Without a Traceroute

Well, apologies for the long silence. I ran into kind of a series of things that seemed to interfere with blogging or take precedence over it including my third quarter report to the Watson Foundation and an application for an internship at Fermilab. For a week or so after my last post, the weather was really cold and grey, and I felt like I wasn’t really doing anything that merited blogging about (note: this is where I differ from oh, say, almost every other blogger online).

Uh, yeah, this is what it looks like when God smites something (copyright 2008, Carlos Guitierrez)

From Bariloche, I crossed over the border to Puerto Montt, Chile. Further south, there’s an active volcano named Chaiten which erupted last year, forcing the evacuation of the small town at its base. I was traveling with a Turkish guy and a Canadian I’d met in Bariloche and we’d really hoped to visit the still-abandoned, ash-covered ghost town.

We made inquiries in Puerto Mont and were told that an overland passage was impossible due to volcano damage. There is a ferry service that runs to the empty town (it just serves as a transfer point where passengers can switch boats for other destinations), but the passage takes about 8 hours, and only departs twice a week. We were in Puerto Mont on a Monday, and it would have been possible to catch a late Monday night departure to arrive at Chaiten Tuesday morning around 7 in the morning. But to return, we would have had to wait until Thursday morning around 10 am. We would have been signing up to spend two nights in a virtually abandoned town, without camping gear.

Part of me thinks we should have just gone for it. At worst, we would have been cold, ashy and bored for a few days (well, I guess at worse-worst, the volcano could have gone off again). On the other hand, we were concerned that police or military guards might deny us entry or prevent us from exploring the town. Instead of catching the ferry, we grabbed a minibus out of the industrial Puerto Montt to the much more charming Puerto Varas about 30 minutes north.

There, we stayed at the Casa Azul Hostel, which earns a shoutout for having decent rates, pleasant, unfinished wood aesthetics, and, mostly, a computer running Ubuntu Linux for guests to access the internet with.

We met a Swiss girl, and, in an incident that is surely emblematic of our increasingly globalized society (or at the very least, the setup for a bad joke), the four of us—Swiss, Turkish, Canadian, American—decided to make Mexican food (chicken fajitas) in Chile. Avocados are quite popular in Chile, so we made fresh Guacamole, and the fajitas turned out deliciously.