Sunday 1 March 2015

Day 12 - 237 KMs, Lago Los Torres, Chile (06:15) to Puerto Piedra (Abandoned lakeside campsite, AKA future Hippie town), Chile (08:35)

Hippie Day Galore!

This day started out early.  I got up around 6:15am.  For some reason, I could not sleep. Anyway, I got busy organising my photos on my cel phone since I had not done so since before the Antarctica.    This took a long time – far more than I ever thought it would take.   After doing this, I had a quickie breakfast of 2 granola bars and finished my bottle of orange juice.



For a change, I was not disappointed with the weather. As the night came last night, the clouds rolled in and it looked like the sunny hot weather finally broke with a low front coming in. Yeah!  This means the day would not be very or the roads would be reasonable NOT dusty!   Happy happy!


The shitty hot gravel roads begins!!   
I got on the road on a record early time.  I was rolling @ 8am!  Yes 8am!  After about cruising rather quiet sealed roads, I finally hit cruddy gravel roads at 40kms.   However the hard thing to understand for me was that I had to drive the next 100kms on shit roads like this today.       For the bulk of this day I would be stopping and going for real-time road blasting.  At 69kms on the shit road of destruction, I has to stop for about 20 minutes.  


Around the corner I can hear dynamite blasts- yes BLASTS!

The flag girl with the radio was cute, she was actually flirting with me, but I kept saying , “no intiendo Espanol” which means “I don’t understand Spanish”.  Poor girl was stuck working in the middle of Northwest Bumblef*ck with no one to talk to.  Anyway, after taking a quickie 20 minute light nap, she knocked on my window to advise me to move on.  I was happy to do so!


Visionary bicyclists riding through Patagonia
More blasting and road blocks. Check out the survival-
style SUV in front of my van. 

After 60 kms more and, YES still on crap roads, I picked up a hitchhiker Homero.   He did not speak any English really except for a few words here and there.  He was a nice guy though.     About 10 minutes later, I ended up picking up ANOTHER hitchhiker!!  Yes another one!  Her name was Anita, she was a lightly packed German traveller who was just wanted a ride to the next national park.     She was cute and I think Homero took a liking to her.  Poor guy, he really liked her I could tell.. I could be wrong, but that’s what I took of it.  Anyway, we drove by like 3 sets of more hitchers but I had no room.

Myself, Anita (German hitcher) and Homero (Spanish hitcher)

We stopped in a small town called La Junta for petrol and a break.    We were tired of the roads with blasting, diggers and the messes that go with it.  We walked down to a nice lake near the petrol station.   We took some pic with eachother.    After that, we hit the dusty road again and Anita only stayed in the van for like 20 more minutes or so and go out at a trail to go hiking.      I dropped off Anita and then another hitcher appeared soon.  This was a guy named, Diego.  He spoke Spanish and English.   So he sat in the back of the van.    We stopped in a small town and got a bite to eat.  We all got “papas” – aka fries!  Not very healthy, but it tasted better than camping food.  ;-)   

In this little town, we also met some really cool motorcyclists; it was a couple riding on a 650cc dual sport motorbike.  Their names were Laurent and Delphine and they are originally from France.  What the check really impressed me about this couple was that they were riding double on the 650cc bike and she was the driver.  So I started to ask him some questions about their trip.  Their motorbike was that she smaller than mine which was sitting at home in New Zealand of course.  Well one has the same engine size but it's a bigger bike; I have a BMW F650GS.  I was really impressed because they weren't carrying much extra gear because they didn't have the space.  That were not carry extra jerrycan for fuel either.  I am are them for what they were doing and I hope they made it safely to where there are going.  Here's a picture of them:


Laurent and Delphine: Adventure riders from France

We kept going right and did not go to Lake Jelcho.   I told the guys that I was getting tired and the next campspot I was stopping for the day.  They were cool with that.   Within 30 kms of saying that a lake appeared on the left.  Then soon enough there was a turn off for what looked like a nice place. It was called, Puerto Piedra (Lake Piedra).   So I backed up, and went in.  This is when the strange spooky ‘twilight zone’ theme came to be in my mind.  The house outside the campsite had 8 or so people (like a large family) outside.  We pulled in and one of the hitchers asked them about camping here.  They said in Espanol that it was abandoned and go ahead and camp if you want to.    He (Homero) asked why it was abandoned, and they refused to tell him why!????  Eh? WTF?  Hummm very odd indeed.

We drove onto the campgrounds, and there were heaps of nice designed cabins that looked like they’ve been abandoned for at least 2 years.  There was a family of like 7 cows just roaming around eating grass and trees.  We had to be careful of stepping on cow dung… it was everywhere.. LOL!

We initially got a nice campfire going in an “outside” chimney.  It’s a chimney outside of one of the cabins.   There was even wood there just waiting for us to use it.   Score!!!   There was a lake just about 10m behind my van and a small old dock to fish off of.  Wow!   I counted about 4 cabins and 2 sets of bathrooms.  There were 2 main buildings near the entrance of the ‘hippie compound’.       Diego tried his luck at fishing, but to no avail. He had a few bites , but no takers.  


Our campsite - an abandoned cabin-style campground with wild cows. Holy hippie, I am in heaven!  8-)
As diego was fishing, I started to cook my dinner (yes the same old pasta, tuna and sauce).  Boring, but it fills the belly.  :-P           As I just finished my dinner, another person appeared walking the grassy road towards us. He has a backpack and looked tired.  He was a German backpacker named Lukas.  He asked about camping, and we invited him to join us.  He was headed South and as we were headed North , but it’s all good.      Lukas speaks some English, good Spanish and German of course.    He was hungry and the other guys offered them part of their dinner using my spare plate.   Nice indeed.  



Homero, the hippie, jumping into a cold ass 
mountain lake!


Diego playing hackie sack near wild cows

Also, Diego and Homero found some old ratty mattresses and had the crazy idea of camping outside under the sky. However I mentioned it might rain.  At the last minute, all 3 guys realised that the weather was not good for ‘under the stars’ camping  so they setup their tents.  Diego was going to house Homer for the night in his 2 person tent, and Lukas had a 2 person “beach” tent.  He had no real rain fly though.  He was in deep shit I am thinking.  He pulled out a black 10x1m long black tarp like thing.  I took a photo of this as he was trying to get it to work.  Funny as hell, but I give him credit for trying this.     I helped out Lukas by loaning him a spare tent peg and a light rope.  It seems to help some.


Lukas using a tarp 4x the size of his tent for camping. :)

As it got dark, the guys tried fishing again, no luck.  We went up to the van and the campfire.  Lukas went to bed first.  I was hanging out taking to Diego and then some cows came out of the dark and scared the crap out of us.  We shooed them away by tossed a stick at them.  They never got hurt of course.  By now it was dark as it would get for night time, with wind and spitty light rain.


Diego and Homero night fishing 

I headed into the van and wished the guys a dry nice night. Hasta Manana!  They stayed out for a wee while longer I think. I did some writing in my paper blog as well as did my MS Word blog entry for my experiences on 28/2.     I will be crossing into Argentina tomorrow, but when I don’t know.

I like this place, this has a lot of potential to be a world famous hippie village in Chile.  It’s free, and earlier Homero even found a gym bag left by someone on Colorado (the name tag was on it still) in the main camp building that had a small bag of marijuana seeds in it.  Makes you wonder what was happening here and what could happen here. Eh?   In case you want to know where exactly this place is, it’s here:


-43:26:28.5864 Latitude, -72:9:22.5612 Longitude

Off to bed zzz lights out at 11pm.  Ciao!





Daily Summary:

Today was an awesome day what can I say!  Rough gravel roads, lots of cool hitchhikers, and great scenery.  What more can I ask for?  Oh wait, I can ask for an abandoned campsite with cabins with wild cows around.  Not only was the campsite totally hippie, but it was also free.   For anybody who knows anybody who's traveling through or will be traveling through Patagonia, take note of the GPS coordinates from my blog above.  Please pass the word out for this free hippie campsite.  Tell everybody you know about it.  I'll love to come back here in five years to find out to be a small hippie community that is of a permanent nature.  My philosophy is simple if someone's going to abandon such a place after putting such hard work into it, we make some use out of it and turn it into a hippie camp where friendly travellers can stay/camp.  After all travellers who go through here aren't rich and they need a place to stay.  You got a lake there for fishing, and plenty of ground put up tents.  As for the cabins well I don't know how safe they are, but they sure will stop you from getting wet from a downpour.   Right ?  :-)


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