Island of Myth and Legend

Having completed a major stretch of the scenic Carretera Austral we were given to understand that we should leave it before Villa Santa Lucia due to the road being blocked there by a landslide.  We were informed that we would be required to drive to the small fishing village of Raul Marin Balmaceda where we could catch a ferry north to Chaiten, thus circumnavigating the road block, or possibly direct to the island of Chiloe, our next destination.

Booking a ferry was not made particularly easy.  We tried to make a booking at Puyuhuapi with the assistance of Andrea, the delightful lady at the shop where we had hired the kayaks.  She phoned the ferry company on our behalf only to be told that they would only take bookings by email which we duly did but then got no response.

We set off from Puyuhuapi anyway on Monday 26^th February and drove 70 kilometres north to La Junta, the turn off from the Carretera Austral.  We stopped briefly for lunch and a further attempt to book the ferry, but the Tourist Information was closed and there was no ferry booking office.

We set off again, this time along a rather bouncy dirt road but through beautiful countryside with lakes, rivers and mountains covered in snow at the tops, and then the road stopped beside a wide river about 500 metres across.  There was a ferry on the other side of the river and we weren’t sure whether it would come over to our side, but it did, and it took us across for free.

After a little bit more bouncing around on the winding dirt road we arrived at the tiny settlement known as Raul Marin Balmaceda, and we ultimately got to the ferry booking office which by a great stroke of fortune was also the shop, the hotel and the restaurant.  All this was ministered by an extremely fat and jolly woman who was unfailingly helpful.

We started to understand why we hadn’t been able to book the ferry when said jolly lady informed us that she was far too busy running the shop/hotel/restaurant to answer emails!

Track through pampas grass, Raul Marin Balmaceda

Our preference would have been to catch a ferry direct to Chiloe but we were told there are only two sailings a week and they were fully booked for some time ahead so we settled for the seven hour ferry trip north to Chaiten, from where we would catch another four hour ferry to Chiloe.

We got on the ferry for Chaiten at seven o’clock on Tuesday morning.  This was a free ferry and it looked it, it was a real rust bucket with rust coming through all over the place.   The access ramp was interesting, high in the middle and low on either side and there was quite a turn to get onto the boat at the bottom.  There were no guard rails whatsoever and if you were unwary you could finish up in the bay, but we didn’t.  In fact, health and safety didn’t really seem to apply at all.  Far from the car deck being inaccessible whilst the vessel was at sea we were able to come and go as we pleased and many of the vehicles had occupants fast asleep inside them!

Rust bucket

The boat trip turned out to be an unexpected delight.  It was a beautiful day, the sun shone and illuminated the ice fields on the far off mountains and, whilst we were still in the shelter of the bay, the occasional penguin popped up and then disappeared again.

Early morning light on the ferry to Chaiten

Distant view of snow capped Andes

Morning mist off west coast of Chile

Sue with El Capitan of rust bucket

Salt marsh at Chaiten with view of distant mountain

Lunch stop at national park near Chaiten

We spent Tuesday night and Wednesday in Chaiten and then at one am on Thursday 1^st March we departed on the ferry for Chiloe.  It was a calm, unremarkable trip, we had comfortable reclining seats and managed to get a bit of sleep.  The ship docked in the port of Quellon at five am and then we drove for an hour or so in the dark to the densely forested Parque Tantauco, a private nature reserve in the south of the island.  When we reached the park ranger station we parked up and had a bit of a nap for a couple of hours until it was daylight. 

Late night ferry from Chaiten

The park ranger greeted us enthusiastically and was very articulate about all the delights on offer in the park. This was entirely in Spanish which was a bit of a waste on Alan, but Sue and the ranger chatted and we soon understood what we could do and where we could camp.

Following the ranger’s recommendation we went for a walk down by the side of the Rio Yaldad through what seemed like an enchanted forest.  This forest is a temperate rainforest but it is so lush and full of fecundity that you felt that if you stood still for half an hour or so you would take root and leaves would start sprouting from your head.

The trails were impeccably laid out and as we walked the ground underfoot was springy with leaf litter and wood detritus, the trees were clad in mosses, in fungi and in various parasitic plants, some of which had beautiful flowers on them.  Some of the trees were clad in ferns and in some cases the entire tree trunk was six inches deep in moss and ferns way up as far as you could see into the canopy of the forest. 

Local flora

Within the forest there were a number of birds including the redoubtable Chucao.  This is a small bird with a loud voice, with a tail like a wren but the salient feature is that it cannot fly or maybe, like Tigger, it can but it doesn’t want to.  The wings are short and stubby and it appears able to use them to help propel its body from roost to roost and across pieces of open ground but certainly it doesn’t fly. 

Chucao in the enchanted forest

Unidentified bird

It took us about three hours to walk from the ranger’s station to the end of the trail and just over an hour to walk back along the main track. On the way back we happened across a bunch of Chilote foxes.  They looked like half-grown cubs and were almost completely unafraid but they had all the foxy attributes and we found them rather cute until we got back to the ranger station and sat down to have a sandwich.  Then the little buggers came along and not only did they try and scam a meal but one of them bit Alan’s foot and another one jumped up and had a go at the crisps that Sue was nursing at the time.  Not so cute after all!

Chilote fox

After lunch we set off for the campsite, about an hour’s drive along bouncy dirt road through the forest.  The following day we walked a couple more of the well laid out trails and took a double kayak out on the nearby lake. However, we found the lake to be pretty sterile with very little on it apart from a few ducks.

Snug as a bug in a rug at the campsite

On Saturday 3^rd March we left Tantauco park and drove about 70 kilometres north to Castro, a lively town which is situated at the head of a fjord on the east side of Chiloe.  We found a very nice cabana right next to the fjord a few kilometres south of the town and, having discovered that it made a very good base from which to explore the eastern side of the island, we stayed for six days.

Castro is quite a gritty place, somewhat rough around the edges (a bit like Barnsley according to Alan), it’s busy, there are lots of people milling around and there is a great sense of the buzz of humanity.

Wooden church, Castro

Inside the church at Castro

One of the most charming features of Castro are its traditional ‘palafitos’, brightly coloured shingled fishermen’s houses on stilts perched precariously above the water.  The idea was that you could moor your boat at your back door and walk out onto the street through the front one.

Fishermen's houses, Castro

Fishermen's houses

Fishermen's houses and black neck swans

Fishermen's houses

Hudsonian Godwits - on shoreline next to our cabana

Besides Castro, we spent our time exploring the small villages and hamlets along the coastline.  Usually this involved leaving the main road and following a steep winding road down to the seashore.  Sometimes there were a few houses with one or two people gathering and drying kelp, and sometimes there was nothing but a shingly beach.  The beaches were very peaceful and appeared at first sight to be deserted but were in fact full of bird life and we much enjoyed them.

Pigs enjoying mussels on the shoreline

Birdspotting

Whimbrel

Chimanga Caracara enjoying mussels

Kelp harvester in happy mood

Herding cattle on Chiloe seashore

Wooden church, Chiloe

Seashore, Chiloe

Distant view of Andes from Chiloe

Wooden church, Chuchao

We also visited Isla Lemuy and Isla Quinchao, two of the smaller islands of the Chiloe archipelago, both easily reached in ten minutes on a car ferry.

Lemuy is a lovely little island, dotted with rural settlements, and it has the distinction of having three out of Chiloe’s sixteen UNESCO churches.  These are very large wooden churches, the outsides of which are generally very bare apart from a bell tower and an open fronted portico.  A couple of them were propped up on one side and not in very good condition but they were interesting and we were pleased to have seen them.

UNESCO World Heritage Church

UNESCO World Heritage Church

Mourners shelter in graveyard

Close up - local building technique

Quinchao was also interesting, the first village had a pretty plaza and many of its houses were made of traditional wooden architecture with wood shingle walls. It had a market selling artisan woollies which looked like the sort of thing that you might send off to a refugee camp and certainly they were a bit shapeless, so we didn’t buy any.

In Achao, the second fishing village, we went into the market and an old crone gave Alan a very spikey fruit which had bits that you pulled out of the middle, a bit like a globe artichoke, and then you sucked the white ends of it and spat out the black seeds.  We have no idea what it was but it least it wasn’t poisonous!

The old man, not quite sure about the spikey fruit

Mussel necklaces

Wooden Church, Isla Quinchao

We need to say a little about the unique folklore and mythology in Chiloe where there is still apparently a widespread belief in witches, particularly in the remote rural areas. Here are a few examples of the supernatural beings which inhabit the archipelago:

Brujo is the generic term for a witch. There are only male witches and their legendary cave is rumoured to be near the village of Quicavi.  To become a witch you have to assassinate a loved one and make a purse out of their skin.

Caleuche is a ghostly ship that glows in the fog, travels at great speed both above and below the water and carries witches to their next stop.  It’s crewed by shipwrecked sailors and fishermen who have perished at sea.

Invunche was stolen at birth by witches and raised on the flesh of the dead and transformed into a deformed monster with one crooked leg behind his back.  He is the one that guards the entrance to the witches’ cave. We doubt that he is much good in hot pursuit, though!

Pincoya is a fertility goddess of extraordinary beauty.  She is the one that is responsible for the abundance or scarcity of fish in the sea.  She dances half naked draped in kelp on the beaches.  If you see her facing the sea the village will get lots of fish, if she is looking towards the land there will be a shortage.

Trauco is a deformed and ugly troll who lives in the forest.  He carries a stone axe and his breath makes him irresistible to women and therefore he gets blamed for all the unexplained pregnancies on the island. (And if you believe that…….).

In spite of keeping our eyes peeled we never came across any witches or trolls but representations of these mythological creatures were evident all around us in Castro. There were statues, souvenirs in the artisan markets, ugly creatures painted on shop hoardings and a few of the locals came close.

Statue of Pincoya in Castro square

We left Castro on Friday 10^th March and headed across to the west coast which was not very far as Chiloe is a long narrow island. The sea here is, of course, the Pacific but it was anything but pacific.  Big wide crashing combers came in like waves of an army, much the same as we experienced on the Mexican coast nearly two years ago.

Pacific combers - on the path to Bridge to Nowhere

Our first destination was ‘The Bridge to Nowhere’ out on a remote headland.  Legend has it that this part of the island acts as a bridge between this world and the next with the souls of the dead calling out to the boatman to ferry them across.  An enterprising landowner has built a symbolic Muelle de las Amas (pier of souls) on the headland that ends halfway to illustrate the legend.

Getting to the Bridge to Nowhere involved driving along a bouncy corrugated road for several kilometres and then a 45 minute wind whipped walk over the hills and along the wave battered cliffs to the headland.  When we got there we discovered that about 100 other people also had it in mind to visit this beautiful place at the same time so it was not quite as isolated as we were expecting!

Sue on the Bridge to Nowhere

From here we made our way to the Chiloe National Park, another vast area of protected forest and we spent a happy couple of days walking the trails through the forest and also the nearby sand dunes and beach.

Campsite in Chiloe National Park

Chimango Caracara, national park

Dinner time for slender billed parakeet

Chiloe is renowned for it’s terrible weather and we experienced the sort of rain that we were told to expect whilst we were camping in the park.  On our second day it hammered it down from about 4.30 pm until the following morning. We retreated into the cockpit of Lucy where we got the heater going, sank a few glasses of wine and ate our supper in relative comfort.

Our last couple of days on Chiloe were spent in the northern town of Ancud where it continued to rain for most of the time. This time we had a nice cosy cabana with a lovely wood burning stove. In between the rain storms we managed a boat trip out to a penguin colony and also to an area of wetland. This was created in 1960 when a tsunami caused by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded (9.5 on the Richter scale) flooded a section of coastal forest. The wetland is said to be a haven for birds but apart from a kingfisher, a solitary heron and a few cormorants we drew a blank. And to add insult to injury it hammered it down.

Wide sandy beach with river estuary, near Ancud

Penguin colony near Ancud

Penguin colony

Penguin colony

Rock cormorants at the Penguin colony

Male Collared Kingfisher, Chepu Valley wetland

We have been lost in admiration at the Health and Safety provisions which have come to our notice in Chile. All right, so the loading ramps at the ferry ports have no guard rails and execute perilous right angled turns half way down. We know that the various cabanas are completely lacking Co2 alarms and fire alarms, but no one can accuse them of not clearly marking the way out through the open door of the garage!

Ruta de Evacuacion!

This morning, Wednesday 14^th March, we got on another ferry and left Chiloe to join the mainland once more.  And so we continue onto the next chapter.