Back from Cole Cole
Trip Start
Mar 01, 2006
1
315
551
Trip End
Dec 01, 2007
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Chiloe National Park,
Chile
Thursday, April 5, 2007
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I woke up by the sound of something foraging in one of our plastic bags in the shack. The weather did not look good, so I stayed in my sleeping bag. Eva got up first, a guy passing on the beach asked her to pay the camping fee.
When I got up the fog was rising up from the Ocean and coming over the coast covering everything. We had breakfast, and then just took long moments of contemplation of the sea.
I tried to remember such a feeling, and somehow connected with the moment I spent on top of Mount Acropolis in Tasmania. Why? In the end, I think that the deafening, constant sound of the waves made me remember that perfect silence I had experienced on top of the mountain. That was the connection, maybe because they were opposites. More likely because in silence like in the sound of waves, you can hear yourself, I mean hear your body, increase self-consciousness but without any effort, like if the situation just created a state of light meditation.
We packed and left, to nearby rio Cole Cole, to try see animals, and fill up the bottles of water. We saw the camp of the chilotes that we had met during the night walk. Something had changed. On the night before there was the half standing remains of a bridge. In the morning everything was destroyed, they had dismantled it to get firewood.
There were shells on the sand, remains of their diner. Like in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, sea shells are the base of alimentation. Their consumption, and later discarding of the shells, are the origin of shell middens, mounds of shells that accumulated during the lifetime of a village or settlement. Along the rivers, we could sometimes see, in some places where the water had taken away the soil along its banks, a big concentration of shells under a meter of soil: the remains of how many hundred years ago?
Our three Chilotes had gone in the rocks to collect more shells, waiting for the tide to be right to go fishing.
A last look at playa Cole Cole, and we walked back in the rainforest, it was hot and humid. Beautiful at times, when the fog got up and let us see the coastline. Also the sun filtering through the trees and the fog, and these excavated passages, dark and steep, and also the wet spider webs, and the colorful flowers, and litle animals fleeing before us.
Got to the village, the weather was getting hot and nice, we passed the bridge of Rio Chaiquil, which was offering incredible reflections. We were back on the beach, by the waves, and started to walk the remaining 2 hours, when a pickup arrived, and picked us up.
The guy had been to the village and was bringing back some wood. We were at the back, he drove like crazy on the beach, it was fun and we were freezing. Passing by the park entrance, we had to bang to stop, cause otherwise the guy was taking us all the way to Castro! But we wanted to walk a bit more in other parts of the park, along the lake, sand dunes, etc... We had picnic and a short nap by lago Cucao.
Back to Castro by bus, where it turned out that we could not rent a car for the next day, which happened to be Holy Friday.
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