Today has been a bit more of an admin day. One of my activities for next week fell through, so I spent a fair part of this morning re-arranging my plans with a couple of other agencies to keep my itinerary as close to the original as possible. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been leaning heavily on AI, not as a lesson planner, but as a travel agent, and I have to be honest, I fear for the travel industry. ChatGPT and Copilot may need gentle nudging and correcting as they work, but they do a phenomenal job at trawling the net for deals, dates and travellers’ tales from TripAdvisor, Reddit and beyond.
I’m not the biggest fan of AI, but as an impartial entity to bounce ideas off, it’s an absolute doozy. It has really helped me to streamline my plans, keeping them within a very reasonable budget – especially important as my choice of location is not exactly famous for being a budget destination. I do often have to correct its mistakes, which is why I would caution any students of mine from meddling with it unless it’s on terms they understand – good advice for just about anything unknown – but as a rule it does a pretty good job at doing the heavy lifting.
I genuinely can’t wait – I’m practically chomping at the bit here – but I promised to keep it a secret, so I will leave just the smallest of clues in this post in case you want to hazard a guess at my intentions.
I’m currently sitting in the English office, listening in on the weekly department meeting on debating strategies and what constitutes a suitable number of poems within the Language A anthology. On my left, the windows open out onto the hill country around Manquehue, where I saw no fewer than sixteen condors circling shortly before lunch. That makes three days out of three this week where I’ve seen the titans of the Andean skies from my office. Normally it’s just the diucas and mockingbirds that pop in for a lookaround once the kids have gone back inside for the third hour of the day. On my right, the windows open out onto the enormity of the Andes to the north, still wearing a wintry mantle of snow. Further down the hill – just out of sight beyond the classroom blocks – are the school’s sports pitches. Our kids play rugby against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century clock tower and the Southwestern Railway. These kids have the towering heights of the Andes all around them. These are just the foothills: somewhere beyond stands the fearsome Cerro Plomo, reaching some 17,861 feet into the sky.
Upon reflection, by journey’s end, I will have spent an astonishing two months south of the equator this year. The last time I was this far south I was tracking mountain gorillas in the impenetrable cloud forests of Bwindi on the Congolese border.
I remember being of the opinion that Chile was a destination I was only prepared to visit thanks to some generous financial assistance with the flights, considering it otherwise a prohibitively expensive destination. I see now just how wrong I was. Not about the money – Chile is easily one of the more expensive South American countries – but about how much there is to see and to do.
I’m now genuinely considering coming back someday to pick up the things that I missed: Chiloé, Conguilio, Punta Arenas, San Pedro de Atacama and so much more besides. There’s simply too much to see here, even when you have five weeks to play around with, and for a naturalist like me, the fact that it pales in comparison to its megadiverse neighbour, Peru, means very little when a casual glance out gives you one of the most spectacular birds of prey on the planet.
Two weeks from now, I will be back home, a brief pit stop on the island before duty calls me to Athens for one last dance. I had a brief moment of nostalgia for it today when I popped in to help a colleague set up a game of Just a Minute to give her students a boost with their listening skills in debating. I love that game to bits – and the BBC Radio show from which I have poached it.
It’s getting to that stage of my time in Chile where I’m starting to take advantage of every moment remaining. Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten quite used to the sight of the Andes, the caracaras that seem to be constantly somewhere on the horizon and the wheezy call and response of the characterful meadowlarks. But soon I’ll have to say goodbye. So, while the weather holds at least, I’ll try to get out after work and soak up as much of that view as I can.
After a productive day spent exploring Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry (specifically Quickdraw, Demeter, Shooting Stars and Delilah) and hanging out with the Senior English team, I popped in to grab my camera and went straight back up the road to Observatory Hill (Cerro Calán). It was smoggy and overcast on my way up, but by the time I reached the summit, the sun had found a breach in the cloud line near the horizon and came shining through – just in time to light up the meadowlarks that were scrambling about the summit.
I went all the way to Patagonia for pumas and took a boat out into the Pacific to see an albatross, but the meadowlarks have been a feature wherever I’ve gone. For me, they’re probably the bird of Chile – after all, national bird or not, I’ve seen condors in Peru, albeit perhaps not as frequently as I have here.
If I had more time – and the weather were kinder – I’d head south again in search of the chucao, a smart little Chilean speciality, and try my luck in search of the Magellanic woodpeckers that reside within the forests of Chiloe. I’d also try to track down the elusive tucúquere, the largest of the owls of Chile, that has thus far eluded me. I suspect I’ll be absolutely knackered when I return from my final adventure next week, but if the sun decides to make a very overdue return, I might make one last jaunt out to Batuco, a wetland reserve to the north of the city, in the hope that I might find the burrowing owls that live around the lake.
Until then, I’m quite content to watch the meadowlarks bousting about.
When the sun can be seen, Santiago experiences an incredible second sunset. The dying embers of dusk catches the peaks of the mountains and showers them in golden light, before they fade to an imperial grey against the iron skies beyond. Then, just when you think it’s over, the mountains erupt in an incredible crimson light. I’m not sure what triggers that second burst of light. Maybe it’s the sun hitting the Pacific, or some trick of the clouds. Either way, it’s breathtaking.
As I walked back down the road toward Avenida Charles Hamilton, the clouds became a mirrored beach, like so much stippled sand. To the north, the triangular summit of Cerro Manquehue rose into the ether like a child’s drawing. It’s been the eternal backdrop of my stay here in Santiago, visible from both my home in Las Condes and my office in Craighouse on the other side of the mountain.
Before I came here, Manquehue was just the name of a Chilean Catholic community who I met once in Durham, many years ago. Now it’s one of my favourite waymarkers in the Valle Central.
Tomorrow brings an observation – one of my last – and a planning session with the Deputy Head for a fully-fledged 90-minute lesson of my own on Thursday. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were testing me. It almost feels like a job interview.
I saw a fox near the car park as I left today – a gold and silver vixen, rooting around the trees just beyond the fence. These culpeos are a lot closer to wolves and jackals than they are to true foxes, but nature clearly likes the design of the fox, because the culpeo and its cousin the chilla have both evolved to fill that niche.
I’ll take that as a good sign. Nothing that beautiful could be anything else. BB x
With strong winds and heavy rain forecast for much of central and southern Chile this weekend, I decided against any madcap travels beyond Santiago. It’s just as well, too: even my whimsical considerations of hopping over the border to tick Argentina off the list with a flying visit to Mendoza would have been impossible, after yesterday’s renewed snowfall blocked the mountain pass, closing the terrifyingly steep Ruta 60 for what is likely to be quite some time.
For once, I erred on the side of common sense and spent my Saturday in downtown Santiago, stocking up on a few important supplies for my final adventure in South America, now less than a week away. My main target was the sportswear giant Decathlon, but while I was hunting it down I stumbled upon a fabulous bookshop specialising in natural history in an underground mall at Tobalaba. I’ll simply have to come back here before I go – the selection of books on offer was incredibly tempting.
I still can’t get over how much birdwatching is a thing over here. I’m so used to Hispanics being generally disinterested in birds they can’t shoot out of the sky. It’s so heartwarming that that particular aspect of Hispanic culture is shifting, and that Latin Americans seem to be the driving force behind it.
With my Decathlon business concluded, I popped into Jumbo – Chile’s answer to Spain’s Mercadona – to grab a couple of snacks for the week ahead. Amazingly, the supermarket did me for lunch, too: they were giving out free samples of the seafood stew mix (which was amazing!) as well as free samples of strawberry yoghurt and pistachio ice cream. They weren’t exactly full-size dishes, but Tomás ordered far too much pizza last night, so I was quite happy with a couple of free nibbles for lunch.
The heavy rains of the past couple of weeks have transformed the Mapocho River which runs through the city. When I arrived, it was little more than a steady flow in a largely dry canal. It’s now a roaring torrent that cuts above the din of the traffic when you’re close enough. Chile really is a country of extremes: when it rains here, people have to be prepared for property damage and flood control, even up here in the mountains.
By the time I reached the car park at the foot of Cerro San Cristobal, it was already half past one, and a lot of city folk had come to the same conclusion as me: that is, that it would be nicer to go for a walk today, rather than tomorrow, when the scheduled rains are due to come down hard. Parquemet was full of cyclists and runners, as it was on my last ascent now three weeks ago, but after a flying visit to the Japanese Garden – which was probably the noisiest zen garden in creation, thanks to it being located within a Hispanic capital city – I ducked off the road, following one of the many forest tracks intended for downhill mountain bikers. But for a lone jogger, I had this route to myself, which meant it was alive with wildlife.
The first critter to show up was a woodpecker. I never did find the famous Magellanic woodpecker during my visit to Patagonia – a very good reason to come back someday – so this striped woodpecker or carpinterito is my first in Chile. Like most woodpeckers, it was a nightmare to capture on film, being in the darkest part of the forest, moving constantly and under a dark, overcast sky, but I just about managed a couple of shots before it disappeared among the trees.
A large flock of finches followed me along the spine of the cerro, feeding among the dead foliage at the side of the path. The siskins here look and sound a lot like the ones back home, but the sierra finches are really rather special. I saw some of these pretty birds in Cusco, but in Santiago they’re essentially garden birds.
I hoped I might find some of the pretty diuca finches that are so common at school. There weren’t any on the cerro today, but I did keep running into diucons, their fiery red eyes even more obvious in the midday light than they were the other day, when I was shooting into the sun.
The best find of all, though, was a bird I’ve become very familiar with here in Santiago. I hear them every single day, and see them at least three days out of seven, whenever I should be near a poker plant. The green-backed firecrown is probably Chile’s most well-known hummingbird, since it seems to have a home on even the busiest streets in the city centre.
The last time I had a close encounter with one of these living gemstones, I didn’t have my camera on me. This time, I came prepared. Firecrowns are fearless little creatures, driven by an insatiable hunger that is a side-effect of their rapid metabolism – so, once again, I was able to sit quite close and watch, until the bird landed so close I could see its heartbeat and its tiny tongue tasting the air.
The firecrown gets its name from the male’s plumage, which really is quite something. Even with the naked eye, you can’t miss that sudden flash of scarlet when they alight upon a branch, just like hoopoes do with their crests when they land.
The secret is the iridescent sheen to its feathers, each one bending the light slightly differently depending on its position on the bird’s forehead. They can, of course, flatten and raise their crests at will, so I had to wait a little while before I was able to capture that ripple of red light.
After spending a happy half hour or so with the firecrowns, I wound my way back down the cerro and used what little battery I had left on my phone to catch a bus back to Las Condes. I only stopped one more time, just before stepping on board the 409, to see a couple of Southern Lapwings that had flown in and gone down to the river. I see and hear these birds every day, too, as they’re a lot noisier than the firecrowns, but I haven’t yet had the chance to get a photo. They’re usually patrolling the rugby pitches in pairs, and they have a reputation for being ferocious with passers-by in the spring, when they have eggs or chicks near at hand.
Well, it’s getting dark outside. I didn’t expect to have such a good afternoon’s birdwatching on what was essentially an extended shopping trip, but sometimes, it’s the outings you don’t plan that turn out to be the best.
That said, I’ve done a lot of planning for next week’s mad adventure, so I hope that turns out for the best, too. It really is going to be rather special. BB x
I’m up early after falling asleep far earlier than usual last night (around 8pm – shocking!), so I thought I’d use the time to pencil in my afternoon’s adventures.
While I’ve been working around the Craighouse campus, I’ve had a lot of time to watch the comings and goings of the birds that make their home around the capital city. Taunton has its fair share of feathered friends, of course, but I’ve had thirty years to get used to herring gulls, crows and woodpigeons. I might be in my third week out here, but I still get a big smile watching the rufous-crowned sparrows hopping about. Naturally, I don’t bring my camera to work, so given that we actually had some sunshine today – and that my colleague Tomás was done an hour before the end of the school day – I thought I’d capitalise on the sunlight and do a bit of suburban birdwatching.
One bird that’s easy to find around Santiago is the mockingbird. I’ve come across these characterful creatures in New Orleans, Lima and the open steppe of Patagonia, but the cheerful Chilean mockingbird is very much a feature of Santiago itself. I imagine they’d be garden birds, if one had the money for a garden in this habitually dry part of the world.
I thought I might try and snap one of the many Chilean swallows circling the heights of Cerro Calán, but they were much too fast and never came down to roost. I did, however, finally have manage to capture a fire-eyed diucon – a little grey bird with striking red eyes, almost like those of a Victorian doll, that moves just like a flycatcher from back home.
It was really encouraging to see more than a couple of other walkers up on Cerro Galán with binoculars and the BIRDA app on their phones. I can’t help but notice that birdwatching seems to be a lot more popular here than I anticipated. I suppose it helps a lot when your average city birds are really quite spectacular to start with.
Take the meadowlarks, for example, who make their presence known with a tremendously loud wheezy call that goes off like a Mexican wave as soon as the first one in the flock puffs out its chest and sings. These are the birds that the locals in Santiago seem to love the most, and with such an eye-popping splash of red on the males’ chests, I can’t say I blame them.
Definitely saving a corner of this post for my favourite little sparrows, though. Slightly smaller than our house sparrows, with an endlessly cheerful chip to let you know they’re nearby, they also have a beautiful song when they’re feeling more musical.
I was up on the cerro long enough to catch the sunset, which was an added bonus. It must have been tremendous from Valparaíso, no doubt, but even here in Santiago, with the forested mountains of La Campana between us and the horizon, it was quite a sight to see.
Today I think I’ll wander over to the Senior English department and try to catch a few more lessons. Be proactive for a change! BB x
I grew up within sight of the sea. You’re never far from the sea in Kent: the furthest I ever lived from the coast was about ten miles as the crow flies, while the second half of my childhood was spent less than a mile from the white cliffs of Dover. As such, I am very attached to the sea and all its smells and sounds: the salt spray of the winter waves, the hushing rush of pebbles pulled down the beach by the tide and the cry of the herring gull. If I should be so lucky, one day, I should like to live by the sea.
Today I took that lifelong love for the sea and dialled it up a notch by taking a pelagic trip out into the Pacific – into the open ocean.
Rodrigo, my guide for the day, picked me up from outside my hostel in Valparaíso shortly after seven. A punctured tyre delayed him by forty minutes or so, so he was anxious to get going, so as not to hold up the crew of their ship up in Quintero, a seaside fishing town some thirty miles north of Valparaíso.
Shortly before we got there, the sun rose into a fiercely red sky. A certain old English saying came to mind:
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight
Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning
It was a beautiful sight, even if it did threaten rain. More spectacular, though, was a clear view of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in all the Americas and the highest peak outside of Asia. The great white sentinel was so immense that by some trick of the light it seemed to throw the entire south of Chile into darkness. Apparently, only 30-40% attempts to scale Aconcagua are successful. The mountain is evidently as much an apu – a sacred mountain – as its better-known kin to the north of the cordillera, and not to be underestimated.
The local fishermen of Quintero were already hard at work as we arrived, slicing up some frighteningly large squid and cleaning their skiffs after a night out on the ocean. They seemed curious about the small group of day trippers herded onto a boat waiting in their harbour – all of them Chilean, with the exception of one wandering Briton – but paid us no more attention than the pelicans: a sort of intentional acknowledgement, as they went about their work.
I couldn’t help being totally bowled over by the frighteningly large squid laid out in the fishery. Humboldt squid – or jibia as they’re known in Chile – are among the largest squid species in the world, reaching a whopping five feet in length. They’re so numerous along the coast of the Americas that they represent a third of the squid catch worldwide – and despite the fact that nearly two thousand tons of them are hunted in Chile alone every year, their population is still expanding. That’s a testament to just how rich the Humboldt current truly is. It’s also why Chile has always been home to a healthy population of sperm whales, who devour these and even larger prey, including arguably the most famous whale of all time: Mocha Dick, an aggressive and exceptionally cunning albino sperm whale who survived nearly a hundred attempts on his life before being brought down off Mocha Island. His story inspired Herman Melville to write the American classic Moby Dick, but it’s the original tale that is taught here in Chile as part of the national identity-building curriculum. How cool is that?
We left the harbour – with its attendant sea lions and pelicans – and started out on the hour’s journey out into the open ocean. For most of that first hour, we were tailed by kelp gulls – Chile’s ubiquitous answer to the herring gull – and strange shapes in the water, many of which turned out to be discarded bottles or cans floating eternally along the Humboldt. I counted at least four Fanta bottles and two bicycle tyres, the latter floating nearly side by side. I wonder what happened to the bicycle itself?
Some of the shapes moving along the surface of the water were a lot more interesting. A curious sea lion, a huala or great grebe fishing offshore, or a family of penguins, spending the winter at sea. Over the course of the morning we saw both species native to Chile: Humboldt penguins – the kind I saw in the Islas Ballestas in Peru – and Magellanic penguins, a more southerly species that have colonies right down to the Chilean Antarctic.
We didn’t have to go far from the harbour to see our first pelagic species of the morning. The first to make their appearance were the shearwaters, experts of the open ocean, zooming low over the surface of the water, banking this way and that. With the roll of the waves, they seemed to slice through the surface with the tips of their wings in the way that gave them their name, though I swear I never saw them touch the water once.
In the descending gloom, they were hard to catch on camera. A little easier were the diving-petrels, tiny auk-like birds that preferred to paddle away from the boat, popping in and out of sight beneath the waves in the habit for which I suppose they were named.
As the rocky headland of Quintero faded into the mist, we were almost entirely enveloped. This dense sea mist is one of the reasons there haven’t been any pelagic tours since April: if the visibility is this poor, the harbour doesn’t let ships out into the open ocean, lest they become lost, disoriented by the waves – or worse, collide with another ship.
Only the fulmars kept us company in the mist, slicing through the fog on silver wings.
After what must have been an hour, the first sign of relief began to glow in the east: the sun, clear of the mountains and their attendant clouds at last, was trying to fight its way through the fog. Curiously, some trick of the light warped its shape into something that looked like a cross or perhaps even an angel with arms outstretched. It’s so easy to see how legends could form in such a strange and unsettling space as the open ocean, in a time when there was so much less knowledge and so much more wonder in the world.
As the mist began to clear, we reached the feeding grounds of the open ocean. There were plenty of shearwaters around, mostly sooties – a dainty species of southern waters that can sometimes be seen as far north as the British Isles on their wanderings. But this is their home, off the southern coast of the Americas, and there were plenty enough of them to prove it.
A young lad on the crew lifted the lid on one of the chum buckets – fish heads and squid tentacles, mostly – and threw some into the water for the birds that had followed us so patiently. They were watchful, at first, as wild things should be, but once the kelp gulls cottoned on, the shearwaters lost their timidity.
One bird I had not expected to encounter at all was a prion – known around here as a paloma marina or sea dove. These Antarctic birds had been driven north by weather currents in the South Seas, by the looks of things, and it was a real delight to watch them bobbing around beside the boat, dipping their heads beneath the water in a constant, frantic search for food.
The real prize of the open ocean took its time. A cry of “albatross” from the captain (one Chilean bird whose name is seemingly universal) drew our attention to an enormous shape gliding through the mist behind the boat. It was there for a moment and then it was gone.
A few minutes later, one of the crew spotted it again. The giant – a black-browed albatross, and presumably the same individual – must have caught the scent of the chum and was following the boat at an increasingly shorter distance, arcing across the water in the kind of wide waves that children do on bicycles when following something too slow for their liking.
In time, it seemed to lose all suspicion of us whatsoever and flew in incredibly close, so close that you could see the glint of sunlight on the tip of its bill.
One of the Chilean birdwatchers sitting at the back of the boat beside me remarked somewhat ruefully that he had seen far more activity in previous July expeditions. To him, the ocean was unnaturally quiet today.
I couldn’t have cared less. I was hoping to see one albatross, but I didn’t expect it to be so close, and so bloody impressive. They really are magnificent creatures.
The albatross is a perfect gliding machine. The only time they need to beat their enormous wings is upon takeoff, which is a somewhat clumsy affair requiring one heck of a run-up – although, when you consider that said run-up usually takes place on the surface of the water, that feat is all the more impressive. To aid them in this endeavour, their webbed feet are absolutely enormous, giving them serious launching power as they race across the waves. Once airborne, they can glide for hours, riding the wind on wings that have evolved to make them the true masters of the open ocean.
As the scent of chum in the water drew more and more seabirds, other species began to appear. There was much activity on the boat when a Salvin’s albatross came riding in to join the bounty: a larger, greyer species with a smart yellow lining to its bill. Like the black-browed, its eyes sit beneath a dark shadow, giving the peaceable bird a perpetual frown – though it looked stern enough when it came charging in to chase the other gulls away from the discarded fish heads thrown overboard.
As more and more birds were drawn to the bounty, others besides the albatrosses came in to investigate. Petrels of every kind: smart pintado petrels, Westland petrels from New Zealand, tiny storm-petrels – known to Spaniards a golondrinas de mar (sea swallows) – and southern giant petrels, like the ones I saw in Natales. I quite like these dark morph birds, but there’s a pale morph that look truly sinister, with cold grey eyes – much more suitable for the vultures of the southern seas.
If it weren’t for the albatrosses, these giant petrels would have dwarfed everything in sight. As it was, the best they could take home was second-billing (no pun intended).
There was a great deal of excitement on board when another albatross appeared: a waved albatross, a stranger to these waters that usually makes its home in the Galápagos Islands to the north. The albatross is a true wanderer, scouring the length and breadth of the ocean in search of food, so they can turn up just about anywhere outside of the breeding season. Even so, the captain remarked that in the last twenty years he had only seen five of them, so it was quite a special sight.
For me, though, the most spectacular bird of all was the last to appear. Towards the very end of the expedition, a truly enormous shape coasted into view from the direction of the open ocean, riding in on the wind on three-metre-long wings. A royal albatross – tied with the wandering albatross for the largest wingspan on the planet.
More wary than its kin – or perhaps more stately – the wanderer kept its distance, gliding in enormous circles around the boat. I’m not sure where they stand in the pecking order, or whether the royal in their name is a flight of fancy on our part in allusion to their size, but the giant was indisputably the largest and most powerful of all those gathered to the feast.
Just once did the wanderer come in close enough to truly appreciate how much larger it was than everything else: even the other albatrosses looked like gulls beside it. Unlike the angry-looking black-browed and Salvin’s, the royal albatross has a kind face with deep black eyes and a clean pink bill.
To see one is to understand how sailors of old were enchanted by this bird, spinning legends about it, including the famous belief that to kill an albatross was to invite disaster – upon ship, captain and crew.
What an incredible encounter! I hoped for one albatross and saw at least fifteen, including the largest of them all. My ears may not have fully recovered yet, but I couldn’t feel more fortunate right now.
Upon returning to Quintero, we all had lunch together at a seafood joint opposite the harbour. Quintero is not on the tourist trail – it isn’t even mentioned in the Rough Guides book I brought with me – so the fare was local, fairly-priced and fresh – and absolutely divine. I mulled over the menu for a bit before opting for a mint and ginger lemonade – my favourite Chilean drink – and the caldo de congrío, a wonderfully warm Chilean seafood soup.
I would have caught the bus back to Santiago, but one of the birdwatchers was tremendously keen to offer me a lift as he was headed back south anyway, and thought he might show me parts of the interior I might otherwise not see. I don’t tend to turn offers like this one down, and I had plenty of time, so I accepted.
Manuel – a Chilean marine researcher of proud Basque extraction – was a proper fount of information. He has been into birds his whole life, studying ornithology at colleges across the United States and working primarily in pelagic research. His job has taken him from the coast of California to the Galapagos and the Pitcairn Islands, as well as both the North and South poles. He remembers when they were proper frontier territories, before modern tourism sank its teeth into the far-flung corners of the world. He remembers also when much of the coast of Valparaíso was a giant lagoon, with bird-rich wetlands that have long since dried up and turned into cattle country after so many years of drought. The recent downpour is an anomaly: the Chilean palm trees that grow in the hills to the east all bear the blackened scars of the fires that rip through the countryside when the summer heat is at its worst, aided by the invasive eucalyptus trees that do so love to self-immolate.
As well as a crash course in Chilean fauna, flora, history and politics, Manuel was something of a prankster, hellbent on stopping in the middle of nowhere to take a photo of me so that I could send it to Rodrigo, our guide, so as to let him believe that I had been dropped off in the middle of nowhere. The average citizen might have left the joke at a passing comment, but Manuel was adamant to see it through, passing over several promisingly desolate spots in the hills before finding one to his liking.
His puckish side satisfied, he made sure to send me on my way with some herbs for my tea and a fresh loaf of local bread, superior to any supermarket pan de molde. I had some this morning. It really was superb.
Manuel dropped me off in Melipilla, a one-storey town to the southwest of Santiago that has definitely seen better days. Several earthquakes – including one that had its epicentre in the heart of the town itself – have laid waste to what was once a very pretty Chilean town, with colonial adobe houses and two impressive churches. What remains is a sad mishmash of old and new, houses patched together with new materials, as though the whole town was rebuilt using six different LEGO sets. The street art of Valparaíso has made its way here, too, though it is perhaps less welcome here than it is in the cascading streets of the seaside city.
I bought a bus ticket for a paltry 2.000 pesos (just over a pound, I think) for the fifty minute ride back to Santiago, and as a bus arrived just as I was buying the ticket, I didn’t need to wait at all. It was half six by the time I made it back to the flat in Las Condes, long before Tomás and his family returned from their Sunday outing to see his grandfather. I meant to sit down and write, but after I had put my clothes in for a much-needed spin in the laundry, I pretty much collapsed into bed. It’s funny what a morning out on the ocean will do.
My second week begins. I will try to see some English lessons this week – and, with any luck, get a bit more involved after a week observing the middle and senior teams.
I have also reached a decision as to what to do with my last week out here. But that, for now, must wait. Let it be a surprise. There is a lot more magic in that. BB x
Valparaíso is sometimes nicknamed the South American San Francisco. That has nothing to do with the cost of living and everything to do with the way it soars up skyward out of the Atacama Trench, carrying the city’s elite on its back. Some of the roads winding up the side of the cerro seem almost vertical. I get the feeling living here would give you the lungs of an Inca and the thighs of a Georgian wrestler.
It’s up here on the heights that you’ll find the house of Pablo Neruda, Casa Museo La Sebastiana.
Neruda sure knew how to pick a spot. His five-storey house, which sometimes feels more like a tower than a villa, commands one of the clearest views of the Bahía del Valparaíso. On a clear day, you can probably see for miles, but even a shroud of yellowing cloud, you could see as far as the forested hills of La Campana and the snowy heights of the Andes beyond.
Neruda had his writing room built right at the pinnacle of his Valparaíso home, so that he could draw inspiration from the beauty of the world around him, whipped eternally by the Pacific winds.
He also seems to have loved maps, especially the older ones. There’s an genuinely incredible French map of the Americas by one Monsieur le Dauphin which I absolutely must track down, as it predates the discovery of Australia, with strange, half-finished coastlines fading into nothing at the southwestern edge of the map under the title “Terra Australis Incognita”.
People seem to treat this street with profound respect. Even the graffiti is cultured.
As if in answer to my post last night, I was surprised to find the street on which Neruda’s house stands, Calle Ricardo de Ferrari, covered in verses that weren’t taken from the Chilean poet’s vast anthology, but from his Andalusian friend, Lorca. Beautifully painted into tiles from an alfarería in Granada, Lorca’s verse follows you all the way down the road, perhaps as an ode to Neruda’s efforts in saving so many Spaniards during the Civil War and bringing them here to Valparaíso, far from the tyrannous grip of Francisco Franco.
Lorca lost his life under the fascist regime. So did my great-grandfather Mateo and all of his circle of writers and poets. It’s probably no great leap of the imagination that they might even have been in contact with Andalusia’s greatest poet, since they were all writing around the same time… and all snuffed out around the same time, too. Perhaps that’s why I feel a special connection to Lorca – and why finding him here in the Southern Hemisphere is so comforting.
I didn’t buy any of his books – I can’t recall which ones I have at home – but Neruda’s magic was already at work on me. As I climbed up to the fifth floor of his house, my ears suddenly popped. My Eustachian tubes have been blocked for nearly a fortnight since that false landing in Natales, which has been a real annoyance. Flying for fourteen hours across the Atlantic and half of South America shortly before probably didn’t help, but either way, it’s been an ever-present bother since I arrived here.
But suddenly, just like that, the fuzziness in my ear wasn’t so bad anymore.
Ok, so it’s still there, but it is very definitely better than it was. I feel like I can hear properly again.
To prove that point, I stumbled upon a family of firecrowns on the way back down into the city. This time it felt like I could hear their piercing trill out of both ears. One even let me get close enough to make up for not having the lens on me (I left it behind as it weighs quite a bit, and you can’t take bags into Neruda’s pokey house).
I’ll miss the hummingbirds when I go, just like I said when I was in Peru. There aren’t as many varieties of them here as there were in the Inca capital, but the firecrowns are everywhere: particularly, wherever anybody has been kind enough to plant red hot poker flowers, which they adore.
It’s still pretty overcast out there. I think I might grab some Peruvian food for lunch, as there are quite a few places nearby, and I fancy a reminder of the delicious bowls of salty seafood I had in Paracas. If I am going to eat, it had better be sooner rather than later. The bay may look calm, but out on the open ocean it is likely to be less Pacific than it looks.
Fingers crossed for an albatross tomorrow! I’d settle for just the one! BB x
Santiago de Chile may be cursed to be a smog-bound citadel for the rest of its days, but in one particular sense, it is exceptionally well-placed: it is about an hour’s drive up into the mountains to the east for skiing during the winter months, while a hour and a half’s drive to the west will take you to the Pacific coast. Santiago’s summer sisters, Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, may only be a hundred kilometres out as the condor flies, but they are a world away from the Chilean capital. In some ways, they are decidedly European: winding streets with towering Parisian buildings, complete with tramlines and traffic lights. In others, they are absolutely Latin American: a fiercely compact cultural melting pot, with Peruvian outposts everywhere.
With my timetable still very much up to me (consisting entirely of lesson observations at the moment), I struck out early for Valparaíso today, very much in the mindset that the part of town where the bus station is – or so the books all tell me – is no place to be after dark. It took me about three hours to get here, all in all, so had I waited until I had got home, it would be around half past nine here – which is definitely pushing it, even by my standards.
So here we are, in Valparaíso, Chile’s second city. With a population of around 300,000, it’s a little larger than the hamlet of 47 in La Mancha for which it was named.
Let’s be real. I’ve come here for two things: sea lions and Pablo Neruda. I’ve been juggling my choice of poet for the Language A course for a while, between Neruda – arguably Latin America’s greatest poet – and Lorca, who I hold in especially high regard. In the end, it is Lorca who has won the day, if only because I have studied him so much over the years (and, no doubt, because I have skin in the game by being part Andalusian myself). All the same, it would be a crime not to include Neruda in the course, so I plan to use his poems to prepare my students for the unseen.
Neruda, for now, must wait. I’ll have time for that tomorrow, after the pelagic expedition. I arrived too soon to check in, so I turned my feet east and followed the coastline as far as the twin piers of Caleta Portales.
I didn’t have to go far to get my sea lion fix. The main pier of Muelle Barón may be out while the city pours time and money into what looks to be a seafront shopping mall in the making, but the real show is a few hundred metres to the east, where the skeletal ruins of an old gas company dock has become one of the favoured haul-out sites for the city’s sea lions.
Alongside the sea lions, the structure is the perch of choice for a surprising number of seabirds, given its safe distance from the shore but proximity to the fisheries. I picked out kelp gulls, Inca terns, a couple of turkey vultures, Peruvian boobies, three species of cormorant and, of course, the Peruvian pelicans that I was hoping to see again.
I thought there might be something loose in my rucksack, as I kept hearing some kind of fabric shuffling sound, but to my astonishment a man in dirty overalls clambered out from among the boulders, seemingly from some crevice beneath the very rocks upon which I had been sitting for the better part of half an hour. He acknowledged me with a gravelly “wenodía”, set down his tatty red baseball cap to mark where he had slept and then picked his way across the rocks, crouching every so often to inspect something between the crevasses of the sea wall.
Valparaíso is a lot poorer than Santiago’s uptown districts like Las Condes. That much is plain.
Moving east, I had my eyes trained on the water, on the off chance that a wandering penguin might show up. I did spot one, a fair distance from the shore, but something else entirely caught my attention – something entirely unexpected.
A marine otter.
Marine otters – known in Chile as chungungos or gatos marinos (sea cats) are not sea otters, like the fluffballs found from Baja California up along the North American coast, but they do live almost exclusively in the sea, rarely venturing into freshwater like other otters. Like sea otters, marine otters were once hunted for their pelts and are thus an endangered species, and quite a rare sight along South America’s Pacific coast. So I really wasn’t expecting to see one here, in the very heart of Valparaíso.
Apparently, marine otters are specialist feeders according to their location, with southern populations preferring fish and northern populations opting for shellfish. This must be one of the northern otters, because in the fifteen minutes or so I spent watching it before it disappeared, it must have caught and eaten at least four small lobsters.
That makes two species of rare otter I have managed to find this year: giant otters in the Amazon and marine otters in the Pacific. And I still haven’t tracked down the otters that live in the Tone, just a stone’s throw from my flat! I’m sure they’ll show up eventually. Maybe I should make that my mission, before the year is out: to see a third and final species of otter, preferably before Christmas!
Not to be outdone, the pelicans put in a good show, sailing in low over the water in that spectacular flight pattern of theirs. I have wanted to see pelicans do this since my mother told me about it after her trip to Peru back in 2015, when I wanted to be just about anywhere but Amman, and I have had the incredibly good fortune to see that sight several times this year.
It’s not the stuff Attenborough documentaries are made of, for sure, and the good people of Valparaíso must see it all the time, but it is something I will never tire of seeing.
Eventually, I reached the busy fishing port of Caleta Portales. I reached it at absolutely the right time of day, too: around noon, the fishermen throw their bycatch back into the sea, loading the scraps into repurposed shopping trolleys and dumping them over the pier into the water below. The local wildlife is well aware of this daily bounty – and, thanks to a quick Google, so was I.
If you needed a clue that the drop was imminent, you only needed to count the pelicans. They had gathered in numbers so great I struggled to put a number to them – and pelicans are not small birds by any measure. They seemed to be perched upon every surface they could find: the sea wall, car roofs, billboards, shipping crates, stalls, bridges, lampposts and on the concrete among the fishermen themselves. After seeing them at a distance in Paracas, they were now far too close for my lens!
One small perk of being here now in midwinter is that some of the adults have started to put on their smarter summer plumage, with a smart yellow tinge to their more defined white faces.
I was already aware of the immense dark shapes in the shadow of the pier, but the appearance of the fisherman with his trolley worked like a magnet, drawing the dark mass along after him, following the overpowering stench of fish – or the sudden vortex of feathers and screeching gulls that followed in his wake.
With the seafood sloshed overboard, the shoreline turned into a frenzy of activity. It didn’t take me long to pick out the bull among the sea lions massing around the shoreline: he completely dwarfed all the others, and that’s saying something.
Forget the roly-poly dumplings that you find off the coast of Britain. Sea lions are an entirely different beast. Adult males can reach a whopping three metres in length and weigh in at around 325kg. They’re also fiercely territorial, as was plain enough from the deep scars on some of the males, including the old bull.
At that size – and at this distance – they were simply too big to get on camera. The 300mm would have been useful here, I think, but it’s sitting on top of my chest of drawers back home in Somerset. As such, I had to make do with portraits of the beasts that had hauled out onto the rocks to wait their turn while the bull ate the sea lion’s share of the bycatch.
At this range, of course, you can make out a lot of detail. The thickness of their whiskers. The sharpness of their teeth. The minuscule ears at the back of their heads, and the scars on their torsos.
One male was so close you could see the whites of his eyes twice over. His eyes seemed to have misted over. He must be very old for a sea lion to have contracted such an infection. I wonder how old? They can live to be around twenty years old in the wild, I think, so this one can’t be far off that mark.
Arguably prettier than the titans hogging the spotlight was a small family of Inca terns, waiting patiently for their chance to swoop in and seize some of the scraps for themselves. This is another species I travelled all the way out to the Islas Ballestas to see, only to find them so close here in Valparaíso that they might have been eating out of my hand.
Here, at least, the lens really did put in the yards.
I hung around the port for well over an hour before deciding it was probably time to head on back to Valparaíso, have a decent lunch and check in to my hostel. The skipper advised against having a large supper ahead of tomorrow’s ocean voyage, so I made a mental note to have a decent lunch instead, and acquire some snacks for the journey home.
It’s not the most scenic route back to Valparaíso from Caleta Portales. In places, the city seems to be collapsing into the sea, and where there isn’t the salty tang of the sea, there is the sweet stench of sweat, marijuana and human faeces. There’s a lot of homelessness here. All the carriages of a derelict train seemed very much lived-in, with signs of recent occupation all over the place: a bouquet of flowers tied to the grille, a washing line strung out in the gloom behind a window, and a dog waiting patiently on the step of the driver’s car. It’s probably more homely than the crevasses among the boulders below the sea wall, though I imagine it’s not much warmer.
The city never seems to catch a break. The Spanish blew the city to pieces in 1866 during the Chincha Islands War. Forty years later, in 1906, Valparaíso was ripped apart by an extremely violent earthquake – a fairly common occurrence in this part of the world, with the city sitting squarely upon the Nazca plate boundary. Apparently, there was a small one just a few days ago off Quintero, where I am headed tomorrow. It’s quite something, seeing the tsunami warning signs all over the place.
The captain has just told me that the boat needs a service tomorrow morning, so we have rescheduled. Weather permitting, we are going ahead on Sunday. That should make my journey home a bit easier. Even so, it is likely to be my most out-of-pocket adventure yet.
Tomorrow, then, is wide open. A whole day to explore Valparaíso! I’ll make sure it starts with a good sleep and a decent breakfast. Those sea lions had a proper feast today – I might as well do the same. BB x
Aeropuerto Teniente Julio Gallardo, Puerto Natales. 15.42.
My mad jaunt down to Patagonia is coming to an end. It has been easily one of the most amazing wildlife experiences of my life, thanks in a large part to my excellent guide Fabián, but also to the exceptional quality of the encounters I have had with the local wildlife, much of it within Puerto Natales itself. It has left me with an insatiable hunger for more adventures of this kind and a fierce desire to see more places like this: there is a haunting beauty to the polar regions of the world that I have ignored for far too long.
I am already considering a new adventure for the last week of the Chilean exchange, but that, for now, must wait. I do have a job to do, after all.
Check-out from my cosy B&B was at ten this morning, so I made the most of having a warm bed right up to the last minute before setting out to find something to do to kill some time before my 16.45 flight back to Santiago.
Predictably, I found my feet marching me straight back to the shore. A great carpet of cloud kept most of Puerto Natales in the dark, but away to the south, the sky was a spectacularly wintry salmon pink. A few estancias and the hamlet of Dinibor are the only settlements between here and Antarctica, if you were to head in a straight line to the south – a privilege only the birds know.
The vast network of fjords that criss-cross the mountains between Puerto Natales and the coast were once home to the Kawésqar, a nomadic people naturally stunted by their lifestyle, which saw them travel the fjords in search of food in their boats. Like the other native Patagonians – among them the Aonikenk, the Yagan and the Selk’nam – they suffered terribly at the hands of the European settlers. Many died of exposure when they were forced to trade their water-repellent sealskin clothing for Western dress, which could not protect them from the cold and the damp.
Others were wiped out by foreign diseases or brought low by the new vices of alcohol and tobacco. A great many were systematically wiped out by foreign mercenaries in organised Indian hunts, paid for by the ranchers, in an attempt to stamp out any perceived opposition to their dominion over these territories. Most heinously of all, entire families were kidnapped and shipped off to North America and Europe where they were displayed as evidence of human evolution in human zoos. Setting aside the painful matter of their obvious humiliation and fear, very few ever made it home: there are several cases of gross ignorance on the part of their buyers who, once the tour was complete, shipped the survivors back to a completely different part of Patagonia, where they were seen as outsiders by both the European settlers and the other natives.
It is nothing less than the bleak and bloodthirsty story of humanity, but it loses nothing in the retelling. It would do us a lot of good to remember what we are capable of at our very worst, if only so that we can strive to rise above the darkest heart of our nature.
My fingers were freezing up after a long walk along the seafront, even beneath two layers of gloves, so I stopped for a hot chocolate and a sandwich in a friendly café. The waitress was really cute and the chocolate was superb. I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the pair of Australasian backpackers when one of the waiters engaged them in conversation. They were here for the skiing, by the sound of things, which seems an odd thing to come out here for. The waiter was telling them how expensive it is to import oat-milk way out here in Chilean Patagonia, but how marketable it is to the tourist trade (it was literally the first thing the taller of the two New Zealanders asked upon entering the café).
I wonder what the Kawésqar would make of wanderers like us and our bizarre motives: be it the girls who have traveled across the ocean to race down the mountains on a pair of skis, or the equally odd chap in the felt hat who has flown across three continents to see the puma, the ñandú and the great black seabird that races up and down the fjords. I suppose they would be every bit as baffled by us now as they were then.
As if to say goodbye, a handsome crested caracara came down to the beach to pick at the coscoroba carcass under the sea wall. These intelligent hawks are favourites at bird of prey centres in the UK, where they perform fly-overs to the oohs and ahhs of parents and children alike. Bird shows are all well and good, but it’s nothing short of wonderful to see them here in the wild, where they belong.
The flamingos were back in the spot they had been on the day I arrived. These Chilean flamingos – easily identifiable by the pink joints on their otherwise grey legs – are the kind I only saw at a great distance during my travels in the Peruvian altiplano, so it’s nice to appreciate their magnificence at such close quarters. They’re very popular with the locals, too, who were always stopping to photograph them or watch them for a while.
It’s hard to single out a special memory from this trip – it has been a series of miracles from start to finish – though I suspect the trophy does go to the pumas by default, as that’s what I came here for, and I did have some absolutely incredible encounters over the course of three days’ tracking. Timing my arrival with the first snow of winter was a master stroke of luck, I won’t deny that. It could just as easily have been a washout, as the rest of Chile has been experiencing torrential rain for most of the last week. You’d never know it here: beyond the intermittent cloud cover, it’s been sun, snow and crystal clear waters down here in Patagonia.
As always, thank you for joining me on another adventure. The Patagonian expedition may be at an end but this particular story is not finished yet, so stay tuned for more Chilean observations and adventures. Valparaiso is very definitely on my weekend list, and the placement itself should be something to write home about. Villafranca always was.
Until the next time, Patagonia – it has been a living dream, every minute of it. BB x
I had to improvise a bit today, after my original plan of jumping on a full-day tour of the Torres del Paine National Park and the Cueva del Milodón fell through. Fortunately, you don’t even have to leave Puerto Natales to enjoy some spectacular wildlife, even in the heart of winter. I was also lucky with the weather today, which was largely sunny for most of the day, making photography that much easier.
Many of Natales’ resident birds look deceptively like domesticated waterfowl, which could not be further from the truth. There are crested ducks absolutely everywhere, greatly outnumbering the smaller and daintier yellow-billed teals that are one of the few birds that remain wary of humans around here. The black-necked swans that live out in the fjord are probably the most iconic residents of Puerto Natales, but they were joined today by a few pairs of Coscoroba swans, a swan-like goose that can be found from the Antarctic waters of southern Chile all the way up to Brazil.
It’s clear who holds the reins of power, though. Not five minutes after the coscorobas came in to land, a pair of black-necked swans moved in, and one of them charged the coscorobas, putting them to flight. About the only bird I haven’t seen them attack yet are the tiny white-eared grebes – I wonder if that’s because they can’t see them?
Some of the birds here look familiar, even at a head-spinning distance of just over thirteen thousand kilometres from home. A small colony of house sparrows and feral pigeons have made the town their own, as they have in most towns and cities around the planet, and at first glance the oystercatchers look similar – but these are Magellanic oystercatchers, limited to the southern tip of South America. You can tell them apart by the yellow ring around their eyes. If other human species had survived, would we have been able to tell each other apart by similar signs?
There was one creature in particular that I was hoping to see – and I was not disappointed. After a half hour’s careful observation – having been almost certain I’d seen the silhouette I was looking for across the bay when I set out – I was very nearly scalped by an absolute giant that came soaring in from behind my post on the dock: a southern giant petrel, a genuine monster of the South Sea with a two-metre wingspan and a violent disposition.
The giant petrel will eat just about anything and has a reputation for bludgeoning and drowning birds much larger than itself, including penguins, gannets and albatrosses. It will even squabble with its kin over human waste left behind by passing ships. For this reason, it’s known as the vulture of the Southern ocean – which is probably why I was so keen to see one. Besides the simple fact that they really are incredibly impressive birds to behold.
A more friendly resident of Puerto Natales is the chimango caracara. You couldn’t miss these happy little hawks if you had even the least know-how about birds – they’re all over the place, perched on lampposts, drifting over the streets in the centre of town, wandering the dockyards in gangs of five or six and hopping along the beach in search of scraps. One of them had found the remains of a coscoroba and wasn’t about to share it with any one, flapping at any other caracaras that came its way.
The occasional passing clouds across the sun made for a tricky job adjusting the shutter speed on the new camera, but when the sun did come out, I could not have been happier with the results. It helps, of course, that so many of Patagonia’s animals aren’t that shy at all.
The old jetty is one of Puerto Natales’ most famous sights, and it hosts a large colony of Imperial cormorants in the winter months. Many of them had gone by mid-morning, seeking richer waters further down the fjord, but I must have counted nearly a hundred here the other night.
I went out for another walk after lunch, following the same circuit in the hope that the giant petrel would return. After about twenty minutes, it caught me by surprise once again, rushing so low over my head that I could hear the wind whistle in its giant wings. I hoped it might return the way it had come, but when it did not show itself again after about half an hour, I wandered back across town. I would have gone back to the hostal for a bit, but something made me press on to the other side, further south. That was where the petrel went, after all.
I didn’t quite make it as far as the fishing wharf, because there was a lovely view from the Edificio Cultural Costanera. I had only just packed away my camera when I found myself having to rush to get it back out again as a flamingo came in to land, right next to one just off the shore that I had not even noticed.
At such a close range, I could see just how heavily feathered the Chilean flamingo’s face is. It must be an adaptation to the cold, as these particular flamingos make their home here in Antarctic Chile and up in the frigid lakes of the Patagonian mountains. A far cry from the languid heat of Fuente de Piedra and Lake Turkana, for sure.
They were just the first. Soon, as the sun was beginning to set, a whole herd of flamingos came in to join them, their feathers glowing a blood-red scarlet in the evening light as they came down into the bay.
They made for quite a sight: a great herd of flamingos set against the backdrop of the snowy peaks of the Kawésqar Mountains. I certainly didn’t expect to see them again, having spotted earlier in the day that they had decamped to the other side of the bay since the day I arrived, and until recently, they had shown no signs of moving.
They were pretty quick to move, however, for one thing: a dark, powerful thing on two-metre wings, speeding towards them just above the surface of the water like a fighter plane. The petrel was back – and the mere sight of it put the fear of God into the flamingos. With much honking and splashing, they took off in a mad hurry, even when it was clear that the petrel was simply passing by.
What a spectacle they made as they flew up the fjord! It was like something out of a dream – and they kept turning this way and that, giving me every chance to snap them against the mighty mountains beyond.
It felt like the perfect ending to the trip, even though I have most of the day tomorrow as well, since my flight doesn’t leave until half four. But I come away with so many incredible memories, some of which I have written about and many of which I can print and put up on my wall. That’s how a good holiday should be, right? BB x
The weather is fickle. It’s still pretty cold out, but it’s warmed up enough not to need more than two layers on when leaving the house. The snow has largely melted away in Puerto Natales and the surrounding countryside, revealing for the first time the vast golden fields of Patagonia. It’s always a bit sad when snow melts, like coming to the end of a very special story, but if the forecast is to be believed, it will be back tonight.
I still can’t believe my ridiculous lucky streak in timing this adventure to coincide with the very first snowfall of winter – and all the magic that followed, right up until the last throw of my expedition today. Right up to the wire.
Fabián picked me up just after seven thirty as usual and we set out into the darkness. Beaming his thermal camera to his phone, we spent much of the twilight hour searching for life in the snow. It was eerily quiet this morning. A single caracara was our only find, shivering in the cold at the side of the road.
And not without reason: the temperature had dropped to a biting -10°C, worsened by the all consuming oblivion of a snowborn fog and an icy wind coming up off the lake. Even the lights of oncoming cars didn’t become visible until long after their engines were heard rumbling down the road.
We had quite a scare while looking for Escarcha and her cubs. The thermal camera picked up two glowing dots on the hillside not far from where we’d left them yesterday: one large, one small. One of the trackers went up into the fogbound hills to get a closer look and radioed in to confirm it was Escarcha and one cub. For a painful half hour, there was no sign of the second cub at all – until it came out from behind a rock where it had been hiding, much to everyone’s relief.
Winter may be beautiful, but it is terribly hard on the animals that live here – especially the young. Hopefully, Escarcha’s cubs make it through the winter so they can find territories of their own in this desolate idyll.
Escarcha took her cubs higher up into the gloom, which showed no signs of lifting anytime soon. Fabián suggested an alternative itinerary up at Laguna Azul, on the eastern edge of the national park, so we left the fog and set back out into the brilliant light.
Laguna Azul offers a tremendous view of the world famous spires of Torres del Paine across the surface of its crystal waters, though they were more often shrouded in cloud than not.
The towers themselves are every bit as breathtaking as you have heard. Unlike Petra (which I was arguably less exposed to before I saw it) the Torres del Paine lose nothing in reality, despite the fact you’ve probably seen them a thousand times over on the covers of photography magazines, NatGeo special editions and South American travel guides. Glowing red and white in the morning light, they might be the exposed teeth of some ancient titan, or the thrones of South America’s lord of the skies, the condor.
Fanciful imaginings on my part. Paine is a Tehuelche word meaning “blue”, in honour of the colour of the peaks in the grey morning, or the icy glaciers that lay at its feet.
Fabián’s mission was to find a tucúquere, a Magellanic horned owl, or the more well-known Patagonian speciality, a Magellanic woodpecker. But the forests around Laguna Azul were silent – completely silent. We found another chunchito (pygmy owl) watching us from the top of a dead tree, along with a couple of colourful rayaditos, but the snowy forest showed no other signs of life.
Perhaps they were all hiding from the creature that left these tracks in the woods: an enormous male puma, whose trail we followed for about an hour as it weaved through the woods, occasionally doubling back to investigate the older trails of a couple of younger female pumas.
Out on the lake, I finally tracked down a creature I missed in Peru. We have grebes in Europe, but the huala or great grebe – the largest of its kind in the world – is a truly magnificent bird, reaching the size of a cormorant. Curiously, as I descended to the lake’s shore to get a closer look, it actually came closer to the shoreline rather than diving and emerging much further away, as grebes are inclined to do.
Back in the car, Fabián checked in with his fellow trackers over the radio. Nobody, it seemed, had had any luck with pumas since Escarcha and her cubs went up into the hills. So we stopped for a snack lunch next to the thundering falls of the Cascada del Río Paine, where the meltwaters of the park’s mightiest river came hurtling down a series of cliffs amidst menacing curtains of sheet ice.
We picked a lucky spot. Two handsome condors sat up on the hilltop, sunning themselves in a posture that must have convinced the ancient Inca that the condor truly was a messenger (and worshipper) of the Sun.
The waterfall must be a reference point for the condors in their navigation, because no fewer than sixteen came flying right overhead on their way up the valley, some of them soaring so close you could hear the rush of wind in their enormous wings. They were mostly youngsters, yet to don the full black robes and smart white collars of their elders.
For me, that would have been the perfect ending to a wonderful three days: a close encounter with one of my favourite creatures in the world – again – but Patagonia was not done with us. Not yet.
The radio crackled to life as we were driving back to the south road: ‘La Petaca está en la carretera’. Fabián stepped on the gas, overtaking two trucks in the snow like a rally car and forking right back up the road to Lago Sarmiento.
The fog had finally cleared, having hung over the lake almost all day, and one of the trackers had located Petaca, the dominant female and the park’s most famous puma, following the scent trail of Escarcha and her cubs: her progeny. By the time we got there, she had slipped off the road and into the scrub, but we were still able to spot her without too much difficulty.
Not for the first time, I was disappointed with the behaviour of some of the tourists and their tracker, who came down from the road to move in as close to Petaca as possible. If she had wanted to come back up the hill, she was cut off constantly by this group that kept cutting ahead of her to get more and more photos of the big cat approaching head-on. Fabián was just as ticked off as I was (I really do appreciate a guide who puts the animal first, and not the client). Surprise surprise, the tracker was one of the ones we’d sparred with a few days prior, telling us to back off as they were there first. Go figure!
I believe that the key to magical wild encounters is patience, understanding and a healthy dose of luck. If that had been that, I would have been perfectly happy – we had already seen so much of the pumas over the last two days. I was ready to hit the road and maybe find some ñandúes on the way home.
And then Petaca reappeared.
With the shimmering waters of Lago Sarmiento behind her, she hardly cast a glance in our direction as she padded her way along the hillside toward the road, following Escarcha’s trail.
With no further obstructions to her path, she came right up to the road, mere metres away. At such a distance, you could really appreciate the power in those mighty paws. Here is an animal that didn’t struggle once in the snow like the fox and the geese from yesterday: she almost seemed to glide across the surface of the frozen hill.
I thought the fence between the road and the hill might prove a barrier, but not for this apex predator. In a single move she leapt nimbly up onto the wire and then launched herself onto the other side, just a few feet away.
Having cleared the road, Petaca climbed up into the hills toward the setting sun and disappeared among the frozen scrub. What an incredible encounter! And what a way to finish a superb three days’ tracking in Patagonia!
On the way back, we found the unnamed young male in the same spot he had been when we first saw him on Monday. It felt fitting that the last puma of the trip should also be the first. We might very nearly have witnessed a hunt, as a lone guanaco was headed right his way, until a passing truck spooked it into heading in a different direction.
The tour I had booked for tomorrow into the heart of the park itself and the Cueva del Milodón was sadly cancelled due to low numbers by the time I got back, so this will be my last time in Torres del Paine. Magical, then, that it should end with a view of the mountains at their most impressive, with ominous yellow and grey clouds rolling across its summit, turning the blue mountains of the Tehuelche all kinds of magical colours. Who could not lose their heart to such a sight?
I’ll take it easy tomorrow and explore Puerto Natales properly. There’s so much human history here that I could so easily overlook, and it will need more than a morning, I think. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 