Lonquimay, part I

As I mentioned, it´s getting rather tricky to keep this thing updated. I´m now in Chillan (pronounced chee-aan), in the south of Chile. I´ll try and split this up into a couple of posts...

So, let´s say I´ve just left Pucon. We headed towards a volcano called Lonquimay. We eventually ended up driving very slowly over a rickety wooden suspension bridge with a two tonne limit. On the other side of this was a massive wooden hostel, run by a Swiss couple. There was a heavy World War II German army medical truck parked outside, of course. I learned later that these folks had restored this jalopy and driven it all over the world. They were ´holidaying´ three years in Chile...

I was bunked in with Sylv and a twenty-four year old student, called Andrew, or ´Drew´, as he liked to be called. Drew was personable, in a Fred Durst kinda way, having shaved hair, and a chin-ey goatee. Like all the rest, a hardcore snowboarder, although I haven´t worked out yet just how he managed to afford to come on a trip like this. I´ve now managed to successfully communicate to everybody that Sylv and I are not a couple, so the only reason we´re still together, but sharing with others is because there´s a ´Tim´ lottery, which takes place at every new accomodation. Essentially, nobody wants to get stuck with Tim, because he talks. A lot. We all agree he´s a nice guy, with a heart of gold. Thing is, that sort of thing never manifests itself in conversation if there isn´t an enormous but. Darren is about ready to kill Tim, since they roomed together for the first four days. Darren´s a Canadian guy with an accent straight out of a cartoon...

´I jusht cayn´t shtand thaat guy. He´sh sho annoying, I want to kill ´im´

Get the idea? Anyway, we headed up to Lonquimay the next morning. This is a relatively new resort, being only two years old. There are a few T-bars and one very, very slow two--man chair. We ran this a few times - shedding clothes on each run, as it was getting hotter and hotter - then Drew and I hiked up out of the ski area and plowed back in. I´d never really done much hiking, so it was pretty cool to be on terrain where we could see no other evidence of human presence. We stopped for lunch in the tent/restaurant. The first thing we found out was that we had to order the food completely separately, before presenting a ticket to the kitchen. Obviously, the woman behind the counter didn´t speak much English. The conversation that ensued was pretty much straight out of Monty Python...

(You have to imagine some licence, and broken English on her part. Also, my Spanish spelling is atrocious (sic))
´Hi, hable Englais?´
´Um, a leetle.'
'Okay, [motioning to the menu] I'll have the hamburgesa'
'Oh, we no have that.'
'Okay, I'll, um, have the lasagna'
'No, we have no that.'
'How about the hotdog?'
'No...'
'Right, do you, in fact, have any food?'
'Yes, we, er, have...'
'No, no, don't tell me; I'm keen to guess...'
Eventually, She actually added a steak sandwich thing (a 'Chiratso', from what I can tell) to the menu, so we had that.

So, having spoken to Mike 0beforehand, we headed to the top of the chair to begin our ascent of the actual volcano. Mike had already set off, since he was actually making the trail up in the snow. We followed the dot on the horizon that I assumed was him. I also ran into a guy I'd met in the hottup in Portillo. He was a snow journalist, and asked Drew and I to pose for action photos with the Pucon volcano in the background. We hiked hard for an hour and a half, putting one foot in front of the other in time-honoured fashion. I can't put into words how tough and exhilerating this was, but by the time I'd reached Mike's break point - about half way up, I was pretty exhausted. The wind had also picked up. Since I was hiking in only a fleece (having abandoned my jacket in the van), I began to get pretty cold. Mike was digging a pit, to perform an avalanche test. He left a square stack of snow in the middle, checked it for layers that may slide, then placed a shovel on the top and hit it with various forces to see the effect. Pronouncing it safe, we waited for everyone to regroup before heading on up. It got colder and colder and, since it was now four o'clock, Mike decided we'd gone high enough. It looked like only another twenty minutes to me, but I always do what I'm told in those situations, so we dropped onto a clear field and screamed to the bottom. Fantastic. (Note that this story isn't over...)

So, back at the hostel, we showered, ate and drank. I was still pretty ill and was pronounced by more that one of the group as a 'hiking mother f***er', due to my efforts on the hill. Pure bloody-mindedness and stupidity, of course. Also had a long conversation with Tim. I received some worried glances from the others, but this was all my own doing. He owns a recording studio, and has been in the business for a long time. We had a discussion on the practice of downloading music. Very intersting, is all I'll say here, suffice to say that I haven't really changed my opinion. And so to bed.