Married in El Chalten: La Vida Casada es Buena!!

Well, El Chalten is not Vegas and it turns out you can´t just show up and expect to get married three days later. We still had some logistical hoops to jump through but they were pretty minor compared to what we went through to get here. The most work came in finding four witnesses that lived in Chalten and were available during the short hours the Civil Registry was open.


For anyone thinking of getting married in a Spanish-speaking country, be careful how you pronounce the word for "witness", as it can sound like some male naughty bits - Once when I said to Ger that we only needed two more "testigos", she just about died laughing.


On the morning of the wedding, I was actually ready a half hour early (!) so Nuria and I had a little dance party.

Despite one of our witnesses almost not showing up (remind me sometime to tell you the story of Dante, the town´s doctor, pizza chef and tango singer), we pulled it off without a hitch. Our wedding was everything we hoped it would be - low stress, meaningful, fun and romantic. In the early afternoon of February 15th, 2008, we were married!!!

Rather than spending our wedding night in a tent, we checked into a nice hotel. We were the first bride and groom that had ever stayed there and the staff were so good to us. Just minutes after returning to the hotel after the ceremony, champagne, chocolate and strawberries arrived! Everyone loves love!!









One week later, our rings arrived.
They´re beautiful, though, so well worth the wait! Mine has the Gorros on them, where Nelson asked me to marry him, and his ring has Mt. Fitzroy, the mountain that towers over El Chalten.

So far, our honeymoon has been all hiking, fun, mountains, glaciers and adventure. It´s very different than the single life, let me tell you!

The Carreterra Austral: Hitching to get hitched

FEBRUARY 4-10TH

The Carreterra Austral starts in Puerto Montt and runs over 1000km south to Villa O´Higgins. A bit of it is paved, but it is generally a gravel road. Why on earth would anyone, let alone thousands of tourists and locals, including hundreds of cyclists, choose to travel this route every summer? Because it is the only road south in Chile, because it is the only road in the section of South America that isn´t horribly boring, and because it takes you through absolutely gorgeous scenery - mountains, glaciers, lakes, rivers, forests - and is largely uninhabited.

For all of these reasons, it is not an easy road to travel quickly down. It took us 1 week, 3 busses, 4 ferries, 10 rides, and lots of waiting. Our time was not wasted, though, with the highlight of our accomplishments being a dance choreographed to "Ice Ice Baby".

The people we met while hitchhiking were fantastic - locals driving firewood, books, medical supplies and such around, an American hippie couple rafting the rivers, Israelis driving fast and playing techno, workers on the mega dam project slated for construction, etc.

Our favourite was Fernando and Monica, a couple from Santiago that had a daughter our age - we stopped lots with them to take photos, then they invited us to accompany them on a boat ride out to see these "marmol" caves they´d heard about.

Many of the people who picked us up didn´t have quite enough room for two people and backpacks and the opposite for many people who didn´t pick us up. We decided that getting rides is not about space in people´s vehicles, but rather about room in their hearts.

Little known fact: Bryan Adams is HUGE in Chile, and several people put on his music for us when they found out we were from Canada.

We also met other hitchhikers who were wonderful. Jorge, also from Santiago, showed us how to collect mussels, and we had a delicious shellfish dinner while camped out one night waiting for a ferry.

We managed to get ourselves on two "full" boats, restoring my faith in possibilism. The final one, from Villa O´Higgins, was the one that would get us across a big lake to where we could hike over into Argentina.

The next boat was in two days but when they heard that we were on our way to get married, and already pretty behind schedule, they found room. Everybody loves love!

From where the boat dropped us, we hiked about half a kilometre, then checked out of Chile.

They almost didn´t let us leave the country because we didn´t have some little paper they had given us when we came in our bikes from Mendoza. Details! It was a few stressful moments when we considered what we would have to do to get back to Santiago to find that piece of paper but they were kind, gave us the necessary stamp and waved us through.

We then hiked 22km to where we checked into Argentina.

After spending the night there, we took another boat across the Lago del Desierto, which used to belong to Chile 20 years ago.

We then took a bus into El Chalten to find Ger and Nuria. It was SO wonderful to see them again, and we promptly went on another hike so that Nuria could show us her favourite places.

The Island of Chiloé

JANUARY 24 - FEBRUARY 3RD, 2008

Chiloé is the biggest island of Chile´s archipelago that stretches south. We took an overnight bus there from Santiago with plans to spend only a few days, but we got really drawn into the folklore, legend, and wooden architecture that makes the island so famous. We also found a wonderful Spanish teacher in Ancud, who taught us much more than just the language.

Fishing is a thriving industry on Chiloé, and wooden boats are still made mostly by hand, with the boards bent by steam generated by a small fire. Divers with air tubes attached to a generator on a boat go down to more than 30meters to collect the fresh shellfish that is in the market.

Our spanish teachers´daughter and neice made us a delicious meal of five different kinds.

We also went out for lunch with them to try the island´s traditional dish of Curanto - a plate of boiled pork, chicken, sausage, potato patties and shellfish. It actually tasted a lot better than it looked, but you should have seen Nelson and I´s faces when all these grey lumps arrived on our plates - there was visible gulping and eye bulging. I was already only eating a meat dish to be polite, and it was definitely a bit of a stretch for me.

Nelson really wants me to tell you all about how the odds are really stacked against me as a world traveller. First, I don´t really like to eat meat. Then, there are also lots of veggies I don´t like - tomatoes, peppers, avocado, olives, etc. but I need to eat regularly or I get really tired and grumpy. I also get pretty carsick if I don´t sit up front and look out the window, am allergic to pollen, dust, perfume and some animals, have a bad back, sore hip and bunk knee, and really like to have a hot shower every day. Yup, pretty intrepid, hey?

We went out to a traditional festival and took in some dancing and music.

We also learned about how they make their traditional apple drink - by whacking the apples with a big stick until the juice pours out, then further squeezing the apple rinds with a big screw press.
We also learned about the legends of Chiloé, such as that of Trauco, the little ugly man that lives in the forest and seduces women with his magic powers. If a woman gets pregnant with no father of the baby in sight, it is perfectly acceptable to say that Trauco did it. And then there is the beautiful mermaid, Pincoya, who seduces men. You can tell that men make up the legends.

We also went to the circus - the Circo del Oro - and Nelson ended up on stage with a bell tied around his waist, shaking his bum at the crowd. I don´t have pictures of that, but I do have lots of video...

Chiloé is most famous for its wooden churches, built by missionaries in the 18th century.
Scattered around the island and on lots of little islands, they really are an architectural feat.

The palomitos, or houses on stilts, are also iconic buildings of Castro, the island´s capital.

We also just happened to be in Castro when an international architecture conference was taking place, so we sat in on a few seminars.

The colourful wooden shingles of the houses all over the island also add to the magical feel of the island.

We tried to get a boat off the south end of the island to the mainland, but everything was full for more than a week. We even tried just going anyways to the dock when the boat was leaving in hopes of a cancellation but knew it wasn´t going to work when the woman behind the desk uttered the two words that are to a possibilist what kryptonite is to Superman: "it´s impossible!".

All the busses were full, too, so we took matters into our own hands and stuck out our thumbs - we got all the way back up off the island to Puerto Montt that day.