The Pilgrims Way
Dominic Gill
My dear friends,
Here I am again, but this time in a near frozen world of mountains, lakes, sea and snow as I start down into Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia. It is just over two years since I took my first pedal strokes away from Prudhoe Bay Alaska, and my brain has lost all track of time. I have so many experiences and feelings in my brain I will have to read my diaries again to order them all!
As per usual you can read the following update on my NEWLY UPDATED WEBSITE, www.takeaseat.org that now has three new videos and a flashy new look...not that different, but I like it!
Thank you so much again to all those that keep in touch and bring me closer to my financail goal for Hope and Homes for Children, just a few more quid needed!! If you need a reason to donate, just look at my hair, that should do it!
I still have a month to go, and from what I have seen so far it will be a cold but beautiful one!! This will in all likelyhood be my last update before my destination....destination, that word rings ominously in my head...first destination of many, but the only one on Achilles the tandem bicycle!
I hope you are all very well, and send my love to all
Dominic
D O M i N i C G i L L
"One Tandem, One Camera, Twenty Thousand Miles of Possibilities..."
WWW.TAKEASEAT.ORG
The Pilgrim's Way
The world south of Conception is a traction engine museum. Every self respecting village has at least one of these iron work horses rusting somewhere near the deserted plaza. These once mighty hulks – now slowly sinking into the winter mud under the weight of their iron boilers – mark the beginning of an era of intensive forestry in central southern Chile, an era that is ongoing, but now dominated by ugly tractors, chainsaws and the unnerving logging trucks with their “now you see me, now you don’t” second trailers.
Taking advantage of a brief weather window in perhaps the wettest Autumn on record (concerned about the new stomach I seemed to be growing on account of an extended period of incredible hospitality), Fernando (my new companion and the first peace loving rata to ride Achilles) and I made tracks into the depths of the dense plantations, and camped that night in a rare patch of beautiful native woodland, our tarpaulin strung between the fly wheels of a slowly rotting traction engine, our carpet a mosaic of brown and yellow leaves. I woke the next morning to the drone of logging trucks and the annoying wine of chainsaws cutting down the mature (at only fifteen years old) pine plantations around us. However, soon the trees swallowed the noise and left us in relative silence as we traveled into the heart of the Mapuche region, the only recognized indigenous region left in Chile. As Achilles rolled on, my tattered and faded Union Jack now fluttered weakly beneath the colorful Mapuche flag which flew for a few short days as I traveled through the remains of their land.
I had chosen once again, not to take the panamerican highway south, and hence ended up on the coast, stormy skies sending bands of well ordered frothing waves spilling onto the dark sand. In the small depressed fishing village of Tirua, the asphalt disappeared into puddles, giving way to dirt “ripio” tracks that took me up and down short steep hills, sometimes hedged in by immature plantations and other times following a tranquil lakeshore, occasionally passing a Ruca, the beautiful traditional thatch dwellings of the Mapuche people.
I was welcomed into this region not by a quaint touristy sign notifying me that this was the home of the “Indians”, but by some careless graffiti sprayed on the side of a small bus shelter (some of which provided me with draughty sleeping quarters!). “Indians, f*ck off and die” it read in badly spelt Spanish with a swastika scrawled underneath. Indeed, there seem to be a lot of misguided youth in Chile that use this sign as a license to hate whatever they want, and in this case fairly ironically at least a fraction of the blood of their ancestors.
My heart sank over the next few days as I began to realize I was simply looking at the same old story repeated all over this continent, “How the Indians lost their will to live” it might be called in a book of fairy tails. And while, even today, kids can be heard laughing at Mapuche names read out in their class register, well meaning white folk urge me to take care in these parts, for there are “Mapuuuuche” here (try and imagine that word being uttered in a fear struck voice such as that in Monty Python’s Killer Rabbit episode).
Needless to say, only a day after hearing these words of warning (Achilles having destroyed the knees of Fernando who subsequently returned to Conception), I found my self in freezing weather lodged in the cosy kitchen of a beautiful Mapuche family gobbling Cochayuyu (a soup of seeweed and native condiments) and sipping on a bottle of moonshine filled with “chupones”, sugary flowers that had been left to flavor this spirit for the last year. The family talked in their native tongue,mapudungun, of which the majority of Chileans have never heard.
I can’t help but shed a sad smile when I think about how we (Europeans) have managed, in what now seem to be the America’s most developed countries, to ostracize the culture, heritage and true historical founders of these regions. Try it one day, ask a Mapuche if he or she feels Chilean, or an Apache if they feel American …..I’m betting that they will think for a while before replying.
While most tourists will know the region surrounding Osorno for its beautiful volcanoes and lakes, for me it was the start of what I have coined “the Pastor’s Passage”, and before you ask, it has absolutely nothing to do with religious proctology. Thanks to a kindly acquaintance back in Blighty, I had a slowly growing string of Methodist Pastors with which I was invited to stay at intervals along my journey into southern Chile (I am in fact writing this on a lap top resting in Coyhaique at the family home of Pastor number four, Esmenar, who with a name like that surely starred in Harry Potter!). The first of these families was arguably headed up by the authoritative two year old Lucas who controlled his grandfather, Pastor Miguel, and the rest of the family with his winning smile and requests to play pittotepotte….to you and me, football.
Here, like the majority of the houses in the south, life revolves around their cosy wood stoves, from where, to my delight, fresh bread is regularly produced. While customs change edging under the feet of the Mount Fuji-like Volcan Osorno, south onto the legendary island of Chiloe, the fresh bread keeps on coming!
It was, in fact in Chiloe, where I discovered the waterproof properties of technical rain gear after two years of constant use is left wanting. While riding through a squall on this picturesque little island, I found that when rain was blown horizontally at more than twenty-seven kmph, the material acts as an ingenious kind of one-way colander, and hence, incredibly, water enters but doesn’t ever leave (until you empty it from your sleeves). Scientists interested in selectively permeable membranes take note; I am willing to loan my waterproofs for research purposes. It was because of my failing equipm that I was especially grateful for the hospitality of Pastor Ruben and Pastor Jaime, rescuing me from various moist days, sheltering in fisherman’s shacks or damp cows fields.
All the while for the last nearly two months, the volcano Futaleufú has been smoldering threateningly and spilling ash onto the surrounding villages. Subsuquently, the area has been sealed off and hence, the caraterra Austral effectively all beit temporarily severed. So, with little choice I embarked only a few days ago on a thirty five hour ferry journey through the channels and islands south of Chaiten, to arrive at Puerto Aisen in a different chilly world of snow, ice and stunning mountains. The journey by sea was fascinating and planted yet more plans for adventures in my already overloaded brain.
As the bags of bivalves stacked on the deck next to Achilles gurgled, hissed and bubbled (giving any decent foley artist a run for their money), I was left with time to think. Time to think about two years and two days on the road. About the people I have met and then cycled away from, and the knowledge I have gained and that I hope I will retain for the rest of my life. I feel full of experiences but not thoroughly fulfilled....but does one ever? I enter what will be roughly the last month of this cold journey keen to finish, but still frightened and unsure of whats next.....I don´t think real life is this easy!!
"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." Robert Lewis Stevenson
D O M i N i C G i L L
"One Tandem, One Camera, Twenty Thousand Miles of Possibilities..."
WWW.TAKEASEAT.ORG
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