Camping: attempt 1

Hello, from my warmer artificially lit musically accompanied roofed desk. That sounded so good from the inside of a soggy sleeping bag draped over rocks and sucking the moisture from the wall of our 3-person tent sad overhead with rain about 2AM Saturday. Great plans and maps and instant soups Thursday ended successfully in failure on Saturday. Thomas and Felix at least slept nearly 12 hours. I passed one of those nights in which you at least believe you didn't sleep until you got so frustrated that you fell asleep.

We left on Friday from the bus station in Santiago. As is necessary, I didn't arrive at the station until the bus was pulling out. It's not interesting otherwise. After 3 hours, we arrived in Talca, a smallish town with a train station and a bridge, one of those towns that always feels sort of wet and mildewy. To kill time while waiting for our next bus to the Reserve in Vilches, we bought some bread and horse jerky, which the vendor nearly forced into my bag. It's better with bread. The bus to Vilches is one of those in which your stop is always, ahhh, just another 10 minutes, ahhh just another ten minutes, until you realize that you are the only person on the bus. Actually we were three, so there were three of us bumping along in the darkness, a black that city kids don't know very well. The bus stopped. Here you go: just fall the road up that way a few kilometers, passed the first guard house - closed - through some gates, and there should be another one - open - where you can inscribe yourselves and pay. Just up this road? And we'll see the house from the road? That's right. And the bus trundled off. Actually, that's when it got dark. Armpit of a cave dark, cloudy, no stars, and the increasing flashes of lighting on the horizon.

Luckily, both Felix and Thomas are intelligent. Felix served in the German military and Thomas in the Austrian. They had headlamps, which enabled us to see the rocks we were about to walk over. The thunder welcomed us and the rain followed. And you know how in Texas we're proud of our big rain drops? You Seattleites know nothing about rain! Well chilean drops put them to shame. They're thick or something, like skydiving tadpoles. After about ten uphill minutes, we noticed some large flashing white bodies about 50 feet ahead. There are pumas in the reserve ya know. They looked to be dancing sort of jerkily, like they had taken classes from some enterprising gringo. And these pumas made this really strange plaintive reeeuuaaaaahhhhh honk sound. And they were 3, bolting from side to side. OK they were cows. But it scared us pretty good. And we scared them too, which scared us even more. They stayed ahead of us for the entire 2-3 kilometers until the final gate, where they were cornered. And a cornered car-sized animal is no friend of mine. They bolted blindly, crashing from one side of the path's barbed wire to the other. One really went crazy and went crashing from side to side all the way past us down the path. But the pumas were gone and we had reached the guard house supposedly open.

No one inside of course. And the path was turning into a river so we decided to pitch the tent. Fortunately Thomas decided to come with us. Because if he hadn't, we would have settled for my friend's two person tent, which is permeable and not long enough for male gringos. But instead we had to hunt this one down, an expensive orange one from Italy that was mostly impermeable. Unfortunately (the whole trip was one of those "fortunately... Unfortunately... Fortunately... Unfortunately..." games), my backpack isn't impermeable so everything inside was soaked. Wet socks and a soggy sleeping bag kept me company all night. Miraculously I didn't get really sick.

It rained all night and into the next day. We woke up and ate our bread. Felix was courageous enough to leave the dry triangle of the tend and explore the guard house next door. A clueless man sat at a desk smoking marijuana. I don' think he really worked there, but he had a truck so someone had asked him to fill in. He explained that the usual guard had died yesterday in some sort of "accident" which he never clarified and that the back up guard was out of the country. He said it was impossible for us to continue with our plans to hike up the mountain and through the reserve because it was snowing a little further up and the path was a river. At about 1 in the afternoon, he drove us down to a little house with a hut and fire for drying things. We had tea and thawed a bit. After talking with the 3 people who seemed to work/live there, Felix figured out that one of the women was the aunt of this girl at the Chilean embassy in Berlin he had a crush on. They exchanged emails. It's hard to tell how many of these encounters are true, since we've taken to creating false identities, gently lying about our lives. It's much more interesting than repeating the usual banal, I'm from the US, studying literature at the Catolica, here until July, living with a family... bla blah 21 years blah. But he's actually from Berlin so it could be. I had a nice conversation about my impending difficulties with finding work as a journalist in Finland. Everyone agreed.

We returned on the bus an hour or so later. The luggage compartment was a pond. The man apologized, saying this is a rural bus. It's a little humbling. The sun came out to make fun of us and shined bright the rest of the ride. We were too dampened to try to return and complete our 3 day planned hike. But what a beautiful countryside! from the shelter of the bus that is. It makes you realize that you are a city kid.