The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  The mountains of Montenegro are as bare and rocky as those of Croatia with stands of Italian cypress punctuating the skyline like groups of guardsmen called to attention. Along the roadside there was an impression of colourful plastic, sacks of potatoes, lines of laundry and strange architecture – usually in concrete. But there was elegance and style too from earlier times and at Perast, a small village at the head of a saltwater inlet, buildings lining the waterfront were of ashlared stone, of classical proportion and idiom, finely detailed but sadly much neglected. In the handsome Bujovic Palace (six windows square), Peter the Great sent his admirals to learn their craft. The sun reflected peace and serenity off the 18th century walls and although our lunch of smoked ham, pale pimentos, glowing tomatoes and an omelette as bright as saffron was not as refined as the buildings, the silhouette of an island monastery, the smell of the casurina pines, the blessed absence of tourists and the attention of two puppies all accounted for a perfect stopover. We were served by a girl as thin as a broomstick who sat on her boyfriend’s lap in between attending to orders from ourselves and those of a large and corpulent policeman (who did not appear to pay a bill). Later, driving through towns, there seemed to be many broad and burly men in sinister black leather jackets, but perhaps leather is in this year, or I have seen too many cold war films.

  Kotor, another historical and architectural jewel, was also deserted. Within the walled town we wandered along narrow streets paved in multicoloured polished stone. In alleys, balconies reached across from either side – what fun lovers must have had, but it was impossible to appreciate the finely detailed façades from an oblique view. Venetian lions, sometimes raised, sometimes in relief, an Austrian prison, churches with domes and foreshortened naves (sometimes with a campanile) and elaborate stone dressings around windows and doors all told tales of different foreign occupations. As we left, the latest insurgents stepped ashore from the Hebridean Spirit (registered in Glasgow) crisply laundered and straw hatted, but these were culture seekers from Virginia Water and Cheltenham and the city gates opened wide. Driving back in the dusk, the Montenegran border policeman took time to finish his internet game of patience and stretched our own patience accordingly, but sensible travellers do not argue with border guards.

  On another day, driving north (with our headlights on in the bright sunshine as Croatian law requires), the fastigiate cypresses mysteriously disappeared and gave way to scrub oaks and sage. There was no sign here of the goats and sheep with floppy ears which thrive on this type of land elsewhere around the Mediterranean. All along the Dalmatian coast great, grey mountains of pockmarked stone rising to 1,280 ft (4,200m) form a forbidding fortress for those who might wish to push inland. Sometimes the rock was striated from cataclysmic upheavals; the last earthquake in 1989 caused serious structural damage and that of 1,330 killed half the population. Tito’s partisan guerrillas could have held out forever in such a landscape.

  At Trsteno we stopped by the two champion plane trees of the world, a pair of Platanus orientalis believed to be over 500 years old. Beside their massive trunks two local women had set out their stalls of dried figs, burnished pomegranates and goat cheese that sat in a puddle of grass green olive oil. Their faces were so lined and fissured and their backs so bent that it seemed they might have planted these venerable trees themselves.

  Many place names along our route were single syllabled. Split, Hum, Bol and Ston are easy enough but asking the way to Sbr, Crmp or Drn required an unfriendly grimace or pen and paper. At midday, via Grg, we reached the end of the Peljesac Peninsular which stretches a bony finger into the Adriatic where the sea turns aquamarine over the shallow shingle. Small children squealed when a ripple caught them unawares; little open fishing boats whose chipped paint showed many years of service bobbed at the end of mussel encrusted ropes. The branches of broad-headed pines leant out so far to the west that their cones touched the water and solid but stylish bougainvillea-clad villas of retired 18th century sea captains sat comfortably along the shore. In the shade of a trellised vine turning seasonally crimson, we lunched on bass which had left the sea a few hours earlier, fresh apricots and a tangy cheese. A shaggy, grey-muzzled dog whose eyes showed wisdom and whose manner affection, rested his chin on our table simultaneously welcoming and expectant. The outlines of the islands became blurred in shades of violet and orange before sharpening to silhouettes, I scratched an ear of our four-legged friend, turned our little car south and we headed for home.

  Chile

  November 2005

  Once the travel bug bites there is no antidote and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life’ – Michael Palin

  The traveller to Patagonia needs to be properly equipped – or so I thought from my Oxfordshire armchair – and so I visited Rohans in Covent Garden, a shop that is experienced in fitting out adventurers. A young man was courteous and helpful.

  “Trousers? Certainly, sir. Will you be bivouacking at high altitude?”

  Heavens, no.

  “Any icework?”

  I prayed not.

  “You’ll be trekking, of course?”

  “Oh, yes.” Hours I hoped, not days.

  After further interrogation it seemed clear that I had disappointed him.

  “Perhaps our recreational department might be more suitable?” and he directed me to Leisurewear downstairs.

  First stop was Argentina.

  Buenos Aires is the most cosmopolitan of all South American cities – ‘Italians who speak Spanish and think they are British. Its history is written in its telephone book – Romanov, Radziwill, Rommel, Rothschild and that is only the Rs.’ as Bruce Chatwin put it. Exile, delusion and anxiety behind lace curtains. The Buenos Aires Herald (‘a world of information in a few words’, so few in fact that it only just made eight tabloid pages) advertised the Annual Canasta Tea at the British Embassy and English practice at The Highland Heritage Society. My hotel, The Claridge, had bellboys with white gloves, a muscular security guard with a revolver in a holster whose strap was unclipped and an English Bar. Recoleta, a favoured residential address of the ’20s and ’30s, had been hijacked by tourists and exploited by antique dealers. Some sold bric-a-brac and others genuine quality but both gave a social insight into a better and more pretentious age with French furniture, marble statues by the score, hats, parasols, tailcoats and extravagant bits of brass plumbing. I walked there by way of the Avenues Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru and Chile. I had only been here a few hours and had already crossed the continent. I was about to hail a taxi – “Claridges, por favor” when I collided with a lamp post that cut my forehead requiring a handful of tissues from a restaurant, a bowed head past reception and a dose of aspirins.

  The route plan of Aero Argentinas’ in-flight magazine still laid Argentinian claim not only to ‘Islas Malvinas’ but also South Georgia and The South Sandwich Islands. The TV national weather forecast included them too. Flying south across the billiard table plateau of Buenos Aires province, square boundaries drawn by eucalyptus or poplar, indicated cattle estancias with ruler straight dirt roads connecting them. Three hours later the view over La Pampas province was unchanged. Later, in the Andean foothills, lakes coloured in shades of pea soup, gooseberry fool and raspberry sorbet appeared each with a piping of sugar indicating a mix of minerals and salt deposits. And then, strung along the horizon like meringue beaten to peaks were the Andes themselves. Above, a sky of the palest and coldest blue; below, the gravel brown of the Patagonian pampa and then the lakes changed to aquamarine and turquoise and the land wrinkled, riven by erosion. From the air it looked magical and, best of all, I was going there.

  El Calafate, with its high street of tree trunk façades, had a schmaltz of alpine charm fronting the concrete of the back streets. The few shops selling high altitude climbing equipment were outnumbered by ‘genuine Patagonian crafts’. The beat-up pickups of out of town sheep farmers with big, tough dogs barking in the back will not rattle through for much l
onger. The middle aged, moneyed tourists (Spaniards and Italians this week), in cruise ship quantities, will soon add restaurants, jewellers and fur shops and backpackers will convert the side streets to bars, cheap sightseeing agencies and more ‘genuine Patagonian crafts’. My Footprint guidebook recommended Sendarian as the best meaty establishment in town. Here, it was said could be found beef fed on alfalfa, grazed under the stars of the southern hemisphere and massaged by handmaidens (whoever they are). I had trained for dinner with a snacky lunch and read several menus to ensure that the juices were flowing and expectant but never before had quantity so overwhelmingly outclassed quality; brick size was not my size and the mixed grill would have fed Ethiopia. I left inflated and humbled.

  The Perito Merino glacier is one of 47 in the Parque Nacional los Glaciares but at 200 ft (60m) high and 3 miles (5kms) wide, it is the biggest. Twenty eight tourist buses rather spoilt the personal visit I had planned but as it turned out, their passengers were like snowflakes in a blizzard, such was the scale of this great wall of ice that moved forward at six feet per day – a glacial sprinter. Following a boat trip that emphasised the stupendous height of the ice wall at water level, I watched from the myrtle-covered shoreline only a couple of hundred feet away and gazed into the deep blue of its visceral soul. Those watching were strangely silent – even the Italians; there was respect and reverence for this gargantuan lump of ice and the final moments of its 100 year journey. Along its wearisome way it had been beset by terrible events that had riven and crevassed its surface. On its contorted and twisted body it carried the scars of a life of torture. It cried out in cracks of agony, great sonorous grunts came from its unseen interior and at its edge, it roared in a final release of pain as it calved off an ancient limb. Was it dying or giving birth? But whether corpses or new born, they would only survive an unhappy month or so gnawed by the winds and waves of Lago Argentino.

  It was springtime in the Southern Andes. Willows dangled their catkins, black faced ibis incessantly quacking as though they would rather be ducks were busy nesting in a Monterey cypress, and male guanaco stood on high ground ready to protect their harem from lusting lotharios. The Chilean Firebush (Embothrium chilensis) was ablaze on the hillsides interspersed with Ladies’ Slippers (Calcelarius biflorus) in varied red and yellow stripes and Mullinum spinosa, known locally as ‘Mother-in-Law’s Sofa’ looks invitingly soft for the unwary. Francisco was late: he came to say that he would be later still – a wheel needed fixing. When he returned, a straggly girl with thin hair and several painful looking pins in her left ear had spread herself comfortably over the front passenger seat. Her job (in the car that is) was to top up Francisco’s mate pot with fresh leaves and boiling water. For the four hour drive across the steppe it was sensible to keep the wits sharpened.

  “Do you like movie music?” Francisco asked.

  “Well, some.” Was he into cowboys, American wars or The Sound of Music?

  As it turned out it was something of them all and the sound tracks of Larimee, Gone with the Wind and Mary Poppins carried us across the high, dry pampa. No vehicles shared the dirt road and only a gaucho with three long-legged dogs raised an arm. Here was the pampa of Julius Beerbohm:

  ‘The seemingly endless plains akin to but grander than any ocean. The pampa is eternally silent while the ocean is noisy and restless.’

  In this province of Magellanes, Chiles’ largest but with only one percent of the population, the golden age ceased with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and now even the sheep were reduced to one for every eight acres.

  In the middle of nowhere (and in Patagonia, nowhere is as far from anywhere as you can get), we stopped at a three roomed shack of corrugated tin. HOTEL was painted in green across the whole façade; the paint had dribbled from the foot of each letter. The elderly proprietor lived there alone since a disastrous fire in 1968 had burnt down the previous little hotel, killed her husband and crushed her right hand. Literally single-handed and helped only by her young son, she had rebuilt the hotel (scorched, reclaimed timbers spanned the ceiling) and now she stood smiling with cracked lips, in a floral pinafore and frayed slippers exchanging jokes with the straggly girl. In winter the snow blocked the road and the wind reached 120mph. At a lonely border post that stood amongst in several acres of dandelions (dentes de leones locally), the Argentinian police searched my suitcase and wordlessly thumped an exit stamp into my passport. The Chilean civilian smiled and wished me a pleasant stay.

  “Senor Chilton, hola,” greeted the luggage porter alerted by the van’s short wave radio. At the front door stood Marcella, slim, hair immaculate, in a cream silk blouse under a wool suit. She beamed with pleasure and enquired of my journey. “A cup of tea, perhaps? Or can I get you some other refreshment?” (She could do this in at least four languages.) Country house hostesses of such charm and savoir faire are rare but here, in the wilderness of Torres del Paine National Park, at the architecturally contemporary Explora Hotel, was an assured and genuine welcome; the combination was seductive and stimulating. The 1,200 ft (3,600m) Paine Grande was framed by my bedroom window, its severe granite sides softened by the dusky pink of a setting sun and reflected in a lake so turquoise its glamour was near to artificial. Over the next three days we hiked across rocks, marvelled at the blueness of the Grey Glacier, rode sturdy horses in armchair saddles and strode over the rolling folds of the Patagonian pampa but always looming over our shoulders was the stern and forbidding presence of the Torres granite peaks.

  We saw most of the airports of Chile on the 1,000 mile zigzag north to The Lake District – Punta Arenas, Punto Montt, Concepcion and Tenuco. All modern and efficient, all with kiosks stocked by the same persuasive postcard salesman. Blurred, sepia photographs of Mapuche and Arucarian Indians in the late 1800s, their bodies painted in white stripes, full frontal naked, looking mournful and broken spirited. Four centuries earlier they had been the scourge of conquistadores and before that had halted the southerly progress of the Incas. A group of black African men boarded at Concepcion, each with a diamond stud in their left ear, a cross around their neck encrusted with enough cut glass to construct a chandelier and a wrist watch the size of Big Ben. If they were not costume jewellery salesmen, they were on an evangelical mission that, for only a modest down payment, would guarantee susceptible peons eternal salvation, immaculate conception and a bountiful life.

  The road to Villarica (it rhymes with Billericay), sauntered past estancias whose wooden houses were set well back and were bounded by white railings and there were paddocks of thoroughbred horses alongside places set out for Chillan highway racing – a straight 500 yard (450m) dash between two horses in a knockout competition. Ash and oak stood together in lush pastures, their base worn to bare earth by sheltering Herefords and Devon Crosses. There were rhododendrons and white azaleas in profusion and drifts of arboreal broom grew over dry river beds like generously spread butter. Pucon sits at the eastern end of Lake Villarica and at the foot of an active volcano. The peak of the perfect snow covered cone anchored its own cloud of steam and at the town hall, a clap-boarded, gabled, turreted and dormer windowed confection, a cluster of traffic lights on its façade served as the town’s early warning system for the volcano’s next eruption; happily it was showing green. Hotel Interlaken, Swiza Pizza and timbered buildings lent an alpine air. The pizzeria displayed elaborate cakes and served lavender custard with poppy seeds. In the heavy drizzle, damp dogs hung their heads and looked gloomily at small, stout men with leathery faces and sad eyes wearing straight brimmed sombreros and coarse grey ponchos. Avenida Bernardo O’Higgins was filled with election posters: Esther Contigo in rimless glasses was going for the newly emancipated and Xavier Pinero, with a pencil moustache, a piercing eye and a straight back, struggled to display the common touch.

  In the gardens of Hotel Antumalal, there were camellias, pink roses and hydrangeas; erigeron had spread along every rocky crack like little flurries of unseasonable snow. The development of the hot
el was an example of the pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit that has contributed so much to this country. In 1938, Czech émigrés Guillermo and Catalina Pollak arrived in Chile. Newlywed and enthusiastic, they fell in love with the beauty of Lake Vallarica and bought the damp, run down little Hotel Playa which they refurbished with their own labours. The eruption of the Villarica volcano in 1949 destroyed the hotel but they had already purchased a rocky and steep piece of land beside the lake considered only good for grazing sheep and here they built a small café. One day, the holidaying President Videla visited the café and with the brashness of a man with nothing to lose, Giullermo asked for financial help to build a work of architectural significance. He got the loan although the architectural qualities of his hotel may be questionable, even allowing for the vogue for Bauhaus severity current at the time. Nevertheless, fading photographs on the stone walls of the reception area showed its popularity; proud sepia rows of snapshots included Queen Elizabeth, King Baudoin and Jimmy Stewart. Its dated style no longer seem to attract European monarchs or celluloid legends – the least faded photograph was of Emma Thompson.

  Heading north again, more buttery broom spread itself along the verges and later, little posies of pale yellow lupins took their place. Smallholdings with a single storied planked house, washing on the line, a few sheep and chickens scratching around an abandoned and rusting Chevrolet pickup regularly lined the road. There were stands of poplar, fir and eucalyptus and in between the shacks and the trees, long stretches of pasture with fat cattle and well bred horses. Stopping in a small town, we looked around; self-conscious and inquisitive travellers but arrogant too, poking our affluent noses over neglected picket fences through which privet had stretched itself like the desperate hands of prisoners. Acanthus had seeded itself into gutters and whenever a truck thundered through, dust hung over the streets to the point of invisibility. Despondency hung around too: over the town and on the faces of weary men but there was not hopelessness. The church was being repaired and a shack had opened up advertising internet connection although it did not look as though business was going to be brisk. Once painted in the shades of a 19th century palette – grey greens, soft reds, rich creams and gentle blues, the clapboarded houses had never had a second coat. On the outskirts, well away from the irritations of dust, shielded from despondency and at the entrance of a long poplar lined drive, a magnificent freshly varnished sign read ‘Estancia Garcia’.