Early in the morning, Astrid and I boarded a large bus in Puerto Varas for the first leg of our CruceAndino tour, a 12-hour slog over land and lakes to reach Argentina’s Patagonian city of Bariloche. Skirting the vast blue waters of Lago Llanquihue, we passed pastures of cattle and dairy cows and fields of corn and sugar beets, part of the German legacy in the region. In the background, the Osorno volcano stood out in ever-sharper technicolor beauty.
We were extremely fortunate: the weather for our crossing was sunny and crystal-clear.
A bit of history about CruceAndino:
In the late 1800s, German settlers opened up a lake-and-land route across the Andean mountains to transport sheep’s wool down to Puerto Montt and around the Strait of Magellan to buyers in Europe. With the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, the transport business went bankrupt, replaced by a tourism company. One of the early travelers of the route, John Augustine Zahm, tells of the adventure in his book Through South America’s Southland, now online, beginning on page 339.
Today, some 30,000 annual visitors make the journey with CruceAndino , crossing two national parks — Vicente Pérez Rosales in Chile and Nahuel Huapi in Argentina — and three lakes, with majestic views of four volcanoes, dozens of forested mountains, and numerous waterfalls.
Following in the footsteps of Nicolás Mascardi:
A most intriguing Jesuit priest, the Italian-born Nicolás Mascardi traveled to Chile in the mid-1600s. As a member of the circular mission of Jesuits on Chiloé Island, he helped free several captured Amerindian chiefs and, crossing the Andes, returned with them to their home on the banks of Lago Nahuel Huapi near today’s Bariloche in Argentina. We, too, were traveling to that lake, possibly along the same route Mascardi took centuries earlier.
Mascardi’s reasons for journeying to Nahuel Huapi were twofold—to minister to the local Amerindians there and to find the lost city of the Caesars. Local guides led him through remote backcountry in his search for the mythical city created out of gold and silver by a band of shipwrecked sailors (see my earlier post.) His explorations proved fruitless: all he found was his own death at the hands of rival Indians on the banks of an unknown lake. Perhaps it was Lago Mascardi south of Bariloche, which today honors the priest’s memory.
In my novel-in-progress, Clara Valle, an avid reader of Chilean folklore and history, knew of Father Mascardi’s travels, and those travels may have affected her own strange journeys …
Los Saltos de Petrohué:
Near the end of our first land transport, we stopped at the Petrohué waterfalls, where the river of the same name passes through a series of lava chutes into pools and eddies in the shadow of the Osorno volcano. Overhanging trees and shrubs resemble Japanese prints, massive cliffs plunge into the river, and spray from the glacier-green water cloaks the landscape in an other-worldly atmosphere. The falls were unexpectedly beautiful, and Astrid and I wished we had more than 20 minutes to view them.
Lago Todos los Santos:
Waterfall on Todos los Santos
A large catamaran transported us and several other busloads of tourists across Lago Todos los Santos, the indisputable highlight of the journey. Named by Jesuit missionaries who first saw it on All Saints Day, its greenish-blue waters finger into steep mountains cloaked in lush temperate rain forest. The Pérez Rosales National Park protects the lake and three volcanoes seen at various points from the catamaran — Tronador (11,351 feet), Osorno (8,700 feet), and Puntiagudo (8,195 feet). Occasional homes hug slender dark-sand strips of beach along the way, idyllic hideaways at the ends of the earth. Even the excessive jostling of photographers armed with smart phones and selfie-sticks couldn’t diminish the majestic serenity of the lake.
Check out my next post for the rest of the journey.