecrown and its favored treat, the drooping blooms of fuchsia. Instead I find a marvelously hairy tarantula and the utterly smooth trunks of a myrtle tree. Both spider and tree bark are the color of cinnamon.
The only bird I recognize is the caracara, a kind of falcon that has abandoned the hunting lifestyle in favor of the already dead. A large and patient bird, it sits on a branch and stares at me with head cocked. Waiting.
I wait. I want it to fly away, so I can snap a photo.
The caracara waits. With dark wings folded over its white body, it’s a dignified character, not counting its huge horrible bill that appears dipped in blood. I wait until I remember that I don’t have any lunch, and that the caracara is hoping that I am lunch. I throw a rock. The caracara takes wing, slowly and audibly, with a span roughly equal to the length of my bike.
The bird is waiting just around the corner, where the single rutted lane abruptly leaves the river bottom and switchbacks up to the Paso de Pérez Rosales. It’s almost noon and the sun has struggled free, yet the day is still cool and I’m panting little clouds of vapor as I climb. Work makes heat and I strip off my shirt. Well short of the summit I experience what marathoners call “hitting the wall,” the overwhelming urge to stop moving
.
I stop. Digging through my panniers in search of food, I find only an ounce of grated parmesan cheese and immediately pour it down my throat. It’s like eating sawdust. Two minibuses carrying ferry passengers trundle past in the opposite direction. The tourists gawk. Some, in an apparently reflexive action, videotape me. They’ ll regret it. Glistening with sweat, my beard flecked with cheese, I look like I’ve been pursued by bloodhounds for a week.
Running out of fuel is a rare and unwelcome experience. I look down as I push on, thinking of anything but the mountain—old girlfriends, new candy bars, and a salt lake called Salina Grande. I nearly miss the sign at the summit saying, Welcome to Argentina. Semidelirious but still in the saddle, I keep moving.
After all, I have my own foolhardy quest. And my own tale, which I swear is true, of the far side of the Andes:
East of the cordillera is a country that is all downhill. From the snow mountain with three peaks, descend to the lake like a radiant jewel. There on the shore under a cloudless sky is the Enchanted Hotel. There you will find smooth white basins of hot water to soak in and a table to sit at and fill your plate and glass for as long as you like. And you will be the only guest.
“DO YOU KNOW WHY there are no blacks in Argentina?” asks Alfredo Pentke.
He runs the Hotel Puerto Blest on Lago Nahuel Huapi. The hotel is a thirty-room wooden three-story from the early 1900s. The tourist season begins next month, and I alone am seated for dinner. Pentke has joined me and soon revealed his German ancestry. His hotel is hidden fairly deep in the backcountry, and I’ve no idea if he is a friendly Nazi or a history buff.
“There are many blacks in our neighboring countries. But here in Argentina they were killed by the wars and the gauchos. The gauchos hated them.”