The People

[Sorry for not writing here for so long, work is killing me, and so is climbing, it seems :P].

I would love to tell you about mountains and such, but fiirst, I must tell you about Frank. Now, I think that one of the greatest pleasures in traveling is that you get to see so many cultures different than your own, and, even more, you get to meet extraordinary people. Take Frank for example. He's an american truck driver that took so much to Arica, Chile, that he decided to buy a house there, fully renovate it and transform it into a hostel. Frank greets all of his guests with a smile and is always eager to hear their story and to have a nice, long, chat. I guess this is partly because his spanish was worse than mine. He has a maid to whom he turns for help whenever the phone conversations get too complicated. His house is full of dictionaries and grammar books covering spanish. In the hostel there is a huge mural that he had made by a brazilian artist. It is a picture of an orange seal that he says he carried with him for 15 years. Another small painting is that of his truck. Frank is a recovering alcoholic but still, he invited us to a glass of wine. He even showed us around town when we returned to Arica after Parinacota. He listens to me saying that we are friends and we've known each other for seven years and says that I have no idea how much that means. We had a long talk about american politics one night (until 2am). The one thing that I was left with is this: "If after the Monica scandal Bill would have showed up with a black eye, it would have proved that Hillary has balls!" So yes, there might be nice americans out there.

After we left Arica we finally arrived to our destination, the small village of Putre, situated at 3500m in the altiplano. The moment we got there I rushed to the tourist office. There I found a guide, Marco Antonio by his name. Now, the only thing we knew about Parinacota was where it was located (roughly next to Lago Chungarra) and that the route was difficult off-season. No info about base camps, how to get there, higher camps, nothing. So the next day I went to Marco's office and asked a lot of questions about Parinacota and the routes there. He didn't hesitate a second to give them to me, he even wanted to come with us (free of charge, just to see how it was to climb in winter). [About the weather, he kept saying it's bad, but all we could see was that it was the most wonderful summers of all. This underestimation would be our downfall] I asked him to coffee because I didn't know how to reward him.

It turns out Marco is actually an italian. He had been climbing since he was 12 years old. He had been to Patagonia, and climbed Fitzroy and Cerro Torre (my dreams now for ... 9 years). He even completed a traverse of the Andes using mules and traditional, normal equipment, that people in the past used to have - no goretex or windstopers or anything for him. He used the old passes and amazingly made it, even though he lost 2 toes. He wants that in 2009 to go back to Italy, get an instructor's certificate, and come back to Patagonia and re-introduce the practice of crossing the mountains traditionally. When asked what to give him for all this information, he told me, in plain words such that I could understand* that there are about 5% mountaineers in this world, and that, in such a small community, information is not sold and is not refused.

I met wonderful people in Argentina as well, I will talk about them when I get to Argentina.


* When i explained to Frank my strategy of not conjugating the verbs (seeing as I always got it wrong) he said: "But surely that doesn't say a lot about your intelligence".

In the next post, Parinacota!