Some people say it’s been a long winter but I was expecting it to be much harsher. We got some good snow yesterday but it spent most of today melting. I did get Mom the picture of the Austral Parakeets in the snow, however. It didn’t come out too badly, considering the camera. The next person who comes down will be bringing me a new camera by the way, probably a Lumix FZ50 unless someone can recommend something better in the same range.

Claudia is in Santiago this week scouting out hairdressers. They need another person at the salon and it’s slim pickings around here, so the hunt is on in Santiago. It’s her first time back since we moved and her family is excited to have her around for a few days. Plus, she’ll get to do a bit of shopping for things we can’t get down here, such as ingredients at the chinese store.

If the roads clear up I plan to do some more exploring around the vicinity of Coyhaique. I also start teaching a “utilitarian furniture-making” course on Wednesday. I’m sure I’ll get some good anecdotes out of that. There should be about eight middle aged women and an old one-eyed man if the same people show up who I met with last week.

Click on the photo to open a gallery with some larger shots of the parakeets.

Got a chance to travel down the southern highway a bit further than I’d been before. Alejandro had to go look over some bridges in anticipation of bidding on a contract to build new ones and he invited me along for the ride. I always am up for a road trip and it was a good excuse to check out the area with tourism in mind. Our target was the outpost of Puerto Yungay, about 400km south of Coyhaique.

We made it all the way down in one day. 400km doesn’t sound like much, but it’s dirt road the whole way, with the exception of the first 75km or so out of Coyhaique. Alejandro was in charge of building the last 100km or so of the road back in the 1980s when he was Major in the army. It was a pretty impressive feat which began by hiking in for a month and a half through the wilderness to scout out a path for the road. All in all, it took about seven years to build that stretch of road.

The bridges we looked at are definately in need of replacement and I hope he wins the contract. He took some notes and we also scouted out gravel pits for the cement. With the price of gas now up to the equivalent of six dollars a gallon down there (about a dollar more than what it costs in Coyhaique), the closer the pit is to the work site, the better.

We had perfect weather for the ride down and back, though it got pretty cold at night. We stayed in pensiones and the wood stoves kept us warm enough. I gave Alejandro some poker lessons and took a couple thousand pesos from him (that’s about four dollars or so). On the way back, we stopped to check out scenery and I got some ideas for kayak and rafting routes. When the weather gets warmer I’ll go back and try out some of those ideas, though I’ll have to get a kayak first I’m not interested in whitewater kayaking, but there is plenty of calm paddling through amazing terrain and I haven’t heard of anyone doing it.

We also took a detour up through Valle Exploradores, about four hours south of Coyhaique. It’s a beautiful valley and their are plans for the road to reach all the way to the fjords just north of the San Rafael glaciar. For now, it stops about 25km before that point. There was a shelter I was hoping to check out which Justin and Nina visited, but it was closed for the off-season. They’ve got some sort of rainwater-containment contraption and also had a solar panel on the roof, though the place was surrounded by trees. Hmmm….

On the way back to Coyhaique we came across a group of jackrabbit hunters. There were seven or eight of them and they had 80 rabbits alligned along the edge of the road. They were waiting for the truck from the Mañihuales factory to stop and buy their rabbits. They get paid 1200 pesos per rabbit (a little over two dollars) and they’d spent a week camping out in the freezing cold to catch them. They set up noose-type snares along rabbit trails and wait for them to hang themselves. On the way back, we saw rabbits hanging from fence posts and gateways in front of a number of houses, so it looks like a lot of people make some extra income on those rabbits. According to Alejandro, Mañihuales (which makes some of the best sausage I’ve eaten, btw) exports the rabbits to France after processing and getting the most out of them. There seem to be plenty of rabbits around and I guess snare hunting does less damage than a shotgun would, so I doubt if Patagonia will run out of rabbits any time soon.

We got back to Coyhaique on Tuesday and since then I’ve been trying to recover from a nasty cold I picked up at some point on the trip. The days have been nice and I’d rather be out at the lake clearing brush than stuck in the house drinking hot lemonade, but it’s a good excuse to do some reading and watch some movies, and it’s a far better situation than what the poor folks in Lebanon are going through.

(CLICK THE PHOTO FOR MORE IMAGES FROM THE TRIP)