Life On A Bare Mountain

Wednesday 7 February

What bliss – all the worries about the duvet were for nothing – we both had a good night’s sleep and woke only just before the alarm at 08.00! Breakfast was served at 09.00, a simple buffet with cereal, cold meats and cheeses, tomatoes, jams and honey, and Madeira cake. There were brown rolls on the table that were still warm from being freshly baked, and the aroma of coffee brewing emanated from the kitchen – even if I was drinking tea, it still smelt good. The round tables, seating a maximum of four, were laid on the patio, so we still wouldn’t be sitting with Steve and Anne, but another lady – with a German accent, and who spoke English very well - came and joined us. Colin spoke to Steve, and it transpired that Steve had been feeling unwell for a few days (a pain under his back ribs), but during the night the pain had increased and moved to the front of his body. He had decided to terminate his holiday (they were supposed to be riding today) and leave immediately after breakfast for La Serena, where they would attempt to change their air tickets and fly back to Canada today. A bit drastic action, but he wasn’t to be persuaded by Daniel or Manuela (who offered to take him to the local medical centre straightaway).

We chatted to the German lady – at least in her late 70’s – who explained that she was here with her son and two grandchildren (who lived in Chile) and had come here expecting to camp!!! She was dressed very smartly in beige fitted trousers and blouse, and a mustard cardigan – hardly camping gear. They had found the campsite attached to the Hacienda flooded – it must be near Noodie Island – and her son and his offspring had ventured down the valley and found another spot. She had decided to take refuge here – much more sedate than living in a tent. She would be leaving after lunch today – hoping that Daniel would take her to the nearest town to get a bus to Santiago – a journey of several hours! She was very interesting to talk to, having lived in Chile and England and visited lots of other countries, before setting down in a small village in Southern Germany.

By the time we had finished eating, Daniel was ready to transport us further up into the Pre-Andean mountains (nobody knows exactly what the difference is between the Pre Andes and proper Andes – but everyone hazards a guess that around 3,000 metres it becomes the real Andes. He drove us along the road we had come in on yesterday, through a couple of towns, before turning off on a narrow “dirt” track, up a steep hill. The path wound up and around the mountain sides, following gullies and dry river creeks. We stopped a couple of times to climb rocky outcrops to look at the stunning views. The mountains were not quite barren – just a few tall spiky cactus, some stunted bushes and itcha grass scattered over the lower levels of these rounded peaks. Daniel told us that there were mini earthquakes happening all the time in this area, but that the shock waves were so small, that most people didn’t feel them until they got to about 4 or 5 on the Richter scale.

We saw several farms in the valleys or perched on rocky outcrops, often with small green oases around the houses, where water is fed by a series of hosepipes, from a spring high up in the mountains, into a succession of pools to reach the houses and surrounding land. When cleared of rocks and watered, the land is extremely fertile and a wide variety of fruit, vegetables, trees and grain are grown. There were even small townships high up near the mountain tops, with a school (taking children from the age of 6 to 12, after which they have to go down to the valley boarding school), a church and (obligatory for every town or village) a football pitch – there is no grass, only hard brown earth, but the lines are deeply etched into the ground.

One of the main industries of this highland area is goats cheese. Most families would have a flock of goats, which during the summer months the farmer will take up to the higher land - over 3,000 metres. The children do not go to school from 1 December till 1 April so often they accompany their father for the summer months. The mother meanwhile, stays at home and cares for the farm, looking after the animals and tending the crops. The goats are milked and most farmers make their own cheese, which is collected regularly from pick up points by a van and taken to market. As the goats get old and the milk yield declines, the animals are slaughtered and the skins and meat are sold, the blood is used for fertilizer and the bones boiled for soup. The meat would be first dried for a day or so on barbed wire fences, then thinly sliced and dried again – they call it “jerky”, but I don’t know if it is similar to the Caribbean meat dish of the same name.

We visited a lady in her home – her husband was away looking after their goats (most families have around 200 goats) – and she had a young son (about 6 years old) playing in the yard with a plastic truck and a daughter in her late teens, sorting through some grain and removing the husks and other undesirable bits. In a stone hut, across from the kitchen, the lady was roasting the cleaned grains in an old black tin bucket over a roaring open fire. It was quite smoky, as she shook and stirred grains in the bucket, with a length of wood, to ensure they didn’t burn. It was a bit like cooking “popcorn”, the grains swelled and popped as she heated them. She then sifted them and they were ready to be milled into flour for bread and cakes, or cooked in soups or with vegetables to make a main meal. On another smaller fire (in a cast iron barbeque with a griddle on top) in the kitchen she was cooking a pot of porridge, using the grains, as well as boiling a creamy coloured kettle decorated in a floral pattern – like those from Marks and Spencer. In the yard was a large tree with fine thin fronds from which dangled strings of tiny red berries – these were red peppercorns, and although we have seen many of these trees here in the valley, apparently the Chileans do not use them in cooking. The tilled land around the house contained tall slender corn plants, tomato plants just coming into flower, melon and cucumbers, looking ripe for picking, plum, damson, apple, and apricot trees with burgeoning fruit, and vines running amock along some trellising. A large field had been planted with walnut trees, a commodity here that fetches a high price, but the saplings that had been delivered had been much smaller than expected, so they were even now, only about four feet tall – there would be no crop for the next couple of years at least. These families have no mod cons like washing machines but some do have a battery radio. The children won’t have seen a computer or a television. The toilet was up on the next hillside about 100 metres away from the house – a wooden frame covered with a plastic sheet around the sides and a piece of wood delicately balanced on top! – not good if you want to get up in the night.

We left the lady to continue with her chores, and carried on up to the top of the lower mountains, still in the Pre Andes. We could see the higher Andes peaks around us, and the flatter land at the end of the valley, leading to the ocean – where it was quite misty (due to the warm air of the Pacific passing over the colder waters of the offshore Humboldt current, and rolling inland as mist and fog). Daniel drove to the pinnacle of one of these moutains and explained that we were to walk down to the bottom, where he would meet us. It was a little daunting, walking over the edge, and down the side of the mountain, where there was no path, and we couldn’t see any sign of the road where Daniel had promised to meet us. The way down was very slippery – loose sandy dirt mixed with rocks of all shapes and sizes. We both slipped and skidded several times, but managed not to fall amongst the cactus and bushes growing all around. We saw “mother-in-law’s seat” a squat round cactus, looking like a stool, full of thorns, with white thistle-shaped fluffy flowers in a ring around the top. It would not be at all comfortable to sit on. Many tiny delicate flowers – some looking very dried and pale, and others white or lemon in colour – were struggling for existence in the shale. There were several varieties of very small grasshoppers, less than 1 cm long – some jumping as much as four or five feet, from stone to stone. We continued our way down the slope and along the ridge of another hill where, at last, we could see Daniel and the vehicle below us – which meant more slipping and sliding to reach the road.

Clambering into the car, we heard it was lunch time – neither of us felt very hungry yet after such a late breakfast, but we would just have to do our best – and we would be stopping in the shade of a very old tree. As we rounded another mountain there was only one large tree in the valley. Up close, the tree was obviously extremely old – the bark was all splintering off the branches and hanging down in dried brown raffia strips, and the trunk was made up of gnarled knots of wood in fascinating patterns. The tree definitely looked as if it had no life left in it, but looking up, the branches had twigs of small yew leaves, dark green and pointy – nothing decaying about them. We saw a couple of birds fluttering in the nearby bushes, and several yellow butterflies flittering around, but most of the wildlife here (and there’s not a great deal apparently) comes out in the cool of the night – foxes, owls, rats, snakes, rabbits etc. We were treated to more brown rolls, with salami, goats cheese and avocado, nectarines, cereal bars and water. We would need another siesta to digest all this food. But now it was time to return to the hotel.

The track plummeted down the hillside in a chain of looping bends, the track only just wide enough for the vehicle in places, with a sheer drop down to the valley floor. Daniel has obviously driven this route many times, and just nonchalantly turned the wheel through the 180 degree turns, first one direction and then the other. I could see Colin wasn’t looking out of the side windows! We eventually arrived back at the “main road”, a few kilometres along from where we had turned off this morning.

Back at the hotel, Manuela was there to greet us, together with the German lady and her son and grandchildren. Having been introduced all round, we made our way back to our room – Colin to lie in the hammock on the verandah and listen to his book and me to blog on the seat beside him, whilst the heat of the afternoon passed. The time passed quickly and by the time we looked at the clock it was time to change for dinner.

Our evening meal was a lonely affair tonight, as, of course, Steve and his family had left this morning. In the dining room there are a couple of black and white photos of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, some wanted posters and a letter to Daniel Gibbons of the Pinkerton Detective Agency who followed these two outlaws and the rest of their band, throughout South America. We’re not sure yet why they are here. Manuela came in and pointed out the saddle on display, explaining the differences between a Chilean saddle – made for comfort on long mountain rides, with lots of sheepskins and blankets under the leather seat – and the British version – made for show jumping and equestrian events. When she left the room, Colin attempted to sit on the saddle, but didn’t seem to think that it was very comfortable for him!

The soup tonight was mixed fresh vegetables, followed by rolls of thinly sliced beef, stuffed with onions and bacon (do they call these ‘beef olives’?) in a mushroom sauce, with duchesse potato balls. Dessert was slices of that water melon that Daniel had packed so carefully in the back of his vehicle when he collected us. We finished our carafe of wine started last night as well as water, and later tea. After the meal we puzzled for a while until it got dark soon after 21.30, when we ventured out to look at the stars again. It was amazing, the sky was full of stars, some bright, some mere pinpricks many light years away, others gathered closely together like the Milky Way. Colin checked his star programme on the computer, but still couldn’t identify more than Orion’s Belt. Manuela had earlier told us that the Southern Cross would rise behind the dining room and their house, but this area of the sky was almost clear when we were looking.

I went back to the room, and left Colin with his binoculars staring heavenwards. He returned about twenty minutes later, very excited – he had just seen a shooting star – something he had only seen once before – going from the myriad of stars almost vertically above us, to far distance over the dining room. He went back and star gazed for a while longer, but there was still no sign of the Southern Cross rising.

The countryside here is so peaceful and fascinating, and to us, the lifestyle is languid, it seems idyllic. But in reality, life for everyone in this region is very hard – a lot of work for very little gain - and almost alien to us city dwellers. Tomorrow we are riding up through the mountains again, and will probably see more of the existence of these hillside peoples.