Ryan's Blog

Who knew I was at the head of such a journalistic fad? Shortly after I wrote about Torres del Paine National Park, an article showed up in the New York Times. A reader wrote to tell me that the Chicago Tribune published another article on the park in its Sunday edition. Now I wonder if all the people I met in Torres del Paine were journalists. The Trib’s take is “Nothing’s Normal in Torres del Paine” by Alan Solomon.

In the article, Solomon makes the following clever analogy: “Los Cuernos del Paine—the Horns of Paine—are a mountain cluster, which is like saying Michelangelo’s “David” is marble.” As I read his article, I learned that he was staying at hotels and making short day hikes in the park. If I may make an analogy of my own, getting the story about Torres del Paine from someone staying in a hotel and making day hikes is is like getting the story about the moon from Michael Collins. That’s an obscure reference, but it fits: Michael Collins was an Apollo 11 astronaut; he stayed in the orbiting command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

Why send a reporter to Torres del Paine National Park without going to the Torres of said park? Here’s one potential answer from Solomon’s article:

Trekking for miles and hours on rugged trails is about the only way to see the actual torres—the towers—of the Rio Paine.

Odds are fair to good, however, that when you get to the point when you can see them in their entirety, they’ll be enveloped in cloud or you’ll be battling face-zinging rain, or the sun will frustrate photographers by being in precisely the wrong position.

But when you do beat those odds it’s spectacular.

You can read the Tribune article for now without registering. There is also a small photo gallery. If anyone sees a Star article on Torres del Paine, drop me a line.

Update: It turns out that you cannot read the Tribune article directly without registering. Due to the Tribune’s somewhat bizarre policy, you can read the article without registering only if you search for Torres del Paine and click on the search result “Nothing’s Normal in Torres del Paine.”

Tip courtesy of James Lewis.

Posted by Ryan at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s not every day that I can say I covered something before the New York Times, but that might be today. Just two weeks after I finished writing my series on Torres del Paine National Park, Edward Wong’s article “Patagonia in a New Light” ran in the Times. Although he hiked the complete circuit (about 9 days) and I did the W-route (5 days), there are a few coincidental similarities:

• I traveled with my friend Amanda; Wong traveled with his friend Tini.
• Wong and Tina had comic misadventures involving the weather in the park; Amanda and I had comic misadventures involving the weather in the park.
• In the most surprising parallel, the park scenery evoked the same literary comparison from both of us.

When Amanda and I hiked through the French Valley I wrote:

We could faintly make out the Paine’s peak through the fog. Much of our time was not spent in clearings that afforded a view of the Paine, though. We twisted in and out of dark forests thickly populated with trees. I heard many people on the trail say that the park evoked Tolkien’s Middle Earth. If that were the case, then we were walking in Mordor, the land of shadows.

Wong described climbing the John Gardner Pass in the rain:

The pass, at 4,072 feet, wasn’t high, and altitude sickness was not a concern, unlike in the northern Andes. Just eight months earlier, Tini and I had trudged to the summit of the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro, at 19,340 feet. But the rain—nonstop all night and morning—had transformed the terrain into Mordor.

The similar descriptions are an amusing testament to the park’s ability to evoke the same feeling in different people across time. If you enjoyed reading about my trip to Torres del Paine here, I encourage you to read Wong’s article while it is still available for free on the Times site. He covers many things that I did not in my account, including the increasing number of tourists to the park, some Chilean history, and the nearby town of Puerto Natales.

On the other hand, Wong paid $650 for his roundtrip from Santiago to Punta Arenas. If you want to find out how to fly the same route for $120, you should get the facts from the guy that scooped the Times.

Posted by Ryan at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The selection at a local ice cream joint, Loca Luna.

This is the third in a series of articles on Chilean culture.

When the Chilean summer sun shines on you, if you pay attention, you can actually feel your skin burning. It’s not just the heat, but the sheer intensity. Temperatures are generally in the 80s and 90s, but it feels like each photon carries its own personal flame thrower to torch your body. Perhaps it has something to do with the UV radiation. Every day the newspaper reports the UV Index on an 11-point scale. Santiago is always at “9-10 Very Dangerous” or “11 Extremely Dangerous.”

The heat is exacerbated by the absence of any cooling. I don’t know of a house around me that has air conditioning. Many people don’t bother with fans either. Why push around the hot air? I suspect they’d say. Adobe houses help the matter, but you can only ask so much of your dirt walls. By mid-afternoon the heat has penetrated the house and left even the houseflies in a lethargic daze. This is the reason that the entire country migrates 80 miles west during the summer months. People abandon the city and countryside for their sliver of beach along Chile’s 3000-mile coastline.

Those without access to the beach aren’t left out, though, because Chileans’ primary tool for summer survival is more economical. We don’t need no stinkin’ fans—here we use ice cream. In order to stay cool, you have to eat a few each day. For best effect, try combining types: a giant scoop of ice cream will cool you, but it will leave you parched; best to follow up with a water-based pineapple popsicle. I wouldn’t be surprised if the country gained a collective 30 million pounds during the summer from ice cream alone. Maybe I’m exaggerating—I’m just saying it wouldn’t shock me.

Cost is low and access is omnipresent. You can get a decent popsicle for 18 cents. A soft-serve cone will set you back 45 cents. High quality Italian-style gelato is $1.10. On almost any given city block there will be a minimum of two stands selling some kind of pre-packaged ice cream. Within a one-block radius of the Los Andes plaza there are 24 locales where ice cream is available. Seventeen sell popsicles or other pre-packaged ice cream bars; four sell scoops of ice cream, three have soft-serve, and two offer premium gelato. One is an internet cafe, another is a video store, and two are haircut shops that offer a free popsicle with a children’s cut.

An ice cream vendor carrying his cooler steps down from a bus.

If this isn’t enough, the ice cream will come to you. During the summer, vendors carry small coolers of popsicles and board city buses to bring frozen heat management directly to you, the consumer. As the bus stops a man gets on and passes through the aisle announcing, “Piña piña, frambuesa frambuesa, chocolate, helados, heladitos a cien.” He has pineapple, raspberry, and chocolate, yours for just 100 pesos. Children and adults alike fish coins from their pockets and cool down with a popsicle.

Ice cream availability is a boon for those in parenting roles as well. One afternoon I took five girls from the foster home on a walk around town. For the affordable price of $1.80, I stopped all complaining and changed the topic of conversation to our chocolate popsicles. That’s money well spent.

Now that we’re at the beginning of March, people have returned from the beach to start work again. Before much longer, the days will be shorter, the weather most crisp, and the roving popsicle vendors will exchange their coolers for boxes of peanuts and candy. For now, the heat is still on. Wanna stay cool? Get a scoop and get on the bus.

Posted by Ryan at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gina and Paulina, two women from Pocuro, with the newly published book. Gina was one of the community interviewers who worked on the project.

I went to my first book launch last Friday in a somewhat unexpected location. In Pocuro, the town where I live, there are about 1,000 people. It is part of Calle Larga, home to 10,000, and 15 minutes from Los Andes, which has 50,000. Given those options, the party was held in Pocuro, in the shade behind a large, decaying adobe house. In attendance were the mayor of Calle Larga and a handful of government officials. The selected location makes more sense once you know the title of the book: An Oral History of Pocuro.

Pocuro, despite its small size, has spent its fair share of time in the spotlight. Gabriela Mistral, Chile first Nobel prize-winning poet wrote about the town and its people in her verses. Pedro Aguirre Cerda, president of Chile from 1938 to 1941, was born in Pocuro and spent his childhood there. The dilapidated adobe house where we gathered was, in fact, his one-time home. The stone chapel in Pocuro was built in 1945 and remains one of the most attractive in the area. Many people choose Pocuro’s chapel from the 11 in the parish for weddings and funerals. Since I live next to the chapel, I hear all the services and can attest to its continued popularity.

An Oral History of Pocuro had its inception in a government project started by former president Ricardo Lagos. The five-year initiative’s goal is to reconnect with the country’s roots and culture. To that end a team of interviewers came to Pocuro, a place less touched by the tides of time. Working together with residents who volunteered, the team spent 2006 talking with elders in the town. They recorded stories of the past and impressions of the changes over the decades. The result was a 130-page collection of once oral, now written history.

The book was written at an opportune time. Life is changing rapidly in Chile. Though the people of Pocuro see themselves as less convinced of the glorious march of progress, they too are along for the ride. Three months ago, on the same week in December 2006, two mega-stores opened in Los Andes. For a city that had many specialty stores and relatively small grocery stores, now there are the equivalent of a Walmart Supercenter and a Super Target. Los Andes is 15 minutes away from Pocuro, but even that is a recent development. It was only six years ago that Pocuro’s main road was paved and bus service arrived. Having a fixed phone line installed is still expensive, but cell phones are plentiful and now everyone has one (though until last month phone cards cost $0.67 a minute; now it’s between $0.30 and $0.45). Dozens of internet cafes in Los Andes offer cheap access to worldwide information and communication. On Saturdays they’re filled with kids playing the latest online games and instant messaging one another.

I’m sure there are diverse opinions on whether all these developments are good or bad; the truth is probably a little from column A and a little from column B. In either case, it’s important to have a record of the past. You can’t argue that where you are going is better if you don’t know where you come from.

I bought my copy for $7. Naturally the book is in Spanish, so I’ll move through it at a slower-than-average pace. As I do, I’ll share more about the Chilean countryside town where I live.

Posted by Ryan at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Special feature

Torres del Paine National Park

A day-by-day account of backpacking in Chilean Patagonia

Tent frames the Torres del Paine

A week ago I finished writing about my trip to Torres del Paine National Park in a multi-part series. It was one of the more ambitious writing tasks I’ve tackled here, matched only by the ambition of those who actually made their way through the seven days and 11,000 words. For those reading at a more relaxed pace, or anyone who missed it the first time around, this is a list of the articles in this now-archived special feature.

• Day 0: The Email
• Day 1: Arrival
• Day 2: The Torres of Torres del Paine
• Day 3: A walk by the lake
• Day 4: Surprise from the skies
• Day 5: At the end of the world
• Day 6: My checklist

Posted by Ryan at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)