by McQuillen Martinez of Colby College
I arrived at Boston Logan Airport about three and a half hours early for my flight to JFK from where I would board my connecting flight to Santiago, Chile. I have not done much traveling abroad in my life, especially on my own, and I was very much on edge. The seemingly endless COVID-induced slew of forms and documents which I needed to procure months in advance of my flight all worked to add stress into the travel process. I made it to JFK without a hitch and settled into my seat at the correct gate when the woman at the kiosk began making announcements in hurried Spanish to the crowd of people before her. I tried my best to understand her for the first minute or so but my high-school level Spanish vocabulary simply couldn’t keep up. I stopped trying to understand her and was just beginning to daydream about Patagonia once again when I heard my name announced by the woman in her long-winded announcement. My heart skipped a beat as I did not understand a word she had said up until this point. I stood up, got in a line that had begun to form, and hoped that I was in the right place. When I got to the front of the line, a man asked to see all of my forms, this was the crucial moment. The first step to see if all my months of planning and preparing would pay off. All I wanted was to be sitting aboard the plane to Santiago. The man was very thorough and gave me a slight scare on my health insurance form but, eventually, I made it through. I was the only person from my Round River group flying out of JFK, many of the others had already met each other in Atlanta, and so I boarded my ten hour and fifteen minute flight to Santiago alone but very excited. As the plane drew nearer to its final destination, I looked out the window and couldn’t keep my eyes away for the final hour of the flight. The impossibly tall Andes ran alongside us in the distance as the plane slowly lowered into the desert-like and mountainous city of Santiago. I went through customs and the numerous COVID precautions, relying on my very limited Spanish knowledge to finally get me into Chile and, after a very stressful few hours, I had made it.
My cousin had gone on the Round River Patagonia semester five years before me and told me stories of a very rugged way of living, so when our group’s van pulled up to a beautiful house with a pool, fresh grapes, and even puppies, I was very pleasantly surprised. We quarantined in this house for two days, awaiting our COVID test results from the airport as well as another student who would be joining us a day late due to a canceled flight. The first night I spent in Chile in my tent in the yard of that mansion was one of the worst ones I have ever had. Wild dogs woke me up with their barking right outside my tent four times that night and, around 4:30 am, I was awoken yet again by water from a nearby sprinkler spraying me directly in the face through my open rain fly. Needless to say, the semester has only been uphill from there. I absolutely love the food down here which consists of a lot of rice, beans, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, and amazing spices, similar food to what I like to cook for myself back at home. After our brief two day stay in the beautiful house in Santiago, our group, now fully together for the first time, boarded yet another plane for the two hour flight to Balmaceda. From the airport in Balmaceda we drove a few hours South to Coyhaique where we stayed in this lovely wooden hostel nestled in the pine trees on a sloping hillside. This was yet another place where I was pleasantly surprised by the living arrangements and amenities. The host had a five year old daughter who was incredibly cute and who we tried to practice our Spanish on, only to learn that we were not even at that very early level of Spanish proficiency yet. After a dinner of pizza in town, we prepared for our final day of travel.
We drove along the Carretera Austral, a very dusty and bumpy gravel road, for 8 hours before arriving at our final destination of Cochrane. The drive would’ve put me in a bad mood due to the dust and violent jolting around, however, the views were so spectacular that the 8 hours flew by. Snow-capped mountains lined the skyline as we drove through dense forests, past lakes and rivers, and finally up into the mountains before our final descent into the valley in which Cochrane sits. We were even lucky enough to see a Guanaco, a species of Chilean llama, at the tail end of the trip. Basecamp in Cochrane pleasantly surprised me again with a flowing river, from which you can safely drink straight out of without a filter, and even showers! We were met with a delicious feast of food from the owner of the campground, Yolette, upon our arrival. We all set up our tents and since then have gradually begun to settle into this new and wonderful way of life that we have all chosen to adopt for the next few months. The leaders were able to fit in class times throughout our extended travels and all of the classes have been very interesting so far, I can’t wait to learn more about this landscape and the animals it supports in the coming months. Soon we will depart on our first backpacking trip of the semester and I am so excited, although hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with that heavy pack on all day.
More updates to come soon!